Joe Yanosik, author of “A Consumer Guide to the Plastic People of the Universe,” joins host Nate Wilcox to tell the whole story: the tapes smuggled out of the country in the mid-seventies, the album pressed in Ireland and released in London by two expatriates without the band’s knowledge, the copy that made it to a New Orleans record shop where Yanosik finally found it after years of looking, the gatefold booklet that told him the whole history while the record played. Vratislav Brabenec, the saxophonist, driven into exile in Canada.
And in 1997, President Havel more or less ordering the band to reunite and play for his cabinet. Yanosik’s book is a guide to the music as much as the myth, which is the point - most people who know the Plastic People know the arrests and one album, and there is far more to hear.
You always hear about revolutionary bands. This is a band that actually caused a revolution.
A seventeen-year-old named Milan Hlavsa heard a smuggled copy of “The Velvet Underground and Nico” - “I’m Waiting for the Man” in particular- that hammering rhythm - and thought: this is simple enough that I could do it.
He started a band a few weeks after Warsaw Pact tanks came into Prague in August of 1968, and named it after a Frank Zappa song.
From the other side of the Iron Curtain, the distinction between those two records was invisible.
What they had in common - somebody doing exactly what he wanted, in public, at volume - was the only part that mattered when the alternative was a state-licensed band playing state-approved songs.
The Plastic People lost their licence. They played weddings, because a wedding was a private event the state could not easily stop, and their friends got married two and three times so there would be somewhere to play.
Their artistic director, Ivan Jirous - a man who wanted to be their Andy Warhol - staged festivals disguised as wedding celebrations. In 1976 the band was arrested and tried, and that trial is what produced Charter 77, the human rights manifesto that turned Vaclav Havel from a banned playwright into a dissident leader.
Thirteen years later he was president.
MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE
“Prší, prší” (”It’s Raining, It’s Raining”), 1974
“Metastáza” (”Metastasis”), 1984
“Mladé dívky” (”Young Girls”), 1985
“Z rohu do rohu” (”From Corner to Corner”), 1985, from the “Půlnoční myš” (Midnight Mouse) album
