About Tom Rapp & Pearls Before Swine

photo of Tom Rapp by Naomi

For Magnet, by Tom Rapp, 2000

Damon & Naomi, longtime fans of Tom Rapp and his band Pearls Before Swine,
had the good fortune to meet Tom in person at the first Terrastock Festival in
1997. In 1999, Damon produced Tom's first studio album in 25 years, A Journal
of the Plague Year, now available from Woronzow Records in the UK, and
Rubric Records in the US. On the release of Damon & Naomi with Ghost,
Tom was asked to interview Damon & Naomi for Magnet magazine, where a
version of the following first appeared.

RING......RING....

Naomi: Hello?

Tom Rapp: How are you?

N: Don't you have to give us a legal disclaimer, since were being recorded?

TR: Uh no. I'm an attorney; I can do anything I want. (Naomi laughs) Why don't we just limit this interview to our pets? Where we got them, how they got their names...

N: Then you could sell it not only to Magnet, but also to Pet Fancy.

TR: That's right. I was telling Damon about the Dylan interview in Playboy. Nat Hentoff was assigned by Playboy to interview Dylan, so he went to Bob Dylan and Dylan said, Okay, I'll write all the questions and answers. So he did, Nat sent it to Playboy and they were published.

Damon: That's as opposed to John Cage, who took questions from the audience after lectures and then gave answers that he had predetermined, no matter what the question. (Laughter)

TR: I was watching "The Sopranos" last year, and all of a sudden, in the background, I hear Damon & Naomi.

N: We are in a media blackout [D&N have no TV], so we had no idea what "The Sopranos" was.

D: Our record company [SubPop] just said, y'know, it's this series on HBO, and we thought, Who's gonna see that? So we said, Sure, and they sent us this page of the script that it was tied to and it was when the daughter was doing crystal meth to study for her SATs.

N: We were like, Yeah, studying for your SATs, that's a worthwhile thing to do.

D: So a while later, we started to see bus ads and whatever for this show ...it took a long time for us to realize it was the same one. It was true to life, though, because we are the #1 band among crystal meth users.

TR: Uh-huh...I didn't really want to go into that too deeply in the interview.

D: I should say college-educated crystal meth users...we're endorsed by the Princeton...what is that board called?

N: College...

D: College, Scholastic Achievement Board or whatever? They're paying us.

N: You're a lawyer; you'll defend us, right?

TR: Oh right, absolutely. In fact, I was going to go through your personal history and ask you, as is typical of people who do these interviews, about the lost, drugged-out years. But then I realized, suddenly, that you don't do drugs at all.

N: We're looking forward to doing drugs later. We're saving it for our old age.

D: We figure that's when you can really appreciate psychedelics.

TR: That's right. I hope you can make the transition from this world to the next very nice. In fact, they'll probably all be legal by then.

D: I think that by then, they'll be required. It's just kind of an accident of history because when we came of age, drugs were such a conventional thing to do. At the school we grew up going to, doing drugs was kind of the equivalent of being a cheerleader or a football player.

N: It was the obvious thing to do.

D: The obvious path was to take cocaine and go to Studio 54 and sleep with professional tennis players.

TR: Well, you wrote the song, "I Forgot To Get High", which I assume is something about that.

D: That was true to life.

TR: Did you find that drugs were harming a lot of people that you knew?

D: We have seen drugs harm a lot of people. But on the other hand, I have to admit that we know a lot of people who use drugs in a really healthy way (laughs).

N: I think it depends on the drug and it depends on the people. I've never seen anyone benefit from them.

D: We've certainly seen people self-medicate. Sometimes, at least, you see people benefit on the outside, but then again, you never know what someone is going through on the inside.

TR: You have a new album coming out, I understand ["Damon & Naomi With Ghost"]. I was wondering when you first ever heard that there was such a group as Ghost.

D: It's very easy to remember, because both Jimmy Johnson at Forced Exposure, and Wayne [Rogers, of Magic Hour and Twisted Village — great record store in Cambridge, MA], they both told us, when Ghost's album "Second Time Around" was just out from PSF in Japan, that we really should hear this group because we'd love it. So we went and got a copy, and we did love it.

N: We freaked out.

D: We couldn't stop playing it, and their first album [these have since been released in the US by Drag City]. It was shocking to us that there was a band that existed now that, first of all, could sound like that, and secondly, that we could feel in such sympathy with. Anyway at that point we were playing in the band Magic Hour which was with Kate and Wayne of Twisted Village...very loud and psychedelic and we were the rhythm section.

TR: And it was a very funny band.

D: Yes, but not a lot of people really got that joke.

N: "The Major Stars" [Kate and Wayne's current band] is probably even funnier.

D: I thought we were over the top, but I guess there's “still more top to go over.” So, we were in that band, and there was this guy who wanted to book us a tour... And Kate said to him on the phone, "We'll go, if you get us our favorite band in the world to go with us." Which was Ghost. That was meant to be a brush-off. But then the phone rang at Kate and Wayne’s a couple months later, and it was the same guy and he said, "I got them. I got Ghost." So they came over and we toured with them and it was fantastic.

At the time, Naomi and I had just finished recording our second album, "The Wondrous World of Damon & Naomi" [named after "The Wondrous World of Sonny & Cher"], but we had never performed as Damon & Naomi — we had assumed that our records as a duo were a studio project only, nothing we'd ever take out on the road. But then Kramer [the famous Kramer] asked us to come to Japan — he wanted me to play drums in his band, and he said he would bring the both of us if we played as Damon & Naomi. We didn't want to turn down a trip to Japan! So we agreed, but we invited Ghost to play with us there, because we were afraid to go onstage alone.

N: A reasonable thing.

D: So actually, our live debut as Damon & Naomi was with Ghost as our backing band.

TR: How many times did you tour Japan with Ghost?

D: Twice. The first time was with Kramer. Then, we were invited back on our own and that time Ghost didn't tour with us, but they opened for us and Batoh and Kurihara, the lead singer and the lead guitar player, played half of our set with us. We also toured the States together with Batoh and Kurihara; that was after the release of our third album, "Playback Singers."

TR: On "Damon & Naomi With Ghost," tell me about the writing of the songs. Who wrote what? How did it work?

N: Well we wrote the songs in the way that we usually write them and then we sent them to Japan on cassettes, with handwritten notes for Ghost to learn. What came back to us was cassettes with Batoh playing the songs — he sort of reinterpreted them — he added some bridges, changed introductions, put in some dramatic pauses.

D: He put in some chords that I can't play! (laughter) B Flat Minor 9th's...I had to look them up. But then it turned out that, like a lot of people, he plays by ear and he finds things on his guitar and it was sort of left to us to figure it out like, "What the hell chord is that?!?" But anyway, he enriched a lot of aspects of the songs — what I think they call "pre-production". Which is when George Martin says, "No, open with the chorus." We didn't take all of Batoh’s suggestions, to his frustration, but Ghost altered almost every song in their own way.

N: Two of the songs on the record are covers, "Blue Moon" by Alex Chilton [from Big Star] and "Eulogy to Lenny Bruce" by Tim Hardin -- Ghost chose that one, but they took it from the Nico record, "Chelsea Girl". And the second song on the record, "New World", is Batoh’s music. He sent that over to us as sort of...

D: Well, the same form we sent songs to him. Guitar...

N: And some sort of humming.

D: So we had the opportunity to do the opposite for him. We added lyrics, and that changed the structure a bit as well.

TR: The album is really...I hope this doesn't sound bad...just so pretty.

D: Thank you.

TR: On "New World", is that Batoh and Kuri chanting in the background?

D: No, it's a sample of Japanese Buddhist monks. That's something Naomi and I added after Ghost was done. The way we made the record was that after all the transcontinental pre-production stuff, Ghost came to our house and we recorded together, but only for a week. We put all the basic tracks down, and then they had to go back to Japan. After they left, Naomi and I spent several months adding overdubs and mixing. That chanting was something we added later, and when we sent them the rough mixes they were really shocked — it's a Japanese source and I think it really freaked them out a lot at first, but now, they say they like it. We thought it went with the lyrics, and I like the way it sounded harmonically as well, all the strange voices.

N: And the great percussion.

D: The percussion in that song is by the monks, too.

TR: In fact, in your music collection, at home, you have a vast number of records and CDs of that sort of thing from all over.

D: Yes — but it's weird about samples — we don't have a computer, so we use them the old fashioned way, which is essentially taping something and using it. And it's almost as if you have less control over it than you usually do over regular writing...either it just absolutely works, or it's just absolutely horrible. We did it before on our first album, "More Sad Hits"; we gave Kramer a cassette of a bunch of things we liked that we felt fit the lyrics, in case he wanted to use something. Then Kramer, in his way, used everything we had given him. There are some great, sort of, cross-purposes at work because there were songs I had in mind for the samples I gave him, but then he put them in all different places than I would have ever imagined. In the end they all seemed to fit.

Anyway, because the chants we put in "New World" were Japanese it kind of took Ghost by surprise. But that's the nature of collaboration, because when you work with someone, you have to take into account not just who they are but who they think you are. You start to see yourself play through their eyes, and I think you play differently as a result. I think when a collaboration really works, it's like an out of body experience, because, after a while, you're hard pressed to say, what’s me, what's Ghost, what's my idea of Ghost, what’s Ghost’s idea of me.

TR: One thing that I noticed is that this record has the first squealing guitar on a Damon & Naomi record since "This Car Climbed Mount Washington."

N: It's the first Damon & Naomi record you can play air-guitar to.

TR: What?

N: Air-guitar is something teenage boys do in their rooms to Van Halen records.

TR: In the Catholic Church it's a sin (laughter)....So, who did the squealing guitar?

D: That’s all Kurihara. None of the rest of us touched an electric guitar because we would have been fools to while Kuri was around. The acoustic guitars are both me and Batoh. The keyboards are all Ogino.

TR: Damon, you seem to be doing more picking on the guitar.

D: I did some of the only fingerpicking that exists on record for me. Because as you know, I'm a dreadful finger picker.

TR: A DFP.

D: A confirmed DFP. But there’s one song on the record, "Don't Forget," which I actually wrote for finger picking and there was no other way I could play it, so it had to be dreadfully finger picked.

TR: Well, it sounds great.

D: Batoh is actually an excellent finger picker, an EFP, and he fingerpicked almost exclusively whenever he was playing. So there's a lot of good finger picking on the record that Batoh did.

N: It's funny, because whenever Batoh plays acoustic guitar, he prefers to finger pick and when you play acoustic guitar, you always prefer to beat it up.

D: Well I really think of the guitar more as a percussion instrument...

TR: When you guys perform, though, it's very helpful to have the guitar as a percussive device. I mean, don't you find that it keeps the beat through it?

D: Actually, that was an issue when we were recording because I couldn't play both rhythm guitar and drums at the same time, it had to be one or the other. And it turned out that when I stopped playing guitar, the rhythms would often fall apart; so a lot of the timekeeping on the record is actually from the guitar rather than the drums. Especially in songs where there is no bass.

TR: One of the things, all of the times that I've seen you perform, is that you always seem to keep the fullness of the albums on stage. Even though, obviously, you can only play two instruments at a time.

D: I always worry about that actually.

TR: When you're on stage, I have this image of you in the spotlight, and it almost seems jewel-like. The harmonies are invariably perfect, and aside from the percussiveness of the guitar, Naomi's bass playing is always like another melody itself. So you're able to have two melodies going, and the percussion, and the music of the guitar, and the two voices. And when the harmonium comes in, I mean, I don't know who else plays the harmonium on stage.

D: Well, sometimes I wish we had another hand.

TR: How much practicing do you do for the live performances?

N: We practice a lot before we perform.

D: Yeah, but only before we go out on tour; I guess if we did it constantly, we'd be better at it. Like I’d stop forgetting the chords and the lyrics. If there's anything I could pass on to younger musicians it's "Learn your songs before the set starts." (Laughter) It's so hard to learn them while you're on stage. Especially when you put your crib notes down at your feet and they’re in the dark. You look down, in the middle of the show, and you can't see your notes. That's very bad.

N: Well tell us how you perform by yourself and make it sound so good.

TR: Drugs, actually. (Laughter)...By my count, this is either your tenth or eleventh album

N: It’s our fourth Damon & Naomi record -- we've never been in a band that's gotten past three records before.

TR: Two of my favorite songs of yours are "Tour of the World" and "ETA".

D: No really?

N: "ETA"?

D: Wow.

TR: Yes, it's the best song ever about a plane crash.

N: That one got us in trouble in Spain because ETA is the name of the...

D: The Basque separatists...

N: And they're very violent.

D: They're like the IRA.

N: Everyone in Spain was like, "Why are you writing a song for the ETA?" We're like, "No!"

TR: People see things that they want to see. Like those people who see Jesus in an oil stain. I remember a story on the news in the early 80's, a woman who had a piece of wood that was cut from a tree, and she looked at it and realized suddenly that it was the image of ET.

I was wondering from each of you, how you were first introduced to music, how that happened.

D: My mother is a professional jazz singer [Nancy Harrow--she has recorded several fine jazz albums], so there was always music in my house, but it wasn't rock music. Although, my mom had the odd rock records that jazz singers have in their collection: she had The White Album and Nashville Skyline...she had Younger Than Yesterday, by the Byrds, and, of all things, she had Eric Burdon and the Animals, but I think she never played that one. But I know a lot of jazz standards because of the songs my mom sings.

TR: Naomi, how did you start with music?

N: Well there was always classical music in my house, because my father played the cello in the Seventh Army Symphony, same place where Elvis was sent when he went to the Army, except that my dad was in the orchestra. They were stationed on the same base in Germany, but I don't think my dad hung out with Elvis. My brother is actually a classical violist.

D: It turns out that both of us are the unmusical children in our families. Our brothers are very skillful musicians, and we're the clods who never finished their lessons.

N: I sat on my flute.

D: It's really weird; we're like the idiot savants.

N: There's your headline.

D: [Monty Python clod voice] "Gee, I can't understand this but I can make a song...it sounds good! Someone in England is going to buy it!"

TR: Damon and Naomi: the roots of self-esteem. Okay, there's our title. When did you start writing songs?

D: When we started playing music, we didn't know enough about it to play other people's songs so we had to start writing songs, because it's all we could play. Literally, we could only play a handful of chords so we had to make do. It was the era of punk rock, and even though what we're known for doesn't sound like punk rock, in our heads we have always thought we were punk rock. We went recently to see the new film about the Sex Pistols by Julien Temple called "The Filth and the Fury." Naomi and I were in the theatre basically weeping with tender nostalgia. It was so moving, just the spirit of that time is still so...

N: It's our 60's, Tom!

TR: Do you remember the first Galaxie 500 gig?

N: It was at Chet’s Last Call, formerly a strip bar. It still had its little fence around the stage and mirrored wallpaper. It was a place anyone could get booked, because it was really just a cover for a drug operation. They didn’t care what the music was.

TR: So, in fact, you do owe your career to drugs. Okay, here's the last question: So, Damon, is it true that you shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die?

D: No, that was Naomi. (Laughter)