Former dissident playwright and former President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel died over the weekend at the age of 75. He will be remembered for the Velvet Revolution of 1989, and the end of Communism in the former Czechoslovakia. But here at rock nyc Havel will be remembered more as a rock and roll fan, the governing intelligence behind the Plastic People of the Universe and took Velvet Undergrounds disillusionment and ran to places we can't imagine in the west.
It is one thing to risk the charts, it Is another thing to risk jail, and something else entirely to risk your life, in pursuit of freedom of expression, Perhaps, when people claim todays music lacks the resonance of the 1960s, what they mean is it lacks the real, physical risk.
I haven't read Vaclav's plays, but I have a feel for 1968's Czech Spring and its subsequent booting by the USSR. Vaclev was in the armed forces when he wrote his first play, and it was from then thru the 1980s, including four years in jail, that Haclev legend lives most in play after play till he became president and his plays ended.
It is very strange to find a man able to move from one extreme to another, it is difficult to find that divining place where art imitates life imitates art. A great man and a great rock and roll fan back when it mattered.