CZECHMATE

THE FRUSTRATIONS OF SHARING A PARTY LINE

‘NOT ALL THAT IS NOT FORBIDDEN IS ALLOWED HERE’’

 

Chris Bohn journeys into the heart of Czechoslovakia. It pulses with fear. But bands refuse to be intimidated into selling their souls to the party. Those who capitulate get the chance to make records and play concerts; those who don’t have learnt to live in an atmosphere of unease, they circulate tapes and play in bedrooms, basements and private parties. For them freedom of expression is something more vital and heartfelt than conforming to the ambivalent demands of socialist realism.

 

The gaunt Ostbahnhof station in Berlin’s Russian sector is a sombre introduction to the East, but its Third Man gloom is offset by the bustling companionship of travellers waiting for the Prague-Budapest express. 

Westerners, me included, can’t hide an aura of uneasy anticipation that manifests itself in nervous glances from the clock to the train indicator; not that there’s any real threat - just a feeling brought on by the sudden, alienating loss of colour on crossing the wall. Eventually relieved by the train’s arrival, I enter a compartment full of young army conscripts, who inquisitively look me over before continuing their raucous replay of Chaplin’s Modern Times screened on East German TV the night before.

They were really tickled by the scene in which Char-lee is nailed by the cops for political agitation when all he did was innocently pick up a red flag fallen from the back of a lorry. And just when they’re looking forward to next week’s The Gold Rush, someone dampens their spirits by reminding them of a parade the same night...

Exit soldiers, enter a sailor and his friend heading for a weekend in Budapest. Why Budapest? It’s a lot more relaxed there, they reply, the next best thing to travelling West.

“East Germany one big jail,” murmurs one sullenly. And for young people it’s a long term sentence (until retirement when you can finally leave the country) rendered all the more frustrating by their ready access to West German media. Eager to talk music, the duo regularly watch the West German marathon Rockpalast, which brings them as close as they can get to live gigs by the likes of Patti Smith and The Police.

Leaving the cocoon-like comfort of the train compartment, I say goodbye to the Germans and whisper a tentative hello to Prague.

 

On the surface Prague has remained unshaken by the momentous events that have unsettled its citizens since the war. Neither the uprising against the Nazis in 1945 nor the Communist takeover three years later did much damage to the city, and whatever scars were left by the Soviet led invasion of ’68 have long since healed.

Which is probably why it’s difficult to equate this beautiful medieval city with its status as a capital of one of the most repressive regimes inside the Eastern bloc (directly behind East Germany in terms of its loyalty to Moscow). The feeling persists in the city’s well stocked shopping centres. No lengthy food queues or empty shelves here. Bohemia has always been a wealthy, industrious province and its economic status hasn’t changed much.

If the Czech Communists have learnt one thing, it’s that a well-fed nation is easier to control than a hungry one - as events in Poland attest. More fruitful then, as one Czech dissident pointed out, to play Big Sister dispensing sugar-coated pills than Big Brother waving a heavy stick; but the essence  is the same: COMPLETE CONTROL.

And the mistake Alexander Dubcek, Party First Secretary and inspiration behind the short-lived thaw, was allowing it to slip away; or so Moscow interpreted the increased freedoms he gave the Czech people.

Today Dubcek’s name has been scrubbed from the tourist guide book and he’s never mentioned oficially.

One of the more open manifestations of Czechoslovakia’s shortlived “liberty” was a beat boom that echoed Western Europe’s. Likewise it blossomed into psychedelia, with bands like The Primitives leading the way. When the authorities started showing interest, their guitarist Josef Janicek left to form Plastic People, Czechoslovakia’s most notorious band, who helped form a bond between the rock and intellectual movements in the dissident artist group Charter 77.

The music’s uncontrollable nature inevitably meant the clampdown, thereby forcing any worthwhile bands underground. (All this is well documented in the superb booklet accompanying Plastic People’s Western-produced album ‘Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned’.)

The authorities acknowledge youth demand for music by licensing their own bands, but they’re predictably awful. And naturally the kids aren’t fooled - I mean who could take any band seriously which sought party approval, thereby allowing them to dictate song content, onstage behaviour and even the running order of records.

 

The reverse side of the coin is, obviously, that musicians want to work and the more purely instrumental bands aren’t likely to upset the authorities anyway.

Consequently jazz rock fusion music was popular for a while in the ‘70s, until new wave shot some vigour into the best of the older bands.

 

The official Czech label Supraphon does license a few Western records, like Elton John, Santana and fusion bands like Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report - but only after Czech emigres Jan Hammer and Miroslac Vitous, respectively, moved on.

 

With practically nothing worth listening to on the official scene, kids naturally look elsewhere for entertainment. And only when you join them in the search do you realise the depth of repression in Czechoslovakia - and just how vital a media pop music is. Otherwise why are the authorities so frightened by it? Why should owning a Plastic People album mean trouble? How come bands unwilling to cramp their expression in official channels risk persecution and imprisonment?

In the West pop music might have been irretrievably corrupted by the twin figureheads of trash aesthetics and commerce, but behind the Iron Curtain playing it is something akin to a mission. And going by all accounts hundreds of bands do, only they’re forced so far underground they’re practically impossible to find.

 

Sunday is a sacred day in Prague. It’s the day when some workers, who’ve spent the week conserving their energy, earn twice as much doing private jobs at black market rates. It’s also a good day to go shopping.

Blindfold yourself, spin round three times and hey presto! The record mart.

Stretching along a muddy ledge in one of the city’s suburban foothills, up to a 1,000 people meet here weekly to buy, sell or swop Western records. It’s almost a family outing and a carnival atmosphere surrounds the morning. Parents root out illicit jazz or James Last records; young kids display pop posters from Western magazines; their older brothers and sisters check out the week’s disco, heavy metal or Europop bargains.

Name your poison and someone’s likely to have it.

There’s always a brisk trade in Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart records (two important formative influences on the Czech rock scene). Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground are popular too, as are freeform and experimental albums, and - yes, it’s spread this far - heavy metal and pomp.

These days there’s always a bunch of eager hopefuls waiting for new wave and punk records. Someone I met had bought PiL’s ‘The Metal Box’in its original canister, and coming up the road is someone with albums by The Strangfers and Wire to offload.

The market is largely a meeting place for people selling or exchanging unwanted or taped records sent by Western relatives. But there are of course plenty of opportunists who, through illicit currency dealings, collect the marks and dollars necessary to make bulk mail order purchases, subsequently to sell the records at heavily inflated prices. Similarly, other traders lower the market’s innocent standing by selling jeans and watches.

They’re the people the police pounce on first during their periodic raids. But sensing perhaps the secret police or informers in the crowd, the market like as not shifts to a new location before anyone is busted. And unless anyone’s foolish enough to be caught with a handful of the same album, the police usually let casual buyers go.

Maybe it’s their idea of safety valve...

Western records are a valuable source of information to be reffered to, not to be copied. Czechoslovakia has established over the past decade rich, vital traditions of its own anyway, so anything new from the West acts more as a spur than booty. If you need any proof look to Plastic People.

Back in the ‘60s when psychedelic bands spouted magic without really understanding it, PP, and their forerunners The Primitives had the advantage of living in a city with a much more powerful magical presence than San Francisco. Alchemists occupied a street of their own, Golden Lane, winding down from the castle, where, incidentally, Franz Kafka lived for a while. (The useful official guide denies the street’s magic connections.) The famous European magician Paracelcus passed through Prague, too.

It seeped into the city’s music, any airy leanings counterbalanced - in Plastic People’s case - by their love of the Velvet Underground’s raw-edged guitar. Their first album was written with the 47 year old poet/writer Egon Bondy, who has been a constant thorn in the establishment paw for decades.

A by all accounts bizarre figure, he reinterpreted the philosophy of the world from a Marxist viewpoint in siw volumes. But his views were too extreme for the official party line.

Additionally, his challengingly beavy scatological lyrics, which confronted orthodox puritanism head on, helped earn Plastic People an almost sub-human reputation with the authorities, who called the band pigs and animals as part of the campaign which led to the arrest and imprisonment of some members and followers.

I met one of these “pigs”, Josef Janicek, for a short conversation. A quiet, introverted man, our discussion is hampered by my lack of Slovak and his poor English, making it difficult to stick to the agreed subject of music. Understandably, Janicek and the band are pissed off that they’re always treated on a political level, often leaving their music untouched.

But it’s impossible to talk round the realities of their persecution. Even as we’re talking, the police might be checking to see if he’s at home.

He tells me about the last concert Plastic People played almost a year ago.

“We found a house in the country about 150 kilometres from Prague and maybe about 200 people showed up. We started playing at 10 pm and it was over by 1 am and everybody went home to Prague. The police didn’t find out about it until two weeks later and when they did, they destroyed the house. They said it was too close to a power station and it posed a security threat, but that wasn’t true.”

He adds optimistically: “But there are plenty more houses.”

The authorities persistent harassment of The Plastic People highlights their fear of music.

“They’re afraid of art that is not under their wings,” Janicek concurs.

“They know that culture has a very big influence on young people.”

The accumulative effects of arrests and busts manifested themselves in the far more introverted ‘Passion Play’, their second album released in the West. Its deeply rooted pessimism contrasts heavily with the joyous, liberating music of their first album. But, as one observer points out, it’s difficult to criticise it on that basis unless you’ve run the same gauntlet of experiences.

He says: “Continually oppressed by the police and ignored by most of society. The Plastic People transferred the sacrifice of themselves into the Easter story of the crucifixion of Christ. Their genuine hurt appeared on the record and lots of friends outside Czechoslovakia said the record was too depressive. But they should compare it to the reality of PP’s situation.

“ The radical left is mostly theory,” he continues, “and if these radicals got in touch with this system, they might feel as beaten and as down as the Plastic People of this period.”

Fortunately, these days Josef is more content, his interest in music rekindled by the unlikely pairing of punk and Irish folk music.

 

There’s a popular joke in Czechoslovakia that goes something like this.

Policeman: Hey, chief, I just found this penguin in the street. What should I do with it?

Chief: (exasperated) Well, take it to the zoo.

(later on his way home, the chief sees the man still has the bird) I thought I told you to take it to the zoo!

Policeman: I did, Sir, and now we’re going to the movies...

The state’s unnaturally large police force is the butt of the sort of stupid jokes English people make about the Irish. But in this case deservedly. However, the joke can get sour.

 

Walking through Wenceslas Square, a policeman stops me for a spot check, asking for identity papers. When I start talking English he waves me on with a smile. Other people, I’m told, have spent 24 hours fretting in cells for not having their papers with them.

At least you can see the uniformed variety. Not so easy to spot secret policemen or informers in public places, though.

One lunchtime I go into a pub with friends met over in Prague.

Suddenly, my drinking partner’s face blanches and he abruptly ushers us out again.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“I just recognised a secret policeman,” he replies. There’s no problem, he insists, but its safer not to be seen in the company of strangers.

Laughed at and reviled though they may be, they’re also feared. Their unpopularity can work in favour of would-be victims, as most everybody is unwilling to co-operate - excepting loyal party members and their ilk.

It is help not so much volunteered out of compassion for the victim as also looking after number one.

Czech people, I’m repeatedly told, are wary of signing anything that commits them to a point of view which might be used against them later - be they council officials asked to support their belief in an artist, say, on paper, or a police witness asked to sign statements. Who knows when the wind might change direction? The rash of executions which followed party purges in the early ‘50s are not yet forgotten.

 

Public timidity combined with friendly co-operation saved one band called Extempore from a similar fate as Plastic People. The police intended to nail them at a concert, but they couldn’t get any reliable witnesses to press complaints against them - a popular one being bad language or lewd stage movements.

Extempore were lucky that time, but living under constant fear of prosecution hasn’t done their sanity much good, as their leader Mikolac (saxist, guitarist, vocalist and writer) states.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m walking on the edge between lunacy and laughter.”

Describing themselves, as a rock and jokes band, with a strong dada base, their music is in Czech tradition of merrymaking balanced by passionate soloing and a sardonic line in cutting lyrics. All in their late 20s, the band admit that the scarcity of gigs - a dozen a year is rarely reached - tends to turn the music in on itself.

But new wave/punk influences checked their more introverted moments and their latest set - based on a song cycle called ’15 Dreams Of The City Inhabitant’ is an exhilarating fusion of tense thrashes, chants and sweet, controlled moments. The songs, according to an English speaking colleague of the band, are “grotesque... full of black humour, absurdity, blasphemy, anarchy and... cryptograms.”

They preview the concert to an audience of one - me - in a bedroom that serves as a rehearsal room.

His rapturous description proves right. Check the horrible surrealist passage from ‘Under The Tram’: “I want to vomit/ When I look at myself/ I have neither arms nor legs/ I’m completely helpless.”

It’s not one for the watchdogs of socialist realism who demand greater respect for the human condition; in this messy torso they’re not likely to see a metaphor for modern man in Prague.

Extempore are eager to be heard by anyone and one evening my presence constitutes just the audience they need to run through their set as if they’re playing a concert hall. Despite the cramped surroundings of the bedroom, the music pours out of them, like water from a burst dam. The “concert” over, they feel as if all those months rehearsing haven’t been in vain.

Yet even here in their own home they are not totally secure.

“Someone might call the police to complain about the noise,” one says. It’s a common enough occurence for bands in England, but when such a call could be used as an excuse for searching the place, bands must treat their neighbours a little more warily.

 

The communist revolution in Czechoslovakia didn’t so much do away with class differences or inequalities as reverse them.

Thus, in education children of traditional working class parents would have a better chance at winning a place in further education than the children of intellectuals or the likes of schoolteachers - whatever their respective qualifications. Similarly people find themselves promoted less on the basis of ability than their loyalty to the Party, which leads to a whole new set of antagonisms, especially in the cultural field.

Somebody told me that the head of West Bohemia’s biggest library used to be a tin miner who probably hadn’t read anything outside party manuals. While there’s an element of bitterness in what he says, imagine how a band would feel auditioning before a committee as equally well qualified.

But education poses a thornier problem. As in the West colleges turn out even more graduates unable to find suitable work. Yet because unemployment doesn’t exist officially in Czechoslovakia, they’re forced into intellectually unsatysfying jobs, where they grow increasingly despondent. Classed as intellectual invalids, they’re lumped together with the malcontents and vagrants as potential troublemakers. Some are forced into action, to join dissident groups like Charter 77; others just give up.

But the strongest bond between workers and intellectuals is forged by their common enemy. Thus, the union of rock and roll and the intellectuals of Charter 77 has done more to break down distinctions than an unfair education system.

One observer perhaps put it most succinctly: “Plastic People’s music describes equally the feeling of intellectual invalids and workers living outside society. Rebels are always beyond class - isolation always breaks down barriers between people.”

 

Of Prague’s three known punk bands, Zikkurat, Dog Soldiers and Energie G, I only got to meet the students of the last. From a strong middle class background - three of their fathers are architects - I sense some resentment towards them.

“Well, in Czechoslovakia there are only a very limited number of people playing electric instruments, because they are so expensive,” says a critic. “So if you have a rich father, it’s naturally easier to get hold of one.”

More importantly, perhaps, they have easier access to information and it depends on how they use it. They might argue - but in fact they don’t - that they’ve got more to lose through their involvement in music.

As it is, they formed the band last April as a hobby and they were invited to play a few gigs two weeks later.

“We forgot everything we learnt,” says singer Krystof. “It was terrible. They turned the electricity off after two numbers.”

The night I catch them rehearsing in a deep basement that, like the truly subterranean underground train system, will double as a bomb shelter in an emergency, they gamely run through a set composing of Brit-punk derivatives and a version of ‘Ulster Boy’ that would have put some Sham performances to shame.

“I know what you’ll say,” anticipates Krystof. “You’ve heard it all before.”

Didn’t say a word.

“Well, we have plans for the music to change this winter. I know that we’re only playing very fast, very hard punk now, but before this group some of us had never played.”

Punk is nevertheless a suitable medium for channelling the frustrations of living in a harsk, totalitarian state, and they do enliven it all with a touch of humour - especially when Krystof starts reeling off the band’s subject metter: boredom; Prague being a dirty town; the easiness with which people accept their lot - all figure strongly.

It’s as if he’s suggesting they have more of a reason to protest that the punks of Western Europe, and in a sense he would be right. It’s impossible to take seriously the rantings of our Oil brigade.

Protesting about boredom actually means something when most of your gigs are played in a basement. At least their music is charged with the energy and conviction to support their statements...

Later, on the streets again, their drummer - true to form, a class clown - yells out,” George Davis is innocent!”

Slowly he turns to me and asks sheepishly, “Er, who is George Davis?”

Forget George Davis, friend, you’ve got more worthwhile campaigns at home.

 

Another night another basement, another dress rehearsal. This time I’m taken on a tour through Prague’s narrow, winding streets past the secret police HQ to see The Classic Rock And Roll Band. On the way we meet a gangly, lank haired youth proudly dutching a new horde of records. Furtively looking over his shoulder, he pulls back the back to reveal ‘Joy Division’s Closer’, Stations Of The Crass’ and The Plasmatics record. An unlikely mixture, but it’s nice to know that tribal barriers have yet to be erected here.

The Classic Rock And Roll Band are ironically a contemporary outfit some 20 years too late. Rock and roll is relatively new to Czechoslovakia. They were still suffering from the rigours of its most brutal Stalinist period when Elvis Presley scandalised the Western world. Little chance of him getting any exposure in the Eastern block then, in the pre-satellite days of easier media manipulation.

Predictably denounced as fascist in the ‘50s, rock and roll got lost in the noise of big beat during the more liberal ‘60s only to resurface in 1968 with the Classic Rock And Roll Band. It took them some ten years and the loss of their founder/singer - who defected during a Spanish holiday - to really break through, but these days they enjoy both semi-legal and alternative status.

Good rock and roll performed with the authenticity that Shakin’ Stevens brings it, if not with his flair, always finds a market, especially in one so starved as Czechoslovakia’s.

One night he was irritated by the docility of the audience and started calling them animals. Unfortunately, the police heard about it, and when Krecan got wind of the news he fled to Munich. He’s not at all happy in the West, but we’ll go into that in a future issue.

A nameconstantly cropping up in musical conversations is middle-aged accordionist Jiri Cert/Jim The Devil, who apparently writes extraodrinary proletarian songs which he performs with stunning compassion accompanied by heart-rending accordion playing.

Hundreds more bands will inevitably go undocumented, most will remain unknown to Czechs, never mind us. But no matter how tough the authorities get, regardless of victimisations, more and more will keep popping up.

In Czechoslovakia both the spirit and the flesh are willing.

While rock exists there the regime will never feel totally secure. The only sleep a totalitarian state gets comes after all alien ideas have been crushed; the very foundation of totalinarianism is a purity of thought unsullied by anybody else’s.

If you don’t think music has any political value, just look at the effort such states make to stamp it out. They might succeed in driving it underground - and consequently strengthening it - but they’ll never snuff it out completely. Rock’s importance in the East is its ready accessibility.

Prohibited books, one observes tells me, are typewritten, beutifully hand-bound and illegally circulated in necessarily limited numbers. A good rock song, however, takes a matter of minutes to communicate its message, and it’s easy to tape and pass on. That’s why some Czechs were amused by the inference in an NME headline that they’d never heard Plastic People (Yes, it is read in Czechoslovakia).

Rock will never topple a totalitarian regime but in Czechoslovakia it sure as hell keeps it on the run.

 

Prague is not an easy place to leave, but it’s still a relief to be aboard the Budapest-bound train. Three Polish students sitting in the next seats have brought their own spirits with them - vodka included. And naturally one fuels the other.

“Polish strike out!” shrieks one at the complacent beer-drinking Czechs sitting behind them.

“Communist Partei Scheisse!” he continues, ramming home the point.

The Czechs, their security suddenly ruffled, throw back a few hostile gestures. But the young Pole needs a whole lot more vodka before he finally falls asleep. Later at the Hungarian border a Czech guard rouses him to check his visa. He drowsily comes awake a bit too slowly for the guard, who gives him two thudding slaps on the back of his head to speed up the process.

My, it’s really touching to see how some Eastern folk treat their own.