Decoding Pearls Before Swine

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A few weeks back I wrote a Pitchfork Sunday Review of Movietone’s The Blossom Filled Streets. Writing an entry in this series is one of my favorite assignments, as I get to burrow deeply into the history of a record/scene/band/sound and try to square that history with my own reactions to the music. Sometimes I’ve written about records where I know little of the story behind them at the outset—the Waterboys’ This Is the Sea comes to mind—and that’s always pleasurable. And sometimes it’s a matter of gathering thoughts that have been rattling around for years and seeing if I can arrange them in a way that makes sense.

I knew the broad outlines of the Movietone story in part because the small scene they were part of during their run—usually called Bristol post-rock—interested me while it was happening. And much of my initial interest in the late-’90s centered on Flying Saucer Attack, the noisy, folky, sorta-shoegaze project led by Dave Pearce, which at one time also included Movietone’s Rachel Coe. When exploring FSA at the time, roads of inquiry tended to wind back to the UK zine Ptolemaic Terrascope, which covered mostly music in the psychedelic folk vein. I’d picked up a couple of issues (wish I still had them now), and a frequent reference point in its pages for Pearce and quite a few other groups found therein was the American folk outfit Pearls Before Swine.

Until this year, I’d never listened to Pearls Before Swine. The band/project, led by singer-songwriter Tom Rapp, wasn’t exactly obscure, since I’d often see them mentioned in interviews with musicians (Damon Krukowski has brought them up a lot, and in fact produced a Pearls Before Swine record in 1999, after Rapp had been retired from music for years). But they weren’t a band that people around me talked about much, and if I saw their records in the bins, I didn’t take notice.

Much of Pearls Before Swine’s reputation rests on Rapp’s first two albums, released on ESP-Disk in 1967 (One Nation Underground) and 1968 (Balaklava), which as of today are the only two I’ve heard (I have my eye out for other records from the late ’60s and early ’70s, I’m hoping there are a few other gems in there.) Both are wonderful, filled with deeply atmospheric folk heavy on the reverb steeped in modes traceable back to the British isles, and Rapp moves between songs about the end of the world rendered in poetic language to a song about wanting to have sex with someone rendered as a clever joke a kid might tell.

The latter, which is kind of as I describe it and kind of not, is one Pearls Before Swine song I simply can’t get out of my head: “Oh Dear (Miss Morse).”

It’s short, and the instrumentation is pretty much just a plucked banjo, a strummed guitar, and, I think, an early synthesizer known as the clavioline, along with an oscillator. The first time I heard it I thought “Elephant 6 meets Broadcast,” which is of course two bands/scenes from the ’90s that were fascinated by the music of the past and shaped it to their own ends and whose members, probably, loved Pearls Before Swine. So I was hearing in this song a future which looked back at a past that I experienced in the present, and I love that shit.

The tune is catchy, and the mix is wild and weird and perfect, the explosions of synth way louder than they should be, like someone accidentally dropped a brick on the keyboard in the studio every other bar. So sound-wise, it’s ace. And it has what seem to me to be some inherently funny lines, like “This may strike you/Oddily/But I want you/Bodily,” each syllable enunciated so clearly you can’t help but fixate on the made-up word and the rhyme—it’s a Dad joke that wants to make sure you don’t miss what’s cringey.

But there’s more. Miss Morse is named for Samuel, inventor of the code that was carried across nations via elevated (or submerged) wires and which changed communication forever. And so communication with her must be in such code. And Rapp landed on a sequence that suits his chorus perfectly, as perfectly catchy as a ’70s jingle and just as difficult to get out of your head:

Dit Dit Dah Dit
Dit Dit Dah
Dah Dit Dah Dit
Dah Dit Dah

As a young boy, the only morse code I knew was “SOS,” which in Pearls Before Swine parlance was:

Dit Dit Dit
Dah Dah Dah
Dit Dit Dit

I learned it around the time I got my first plastic red Eveready flashlight, and I was told that knowing this code could save my life. If I were lost in the woods and all alone I could flash “SOS,” and those searching me would be on the lookout for such a communication and would come find me.

So that’s all I knew, SOS. Perhaps your average person in 1967 knew a bit more morse code than that—maybe they’d earned a scouting badge for morse knowledge, say. And those buying records on ESP-Disk—a label, after all, founded to encourage the use of the new hybrid language Esperanto—were perhaps slightly more likely to know how to translate the dits and dahs to letters than the man on the street. But most people, I’m guessing, heard in the song only a catchy chorus and the cool electronics and that was more than enough.

Still, those who knew morse code had access to what we now call an easter egg: Rapp’s letters spelled “FUCK.” See for yourself with this handy morse code translator. He later said he’d originally tried “LOVE” but the rhythm of the dots and dashes failed to match the melody. FUCK, however, was perfect. Whether that altered the meaning of the song and he came up with the oddily/bodily line afterwards, I don’t know, but I imagine landing on such a secret cornball joke led to a happy feeling, and that feeling is still spreading around the world 58 years later. What can I say—I’m a sucker for a clever, dumb, yet elegant gesture like this one. It’s great fun to imagine being a morse-fluent kid in 1967, hearing this transmission, and getting the reference—you’d be running to tell your best friend within seconds, sort of like I am doing now.