When Wilson arrived, he found literally hundreds of beat, pop, rock, psychedelic, folk and country bands emerging from Prague's working-class neighborhoods and the countryside near the city. As a guitar player with a long-abiding interest in rock 'n' roll, Wilson quickly became close to a number of young Czech musicians. Much of the new Czech music had its origins in the West: rock groups like The Beatles, The Doors and The Velvet Underground were having almost as immediate an impact in Eastern Europe as they were in America. Wilson was welcomed with open arms by Czechs anxious for any word about the Western rock scene.

But suddenly Dubcek's increasingly freelance and experimental Marxism came under heavy attack from the Kremlin. Then, less than a year after Wilson hit town, the Soviet Army did, too. Hundreds of tanks and a half-million troops rolled into Prague in a startling display of "socialism-in-practice," Moscow-style.

In short order, Dubcek was deposed, more compliant Czech leaders were installed and "Prague Spring" gave way to the dark winter of "normalization." By coincidence, a group of bored teenagers from a fading residential quarter of Prague known as Brevnov chose the weeks immediately following the Soviet invasion to start a band, dubbed the Plastic People of the Universe. The Plastics took their name from a Frank Zappa reference to "spineless people, opinionless people, people without convictions or faith," according to Ivan Jirous, the intellectual who later became the Plastics' artistic director and unofficial historian.

In retrospect, however, it seems clear that the group didn't understand or mean to use the term in the same derogatory way that Zappa had. To the Czechs, the word "plastic" means something else entirely, almost the opposite. "They meant the same thing as Warhol did when he said 'I want to be plastic,' " states Paul Wilson. "They meant it as a means of making oneself undefinable in normal terms." Or, as Jirous was to write years later, "We are plastic in our own world, in the world of the underground, in the world of the cosmos."

The Plastics took their original inspiration from the granddaddy of Czech underground rock bands, The Primitives Group, who were together between 1967 and 1969. In their heyday, The Primitives were the leading local representatives of what the West was then calling "psychedelic music." They put on extravagant concerts, similar to "happenings," featuring slide shows, sound effects, flashing lights, fire eaters — a McLuhanesque total environment to wrap around their music.

Although they specialized in versions of songs by prominent Western artists and never really developed their own repertoire, The Primitives were important to other Czech musicians because they were the first to create an underground ethos. From the start they functioned outside normal, politically corrupt, everyday Czech society. They inhabited an independent, almost private world. At the same time the circle of collectively operating artists who managed The Primitives tried to use their rock music to reach a wider audience with avant-garde ideas.

Karel Voják, a 33-year-old émigré now living in New York, was a member of The Primitives' collective. When 1 interviewed Voják in his Manhattan apartment, he remembered The Primitives as "the first art-rock band in the world." Together the musicians and conceptual artists produced several environmental extravaganzas, such as 1967's "Fish Feast" and "Bird Festival." "At the Fish Feast," Voják said, "the musicians had special costumes and makeup and played in the middle of a big set, with blue and green flames burning all night. For the climax, we threw live fish all over the club. Later, we had the Bird Festival, when we got a half-ton of feathers and filled the hall. Everyone was knee-deep in feathers by the end."

When The Primitives disbanded in April 1969, the Plastic People inherited their lead guitarist and many of their fans. Having been granted professional status by the state booking and licensing agencies, they began performing regularly throughout Western Czechoslovakia (Bohemia), billing themselves as the "Psychedelic Band of Prague."

Shortly thereafter, Paul Wilson was invited to watch the Plastic People perform. The occasion was on August 31, 1969, at a gallery in the heart of Prague. Wilson and about 100 others packed a 20-foot by 25-foot room to hear the group play works by Ed Sanders, Lou Reed, Jefferson Airplane and other Americans, as well as original songs like "Man Without Ears." Wilson was extremely excited, and a year later he became one of the Plastic People himself, singing and playing backup guitar.

Czech music critic Honza Hruza was also present in the tiny gallery room, and he was impressed as well. As he wrote later in a review: "The Plastic People have become the top Czechoslovakian psychedelic band. It is also not without interest that for the first time in the history of Czech rock, an official sponsor has taken a band like this under its wing. And what's more, the director of the state booking agency, Mr. Ivan Varvarovsky, has outfitted the group with top-flight equipment — Fender guitars, Ludwig drums and Dynacord mikes." The enthusiastic Hruza went on to note: "The group's future plans include a September gig in the Music F Club, a psychedelic show in the Waldstein gardens, an album and a tour around the country."

A decade later, Paul Wilson remembers fondly those halcyon days with the Plastics. "It was truly collective music-making. Everyone would contribute, and things got very eclectic. We played a whole lot of The Fugs, some poems by William Blake that we set to music, even one by Edmund Spenser. Basically, anything went at the time. It was wide open."

One of the Plastics' early projects was a long piece called the "Symphony of the Planets." Another, completed shortly after Wilson joined the troupe, was a cycle of songs dealing with mythological beasts derived from a combination of Celtic legend and their own imaginations. It was called, appropriately, "Plastic Bestiary."

Although the compositions are innovative and have won several awards, the Plastics' music was often cacophonous. Typically, a Plastics song begins with a simple, thudding, repetitive bass line, which gradually increases in tempo and intensity and is aided by other percussive and rhythmic instruments, such as drums, viola and guitar. Once established, the urgent rhythm suddenly gives way to wailing melodies, usually featuring the saxophone. Add a tinkling electric piano overlay, gruff vocals and the usual abrupt ending. As befits the seriousness of their lyrics and the brooding Slavic temperament, most of the songs seem to be in a minor key.

Despite the growing critical and public acclaim, the band began to run into problems with the new hard-line government. Although their music was political only by default (they chose to refer to themselves as "cultural" revolutionaries, if at all), they were soon swept up in events largely beyond their control. At first they simply tried to ignore the coercive pressure from above: they passed through a period in which they related to their beloved underground only as an "alternative mental world." They believed, as they sang in a song characteristic of their first phase, that "All the stupid brains are out in the sun/Our powerful nation lives in a velvet underground."

Before long, however, it became impossible for them to ignore the destructive actions taken by the Communist leaders in the early '70s. The state refused to permit groups to sing in English, forced bands with English names to change them and reduced many top musicians to playing backup for the packaged stars of commercial Czech pop music, a bland mix that can best be described as a Slavic cross between Barry Manilow and Barry White.

In 1971, as a result of the new "standards," the Plastic People lost their vital official professional status, including their license to perform publicly, their recently acquired "top-flight equipment" and even their instruments. Rather than change their act and temper their repertoire, they chose to burrow deeper into the underground. Faced with the loss of their income, they took non-music jobs and patiently constructed their own sound equipment from scratch. They continued playing their own music on their own terms, performing without pay at weddings and private parties.

"I have always felt angry towards other relatively decent rock groups when, in the early '7Os, they began to make an official name for themselves," wrote the Plastics' Ivan Jirous years later. "The Plastic People maintained their integrity not because they were good musicians; in other rock groups of the time, there were musicians who were better. But one thing was clear to us: it is better not to play at all than to play music that does not flow from one's convictions. It is better not to play at all than to play what the establishment demands. "

Despite the loss of their professional status, the weddings, parties and festivals that the band appeared at proved to be just as popular as their previous public concerts, both with Czech youths and the secret police. As a result, each of the relatively rare Plastic performances became a memorable event. On March 30, 1974, for example, at a town called Ceské Budejovice, hundreds of army troops and police with attack dogs dispersed a crowd listening to the band. More than 200 people were arrested.

Other incidents and busts soon followed. The musicians themselves were constantly threatened with arrest. Not surprisingly, the outspoken Ivan Jirous was the first to go, receiving an eight-month sentence on trumped-up charges.

In the face of continual harassment, the underground music scene grew even stronger from 1972 to 1975. Other bands began to appear in the wake of the Plastics. Among the best were Umelá Hmota (Artificial Matter) and DG 307, which got its name while the band members were under the mistaken impression that the phrase was a medical code denoting schizophrenia. When they later discovered that it actually stood for a diagnosis of "temporary mental disturbance brought about in otherwise normal persons by a high-stress situation," they were delighted.

This second generation of underground Czech rockers adopted a much darker tone than the often whimsical Plastic People. More emphasis was placed on dynamics and a heavy, thudding beat than on melody and prolonged "psychedelic" soloing. In both their style and their statements, the younger musicians seemed to foreshadow a still-gestating Western trend — punk rock. The leader of Umelá Hmota, for example, once explained his musical philosophy thus: "Tuning up is a luxury of bourgeois music."

Although they did briefly become street-legal (actually regaining their professional status for two weeks until it was again revoked on the grounds that their music had a "negative social effect"), the Plastic People were gradually edged into an untenable position by the state. After the Ceské Budejovice bust the authorities kept them under constant surveillance. Meanwhile, pressure mounted within the party hierarchy to find a permanent solution.

By 1976 it was apparent that something had to give. At the Second Festival of the Second Culture, at the wedding of Ivan Jirous and Juliana Stritzková, held on February 21 in the village of Bojanovice, the full extent of the underground was manifested: a dozen different bands performed before an audience of hundreds. The joyous festival went on for more than 12 hours without police harassment. But a month later the authorities made a full-scale assault.

Beginning in March 27 musicians from five different groups were arrested in a continuing sweep, including members of the Plastic People, DG 307, Umelá Hmota and an exciting new band called The Hever and Vazelina. More than 100 others were interrogated. Private correspondence, manuscripts, tapes, films and photographs were confiscated. Worse, the instruments and equipment that the Plastics and DG 307 had painstakingly constructed over a period of six years were seized and impounded.

Simultaneously, a propaganda campaign was launched against the arrested musicians and disseminated through the state-controlled press, radio and television. The imprisoned were described as long-haired, anti-social elements, alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals and psychiatric cases. They were accused of creating a public nuisance and engaging in mass orgies.

In July, 1976, three members of The Hever and Vazelina were sentenced to up to two and a half years for disturbing the peace. In September Plastic People's Ivan Jirous and Vratislav Brabenec, DG 307's Pavel Zajícek and singer/poet Svatopluk Karásek were sentenced on similar charges.

As a direct result of these and other trials, the disparate elements of the alternative Czech culture were united for the first time. The legal battles of the Plastic People inspired prominent members of both the political and cultural opposition to come publicly to their defense, either by writing letters to the government, the party or the Western press, or by showing up in person at the Prague courthouse.

At a time when the ruling Husak government was signing the international Helsinki accords and other international covenants on human rights, the trials opened the eyes of the more established Czech dissidents to what was happening in the music underground. Out of this realization sprang the Charter 77 movement, a coalition that issued a manifesto calling for increased human rights within Czechoslovakia, as stipulated by the Helsinki Agreement. Almost 1,000 people signed the manifesto, and thousands more worked for it secretly. Playwright Václav Havel, former government minister Jiri Hajek and philosopher Jan Patocka headed the movement, but it coalesced around the continual harassment of the Plastic People and their supporters.

"It is not man who defines a moral order according to arbitrary needs, wishes, tendencies and desires," wrote Patocka in February, 1977. "On the contrary, it is morality which defines the man." Weakened by frequent, lengthy police interrogations, the aged Patocka suffered a heart attack and died only a month later. Havel also faced daily interrogation and two subsequent trials of his own.

For his part, Ivan Jirous managed to be released from prison in September, 1977, only to be promptly rearrested the following month. He has been incarcerated ever since and was finally sentenced last May [1978] to one and a half years. Even Canadian citizen Paul Wilson, in his tenth year in Czechoslovakia, faced problems. In May, 1977, Wilson was interrogated in Prague for a few weeks, in a manner he calmly describes from his new home in Toronto as "fairly standard, usually lasting six or seven hours, during which I was periodically threatened with jail sentences." In July of the same year he was arrested along with ten others at a private party in Rychnov in Northern Bohemia. His host's home, he recalls now with a nervous laugh, was later blown up by the police. Finally, he was expelled from the country and made his way to London, where he disembarked in the middle of the punk explosion.

Today most observers and friends of the underground Czech bands feel the situation in Prague is basically unchanged; if anything, government censorship and persecution has gotten worse. Recently three Czech teenagers were arrested and tried for sedition. Their crime? Playing Plastic People tapes and other underground rock.

"Is there any hope?" asks Paul Wilson rhetorically. "1 really can't say. People's spirits are high, they haven't been broken by the increased pressure. ... Right now people in Prague are willing to go to jail for two or three years. ... But certainly not forever, not if the sentences get much longer and the harassment tougher."

Why all this terror over mere music? After all, it's only rock 'n' roll, even if you don't like it. Why is the Husak government so afraid of the Plastic People, a band that is "political" only with the smallest "p" possible?

The answer, as the Plastics themselves noted in a song they called "Hundred Per Cent," is obvious: the government is scared stiff of the anarchic influence and seductive subversion of rock. "They are afraid to let people out," sang the Plastic People. "They are afraid to let people in. They are afraid of the Left. They are afraid of the Right. They are afraid of science, of art, of books and poems and theaters and films and records and tapes, of writers, poets, journalists, musicians and singers. They are afraid of détente, disarmament, the treaties they have signed, of what they have said, of what they have written. They are afraid of water and fire, wet and dry, snow, wind, frost and heat. They are afraid of Marx, of Lenin, of truth, freedom, democracy and the Human Rights Charter."

Needless to say, the situation is quite different here in America, with its pluralistic, ultimately co-optative, cultural economy. Whereas in a monolithic culture like Czechoslovakia's any alternative to the state's apparatus has immediate and quite subversive implications in dozens of other areas, in the United States it often seems that no movement, however "radical," can have any real, long-term effect. Instead, as the excitement of the We Decade melted into the ennui of the Me Decade, the American rock gods of the '60s, who had been the Czechs' inspiration, moved to Malibu and did a lot of coke.

Maybe it was the Plastic People of the Universe who were really the lucky ones, for they never faced the temptation of selling out. Ironically, this is a point that Ivan Jirous made himself, years later, in a monograph on the band's history.

"It is a sad and frequent phenomenon in the West," wrote Jirous, "where in the early sixties the idea or the underground was theoretically formulated and established as a movement, that some of those who gained recognition came into contact with official culture, the 'first culture,' which enthusiastically swallowed them up as it accepts and swallows new cars, new fashions, or anything else. In Bohemia the situation is essentially different and far better than in the West, because we live in an atmosphere of absolute agreement: the first culture doesn't want us and we don't want anything to do with the first culture. This eliminates the temptation that for everyone, even the strongest artist, is the seed of destruction: the desire for recognition, success, the winning of titles and prizes and, last but not least, the material 'security' which follows."

So in Bohemia, where Plastics' historian Ivan Jirous sits today in a jail cell, the situation is "far better than in the West." What moral, if any, can "the rest of us" draw from the ongoing saga of these "plastic" people thousands of miles and light-years away?

There are, of course, connections that can be made. The Plastics themselves, for example, identify strongly with current punk trends, particularly the English variety. Bands like the Patti Smith Group, which features Czech émigré Ivan Kral, have reciprocated by performing in a benefit for Amnesty International, which has accepted the Plastics as "prisoners of conscience."

"Ever since the New Wave started altering people's musical tastes back here, it seems as if the Plastics' music has become more accessible," says Paul Wilson. He believes that there is a sociological connection as well. "At least in England the punks were on the bottom of society; they had no hope of escaping. As a result, they too gave up on 'normal society' and went underground."

But when all is said, our two countercultures are separated by the border "between pseudo and real," as Primitives exile, Karel Voják, angrily states. "The music of the Czech rock underground is intellectually different. I think the difference stems from the collective effort. It's much more involving, instead of this mindless attitude of 'Let's play some rock 'n' roll.'

"There's also a difference in seriousness," continues Voják. "It's a life and death matter there, here and everywhere. People need to understand that here more than in Prague, because there they already know it."

Maybe that's why the Plastic People of the Universe simply refuse to quit. As Paul Wilson tells it: "They're still playing today, although they can no longer play out. They have a little studio out in the woods and are still churning out tapes. As a matter of fact, I expect a new one within a month."

— Rory O'Connor ( roc@mediachannel.org) is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker and CEO of Globalvision New Media, producers of MediaChannel. This article originally appeared in the May, 1979, issue of Mother Jones.

© Copyright 1979, Mother Jones magazine. Reprinted with permission of the author.

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