Classic Americana Albums: Tom Rapp “A Journal of the Plague Year”

A contributory article to an occasional series.

Italo Calvino, the eminent Italian writer, once wrote, “The more we think we know the classics through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.” Looking at the idea of “Classic Albums” in that way is the best approach for discussing great albums such as Tom Rapp’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” recorded on the cusp of the millennium, decades before Covid gripped the world. Rapp loved poetry, which was reflected in the meticulous, elegiac lyricism that characterized his recorded output from the sixties psych-folk band Pearls Before Swine to his four solo albums, the first three coming in rapid succession (1971-73) before he went voluntarily into a quarter-century retirement from music.

Rapp held much resentment towards the music industry, though his response to being taken advantage of was more subtle than John Fogerty’s, who wrote a song about a pickpocketing pig named Zanz (‘Zanz Kant Danz’) in reference to Fantasy Records label head Saul Zaentz and got sued for his trouble. Rapp formed his band with high school friends Wayne Harley, Roger Crissinger, and Lane Lederer and sent a demo of their “One Nation Underground” album to ESP-Disk Records thinking, “If they’ll record the Fugs, they’ll record us.” And he was right. Unfortunately, though the record sold a reported 200 thousand copies, Rapp never received a penny from the label. In his usual ironic fashion, he chalked it all up to alien abduction, “When the aliens probed (Bernard Stollman), it erased his memory of where all the money was.” He was also swindled by his manager as the contracts he signed authorized full control over his career and finances. He later claimed to have made a meager $200 from his royalties that were estimated to amount to over 100,000 sixties-era dollars.

After retiring from music, Rapp sold popcorn then became a projectionist at a movie theatre, finding splicing film reels paid better than splicing tapes. He went back to college at Brandeis University, then UPENN and after graduation cut his shoulder-length red hair, trimmed his beard and become a civil rights attorney specializing in corporate malfeasance. In 1997, he re-emerged on stage at the Terrastock festival in Rhode Island with his son David’s band, Shy Camp. There he connected with Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang of the minimalist eighties band Galaxie 500, who would encourage and collaborate with him on his comeback album.

Rapp went back to performing, either solo or accompanied by his son David. He would play old Pearls Before Swine songs, stripped of all the psychedelics, covers of Tim Buckley, the Fugs and Bob Dylan, obscure Damon & Naomi numbers and his own new material. He was in his element as a laconic storyteller, regaling the audience with tales of drugs and wild nights in the sixties. Sometimes he would open for Damon & Naomi but the duo found Rapp to be a tough act to follow with their brand of moody music. ”It’s hard to come out and do our bitter songs,” Krukowksi once said, ”after seeing Tom and feeling so good.”

For those who knew of Rapp or PBS and wondered what happened to him after he fell off the face of the Earth, his stock answer was ”I got into a 12-step program for reclusivity (sic) and this is my 12^th step.” The result was the “A Journal of the Plague Year” album, produced by Damon Krakowski and Nick Saloman of the British band Bevis Frond. The album opens with an a cappella rendition of W.B. Yeats’ ‘Silver Apples,’ and you immediately recognize the slight lisp and zephyr-like voice even with a quarter century worth of rust to shake off. The poem suggests there is another chance for worldly perfection through artistic creativity, and listeners are left to wonder if this record is Rapp’s last best chance.

‘The Swimmer’ is dedicated to the late Kurt Cobain, a eulogy to the troubled rock star, and features some lovely harp work by Stone Breath and Green Crown multi-instrumentalist Olivardil Prydwyn, showing Rapp hadn’t abandoned his fixation on Greek myth and medieval music: “Fair thee well, Where ever you are, Swimming in your darkness, like a solitary scar.”

The next two tracks are Rapp at his solo acoustic folksinger finest. On ‘Blind’ Rapp plays the riff from Buffy Sainte Marie’s ‘Universal Soldier’ on harmonica in a melancholy but optimistic song about life going by so quickly you hardly notice. ‘Space’ (the old PBS track) continues his fascination with Bowie’s “Space Oddity” that manifested in songs throughout his albums (‘Stardancer,’ ‘Rocket Man’). It’s about how it’s lonely out there, recalling Cat Stevens’ ‘Morning Has Broken’ in the lines, “When I brought my ship to land, like a starfish in the sand, I don’t think I’ve ever been …. (aching pause) so far from home.”

On the haunted landscape of Ray Bradbury’s ‘Mars,’ the track features Rapp on electric guitar, Krakowski (drums) and Andrea Troolin of the Minneapolis band Bomb Pops on cello. It’s a track about existential longing. Something vital and ephemeral is being missed: A better place, a bigger world, a different way of being. Implicit in all that musical longing was exploration, both inner and outer into the unknown using the juxtaposition of stark imagery: “The wind is rising in the lost canals ….. haunted by the voices of the small blue children, made secret wishes when the earth would rise, and swam like silken ribbons in the scarlet skies.” It’s no leap to visualize the scene in Kubrick’s “A Space Odyssey” when the astronaut gazes at Jupiter’s iconic red spot and exclaims, “Oh, how beautiful.”

‘Hopelessly Romantic’ gets the full rock band treatment as David Rapp joins on electric guitar with his father, Krakowski, Prydwyn with an intricate mandolin solo, and Carl Edwards, his former PBS bandmate, on violin. Rapp played a solo acoustic version of this song on his own tribute album (“For the Dead in Space”), but this version is stronger and even the Dylan-esque vocals on the chorus sounds more insistent, “I could jump off a train for you, well I would be scorned for you, born for you.” Prydwyn adds harp and flute to the lilting ‘Running in My Dream,’ then the old Terrastock quartet with Damon, Naomi and Prydwyn is reunited for ‘Wedding Song’, its narrator afraid to be alone but believing there was no one who could be trusted with his soul.

Rapp was a gentle soul just hoping to be allowed to play his music for the enjoyment of whoever listened. It was astonishing to read about how many people he touched in one way or another, either with a song or a conversation. I exchanged emails with one of those, Andy Aldridge, who met him at the London Terrastock festival. “We chatted for a while and at some point got onto the subject of Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music,” of which I was barely aware. A few weeks later an unannounced parcel arrived with a beautiful box set copy and a sweet note from Tom.”

Rapp was certainly not a child of the sixties, a hippie, someone who wore a flower in his hair. He wasn’t necessarily a member of the counter-culture, but by all accounts he was a gentle, kind man. He was born in North Dakota on March 8, 1947 under a Pisces moon, signifying people who tend to be imaginative, creative and kind (to a fault). Those 25 prime years that he missed could be seen as similar to the years that Boston Red Sox Hall-of Fame hitter, Ted Williams, missed after being drafted during World War II. How many more records would the man they called “Teddy Ballgame” have broken? How many classic records would Tom Rapp have recorded?

Rapp did have a warped sense of humour, however, as we saw in his comments above about mismanagement (to be generous) of his finances. In song, he could tell a fable or make ironic statements with the best of them. The heaviness of his songs aside, he wrote a priceless, tongue-in-cheek ditty called ‘(Oh Dear) Miss Morse’, which confounded censors with a chorus that spelled out vulgar four-letter words in Morse code.

Rapp concluded the album with the pageantry of ‘Shoebox Symphony’, a parade of three songs blended into an epic 11-minute pièce de résistance. It was adapted from a tape he found rummaging around in a shoebox marked only “68,” obviously left over from the Pearls Before Swine years. Recorded and co-produced in London by Nick Saloman and Ade Shaw from the Bevis Frond and with Damon & Naomi on backing vocals, the trilogy opened with ‘Where is Love?’ featuring a lengthy mellotron solo by Saloman that combined the riff from The Beatles’ ‘Nowhere Man’ with a lilting merry-go-round styled amusement park melody. Rapp sings it as if cruisin’ Dylan-style down ‘Highway 61’, over-enunciating the last word of every other line: “We must know people, are working out a plot, they’re trying to steal tomorrow, if they don’t get caught.” Next, he is taking the off-ramp to Part II, ‘State U,’ harkening back to his songs of sociopolitical relevance by this scathing diatribe against those ungrateful pseudo-hippies who co-opted the “peace and love” mantra of the ‘60s in institutions of higher education and “the high-class places of money, where they go to church on Sundays,” yet still got their kicks by writing “FUCK” on the bathroom walls. Pre-recorded sounds of children laughing and playing segue the symphony into the shimmering pastoral instrumental ‘Just Let the Grass Grow’, ending with a nursery rhyme outro that devolves into distorted, rallentando voices.

You should definitely search out the CD version of the album as it contains a hidden track recorded live where Rapp relates a hilarious drug story from the sixties. The setting is a building in NYC where Electra Records, “I meant, a major recording label,” had their offices on the 7^th floor. On the 9^th floor were the offices of the New York City Drug Enforcement Agency. Every day around noon, in would walk the infamous Wavy Gravy, the official clown of the Grateful Dead and a famed counter-culture personality, wearing an orange jumpsuit like they give inmates in prison. “He used to come around with his “catch of the day” (a psychedelic or treated hashish) and talked about dropping acid, how you could see God and become one with the universe. That didn’t turn out to be true.”

Apparently, the people who worked at that anonymous label were into messing with the DEA upstairs. One of their favourite pranks was to smoke joints in the elevator on the way up, get off on the 7^th floor then push the button for the 9^th. Making fun of “the Man” was considered a sporting event in those days.

“A Journal of the Plague Year” slipped almost unnoticed past radio jocks, who wouldn’t know a diamond if they held it in their hands. This was pure folk music without the treacle that some folk artists choose to pour on too thickly. Think Paul Simon in his toned-down, introspective mood on “Still Crazy After All These Years.” Rapp showed he may have been a child of the sixties but he was no relic of that turbulent age. These songs were written for an uncertain but hopeful present day, neither looking behind or ahead.