RIP Tom Rapp

The Antiplanner was surfing the web on Saturday and happened to learn that Tom Rapp died last week of cancer. That may not mean anything to you and he didn’t have anything to do with the Antiplanner’s usual issues, but his music had a big influence on me.

“If you cannot be universal,” Rapp said about this thought-provoking song, “you should at least be ambiguous,” a statement that applies to a lot of his work.

Growing up in Portland, I often listened to a radio station called KVAN, which from 1967 to 1979 focused on “progressive rock.” Its owner was Catholic and the station also played a mass every evening, but she apparently didn’t care what its disk jockeys did the rest of the day. So they often played full albums of then-unknown artists such as Pink Floyd (I first heard A Saucerful of Secrets on KVAN), Jethro Tull, Bruce Springsteen, and many others. In 1969, I was fortunate to be listening when they played the full album of These Things Too by Pearls Before Swine. Most of the songs on the album were written by the group’s lead singer, Tom Rapp.

One of the more haunting stories told on These Things Too, the Man in the Tree is about someone having a spiritual crisis.

Born in North Dakota, Rapp claimed to have won third place in a talent contest in Rochester, Minnesota whose fifth place winner was named Bobby Zimmerman. Whether true or not, Rapp ended up producing ten albums of music that were sometimes described as psychedelic but more accurately as surreal. Some of the songs were protest songs, a few were love songs, but most had a religious tint or were based on mythology and legends (sometimes mythologies made up by Rapp himself).

Most reviewers tend to skip over These Things Too (click to hear the entire album), but I think it was his best. It was really a concept album about the tension between the material and spiritual worlds. While he wrote other songs about the same theme, no other album was so completely devoted to it. For a young high school student trying to decide on a life path, this was a heady source of inspiration.

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Along with Song About a Rose, The Old Man, and Translucent Carriages, “Did You Dream of” seemed to come from a misty mythological world.

Several of his later songs were about astronauts getting lost in space, as a metaphor for choosing between life and death. Bernie Taupin said that the first one, called Rocket Man, was the inspiration for the Elton John song of the same name. I liked the one called Stardancer better, though it is really the same song with different lyrics, melody, and harmonies.

For the Dead in Space is the most explicitly metaphorical of Rapp’s astronaut songs.

Sadly, Rapp got ripped off by the music industry. He recorded his first two albums with a company called ESP that never paid him a cent. Then he switched to Reprise Records, only to have his business manager steal most of his money and skip town.

Discouraged, Rapp dropped out of the music business, went to law school, and spent the rest of his life as a civil rights attorney, thus choosing to live a life in service to others rather than for material gain. I’m sure he did important work, but it’s sad that the world never got to hear the many songs that he might have written if he had made the money he deserved as a composer and musician.

During the 1970s and 1980s, I probably listened to Tom Rapp more than any other artist. I can’t say for certain how he influenced me politically, socially, or spiritually. But I doubt I would be the same without him.