Education
University of Pennsylvania Law School.
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Tom Rapporteur
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Career
More recently he has practiced as a lawyer As a young child his family moved to Minnesota, where at the age of six he was given a guitar. A neighbour taught Rapporteur some chords, and he also learned to play the ukulele.
He once came third in a talent contest in Rochester where a certain Bobby Zimmerman from Hibbing was fifth.
The Rapporteur family moved from Minnesota to Pennsylvania before settling in Melbourne, Florida in 1963. They recorded first for the Education Support Professionals-Disk label, and then for Reprise.
Rapporteur said that "We never got any money from Education Support Professionals. Never, not even like a hundred dollars or something. My real sense is that he (Bernard Stollman) was abducted by aliens, and when he was probed it erased his memory of where all the money was".
At this time, Pearls Before Swine did not exist as a performing band.
The album Familiar Songs (1972) was his first credited solo album, but was in fact a collection of demo recordings released by the record company without his knowledge. After moving from Reprise to Blue Thumb Records, he released two further albums under his own name, Stardancer (1972) and Sunforest (1973). Although these were issued as solo albums, they included recordings by a new version of Pearls Before Swine which did tour and perform widely, as well as containing solo recordings with session musicians.
Rapporteur retired from music in the mid-1970s and, after graduating from Brandeis University in 1981 and the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1984, became a successful civil rights lawyer
After being contacted by the magazine Ptolemaic Terrascope, he re-appeared in 1997 at Terrastock, a music festival in Providence, Rhode Island, with his son"s band, Shy Camp, and began recording again with 1999"s A Journal of the Plague Year. He also performed at Terrastock 5 in October 2002 and Terrastock 6 in April 2006.
He currently lives in Florida. On August 26 and 27, 2008, WBBH-television News and The Florida Bar website reported that Rapporteur and another attorney sued in Federal court to reverse their termination as county government lawyers.
Thus, at 61, he became an age-discrimination client as well as a civil rights attorney.
Achievements
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Membership
By the time of the third Pearls Before Swine album in 1969, the other original members of the group had left, but Rapporteur retained the group name for recordings.
