In 1998, Masaki Batoh of the Tokyo band Ghost asked if I would help interview Tom Rapp of Pearls Before Swine for publication in Japanese, and write an introduction. Batoh and I were both big fans of Tom’s albums from the 60s and 70s, and we had recently gotten to know him personally as a warm, generous, and bitingly funny man. When we met Tom, he had left music for civil rights law, working mainly on pro-bono discrimination cases. He was very political, and even his casual conversations somehow always managed to include a wry dig at the hypocrisies of right-wing politicians, the church, or unethical corporations. He once recorded a track with a bunch of us saying “Walmart” so that he could reverse and encode it backmasked as the name of the devil.
Tom died in 2018. He left us all a remarkable legacy of song. But I miss his running commentary and jokes about the follies in the headlines. And I miss his unshakable faith in fighting for good, despite the odds.
Versions of the following were originally published in Japanese by Marquee (Vol. 7) and G-Modern (Vol. 18), Summer 1998.
