THE LAWYER'S SONG

A QUARTER CENTURY AGO, TOM RAPP WROTE GREAT MUSIC, AND NEARLY STARVED. NOW HE WRITES LEGAL BRIEFS. HOW IS ART IS LIKE LAW? BOTH MAKE A PLEA.

PHILADELPHIA -- Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn on thee and rend thee. Matthew 7:6

He carries himself with an air of apology. His face betrays a mild nervous twitch -- a tentative, but-on-the-other-hand tuck of the chin into the right shoulder, a man capitulating to life.

He is a lawyer who seldom goes to court. He works at his desk, at his computer terminal, plugged into 200 years of legal precedent, comfortably alone. He is expert on certain aspects of judicial estoppel. His job is to find constitutional grounds upon which to challenge corporate actions; then he delivers his work to others who are more assertive and adroit in the courtoom. At this moment he is reviewing an opponent's motion for summary judgment, through dainty spectacles that ride down on his nose. He is Bartleby the Scrivener, Melville's colorless clerk who became part of the furniture.

Can this be where genius disappears to, after we have flayed it half to death?

Once, a long time ago, Tom Rapp was a rock star. You've probably never heard of him. In 1967, as a scrawny 20-year-old in Melbourne, Fla., he created a band with a name so arrogant it invited failure.

Most musicians selected band names that were safely seditious, like the Rolling Stones; or self-consciously silly, like the Strawberry Alarm Clock; or antiseptically straightforward, like Sonny and Cher. You don't need a degree in marketing to realize you shouldn't alienate people from the get-go.

Tom Rapp called his band Pearls Before Swine. It was a crisp one-finger salute to the listening public.

The band was mostly just Rapp. He wrote the songs, arranged the songs, sang the songs, played lead guitar. He had a dust-bunny beard and Orphan Annie bedspring hair that rode his shoulders and boinged when he walked. His voice could sound thin and doofy like Rudy Vallee, or rich and rumbly like Neil Diamond, or tremulous like a man weeping at his child's grave. Critics called his music acid folk. It trod the familiar 1960s floorboards: anti-war, pro-drug, get-inside-your-mind kindergarten Zen. But upon this floor he built a minaret, a windswept, rococo structure with spooky echoes and forbidding shadows. His lyrics borrowed from A.E. Housman, W.H. Auden, Sara Teasdale, Herodotus. He used cynicism like a horsewhip. When he wrote of love it did not sound like Herman's Hermits:

Bodies on bodies

Like sacks upon shelves.

People are using each other

To make love to themselves.