LP: Pearls Before Swine (Tom Rapp) - City of Gold

Cond: Sleeve:VG w/ Ring wear, LP: VG a fair amount of hairline scratches

Edition Notes: 1971 Reprise RS 6442

Album Notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5g0baJAWtc

"Pearls Before Swine were formed with three high school friends in 1965. They
sent a demo to ESP-Disk in New York, owned by the lawyer Bernie Stollman, whose
first release were in Esperanto (1964) and avant-garde jazz before signing the
rebels The Fugs and The Godz from the local scene. It’s said that the Swines’
debut, in its Bosch art cover (One Nation
Underground 1967), sold 100,000-250,000 copies but zero royalties for them
(thank goodness Stollman failed to sign Dr Strangely Strange at their concert
in Dublin and they went with Island). One reviewer saw Rapp as “one of the most
erudite, literate minds in rock”. In late ’68 Pearls Before Swine issued the
magnum opus Balaklava,
with a Bruegel cover, which included Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne and the voice
of…Florence Nightingale!
The original PBS never played live
together, but Rapp continued with the project when he signed to Reprise in ’69
for his third album These Things Too,
featuring Dylan’s I Shall Be Released and W.H. Auden’s poem Footnote. Recorded
in New York,
the same producer was used with local sessionmen. The Use of Ashes (1970) was recorded with his Dutch wife Elisabeth
after sailing on the maiden voyage of the QE2 to live in Holland. Its Rocket Man, based on a Ray
Bradbury sci-fi short story when Rapp was living near Cape
Canaveral, inspired Elton John’s famous song; many years later The
Jeweller was covered by This Mortal Coil.
City
of Gold here, also known as the Nashville
album because backed by the cream of that city’s musicians (though recorded
again in New York and at Bearsville, Woodstock), was seen by
some contemporary reviewers as PBS on the first side and Tom Rapp on the
second. This interpretation is fraught because all albums after Balaklava are
really Rapp with wife, friends, and sessioneers exploring his quest for new
sounds and ideas as a storyteller taking listeners on a voyage. Much of this 5th
album featured unused ideas from previous sessions, and according to the featured
singer David Noyes, from as far back as 1969."

https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2017/09/pearls-before-swine-city-of-gold.html