Rolling Stone is reporting that revolutionary-humanitarian Czech president Václav Havel, who died on Sunday, realized the true power of rebellion thanks to music, and especially thanks to a rock band, The Plastic People. The band, which formed after the Prague Spring, had many music heroes like Frank Zappa (their moniker is a Zappa song), the Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart and the Fugs.
Paul Wilson, a Canadian who was living in Prague during this time and joined the band in 1970, said to Rolling Stone that he first sang in English, but when the group was pushed underground by the hostile Czech regime, the band switched to Czech lyrics, and became increasingly politicized.
Ivan Jirous, an Andy Warhol figure who was the band manager, wrote an influential essay about the rock & roll resistance, describing a community whose goal is to ‘live in truth’. Havel and Jirous met in a ‘secret highly conspiratorial meeting’, and in the following weeks, many musicians including the Plastic People were arrested as dissidents.
Havel wrote his manifesto Charter 77, who made him the leader of the opposition in Czechoslovakia, knowing what to expect, but undoubtedly inspired by these musicians.
Wilson recalls: ‘He said, 'We're never gonna get anywhere unless we put our butts on the line like these kids have.’ The manifesto, as we know, led to his imprisonment.
The Plastic People disbanded in 1988, a year before the Velvet Revolution led by Havel, but Havel kept in touch with the musicians who reformed as Pulnoc in the early 90s, and recorded a cover of the Velvet Underground (‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’). He even invited them to play at Prague Castle to mark the 20th anniversary of Charter 77 in 1997.
And Wilson even suggests something I had, of course, never thought about:
‘It's not clear where the movement name originated. It would be nice to think it came from the Velvet Underground, but there's no proof of that.’
Aaawww that would be just too perfect!! As everyone, I had always thought the name was to design the gentle and bloodless character of the revolution, but who knows? Is it giving too much power to Lou Reed??