For those who missed Friday's concert, here are the programme notes I wrote about the new CD. It's a bit long but then this isn't a regular bloody blog....
The Plastic People of The Universe release their latest collection of songs at a launch party in Prague on 26 January. This is the first release without the participation of Milan ‘Mejla’ Hlvasa who died in 2001. The title, Maska Za Maskou/ The Mask Behind The Mask, is enigmatic but offers hints at the other talents that have remained hidden behind the mask of The Plastics’ legend.
The legend, of course, is everything in rock ‘n’ roll. The Plastics’ legend goes something like this:
Friends got together after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia and started playing cover versions of songs by The Doors, Fugs and Velvet Underground (remember the colour velvet). They loved Frank Zappa and in particular, his song Plastic People. They grew their hair long, wore make up, mad costumes and played gigs and sang in English until things got heavy. After things got heavy, they carried on anyway and began getting into trouble with the normalised authorities in Czechoslovakia or “began socking it to The MAN”, in rock ‘n’ roll legend speak. Eventually, the band and some of their friends were thrown in jail for ‘disturbing the peace’. This blunt and stupid act catapulted the band into international consciousness and gave Václav Havel a book title. It also provided the the band with a subversive power – the exact opposite of the Soviet puppets’ intention. By jailing The Plastics and their friends, the 1970s Czechoslovak authorities actually acted to unite conflicting anti-government groups and individuals. Václav Havel and those very disparate people became known as dissidents and coalesced around a document called Charter 77. Thus, by implication, The Plastics became dissidents, too. Fast-forward to 1989 and the whole Fall of The Berlin Wall narrative. In Czechoslovakia, this is known as The Velvet Revolution (we did remember the word ‘velvet’, didn’t we?). Chain-smoking Václav Havel becomes president of Czechoslovakia and thus the myth is complete: The Plastic People of The Universe brought down the state and Frank Zappa joined the government.
Rock ‘n’ roll or what!
Can we imagine a globalized version of that myth where Al Gore replaces the chain-smoking playwright and The Killers replace The Plastics? No, The Plastics’ myth has more resonance, it has good guys, bad guys, suffering and ends rather like a rock ‘n’ roll fairy tale – the good guys take over and continue smoking, drinking and making music. Let’s remember that: the music. Let’s remember the music and also Al Gore is not rock ‘n’ roll.
This legend was quoted as recently as December 2009 when another smoker/ playwright, Tom Stoppard, wrote an article in the London Times under the headline, Did Plastic People Topple Communism? Both a character from his play, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and a character from the band, Vrata Brabenec, offer the same response, “that’s the story, I’m afraid”.
The story is The Plastics brought down Czechoslovakia’s communist regime in 1989 but like all stories and myths it both highlights and disguises a truth. In the 1970’s, it was the Soviets who created a mask for The Plastics. Brabenec laughs, “Those goons gave us the best PR possible”. This PR, as Brabenec calls it, was a mask. Now, The Plastics reveal and revel in a new mask, one they have recreated for themselves.
For those of a certain literary disposition, a title like The Mask Behind The Mask has that certain bit of poetic, Wildean whimsy. The analogy works particularly well when one thinks of the deterioration of Dorian Gray’s portrait. Are The Plastics exercising a certain aesthete whimsy of their own or are they exorcising the ghosts of their own perceived degeneration..four of them are in their 60s, after all…..the notion has a wonderful irony about it.
For those who have read beyond the British late Victorian “aesthetes” to encounter the French poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, the title The Mask Behind The Mask may generate some pleasingly decadent and gamey sensations in the synapses of their sensitive souls.
The sheer dandiness of the title may remind others that there was such a thing as political subversion in culture way before the Soviet Union had been a twinkle in Father Stalin’s eye. For those who have read a little too much Czech prose and cultural criticism, one is reminded of the energy and creativity in the stories and essays of Bohemia’s most extravagant Dandy, Arthur Breiský. Breiský encouraged the creation of as many masks as possible. He was such a masked dandy and legend that no-one can really be sure when or where he died. Was it in an elevator crash in a New York skyscraper in 1915, was it somewhere in Germany in the 1930’s or did he simply decide he had nothing further to add and left Prague in 1914 or later? Never mind the truth, the mask of the legend is far better!
Another legend hidden behind a 1970s regime-inspired mask is Egon Bondy, a poet so subversive he was classified as a mentally ill and sectioned by the Czechoslovak authorities. As The Plastics moved from cover band to composing original music in the early 1970’s, they were introduced to Bondy by another poet and cultural critic, one Ivan Martin Jirous. Jirous has also been described variously as the Plastics’ manager, artistic director and more often, Magor or loony. The Plastics were encouraged to set Bondy’s poetry to music and Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned was the result.
In the same way that describing Václav Havel as a playwright doesn’t quite cover everything, describing Egon Bondy as a poet doesn’t quite cover the breadth of his achievement either. Due to the times he lived in, it simply isn’t known how many volumes of poetry he produced, or how many novels he wrote. Then there was his history of philosophy. Bondy’s biopic is in production, the screenplay written by the son of one of Bondy’s psychiatrists!
Whatever Bondy’s achievements, it is fair to say that Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned is a wonderful introduction to his thoughts. However, it also provided The Plastics with the template for the rest of their output: poetry first, music later.
Bondy’s vision was encapsulated in what he called “Total Reality” and produced poems of striking but false simplicity. For example, Mír. In English, it is regularly translated as Peace with these lines:
Peace peace peace.
Just like a piece
Of bog roll
But the original is not too difficult
Mír, mír, mír
Jako toaletní papír
Unfortunately, the translation misses out important meanings. The Mír in the poem is peace in Czech but also Russian. It was also the given reason for Soviet intervention anywhere and the name of Soviets’ space programme. Toaletní papír was often in short supply in the peaceful Soviet paradise. So the couplet takes on a variety of meanings beyond peace being like bog roll. Peace is war, it is Russian, it is a rocket, it is misused science and it is in short supply.
Thus we have the beginings of Bondy for beginners: satire, cultural critcism and polemic all wrapped up in a sweet rhyming couplet but betrayed by a dissonant, dissident metre. A technique used again but more pejoritively in other lyrics on the Egon Bondy’s album. In Podivuhodný Mandarin, for example, it is never quite clear who, exactly, is the Mandarin. Also, adding to the ambiguity is the adjective podivuhodný. Podivuhodný can be translated as admirable or miraculous and is frequently translated as wonderous. I mention this because those adjectives conjure up magical, positive messages but the poem’s Mandarin is grubby, lewd, even bawdy. The cultural critic, Pavla Jonssonova, describes it today as sexist. However, the audiences listening in the 1970’s were able to make up their own minds. In those days, the Mandarin could have been understood as the Soviet “advisors”, the Soviet-managed Czechoslovak government or their collaborators. Sexism was one of many cultural crimes.
Those audiences at Plastics gigs also included the secret police, the civilian police and their many friends. Possibly before but certainly after Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned, The Plastics were living on borrowed time. However, Brabenec disputes whether the band could ever have been dissidents. He even disputes whether the poems they set to music could be regarded as anti-regime, even in the 1970’s. When he is asked about those days his responses vary but they follow a general theme: “we were musicians playing music”. This isn’t quite the story we began with. It lacks the legend element.
The political situation is different: Havel is not only out of jail, he an ex-President and an ex-smoker. Where was the band that night in 1989? Josef ‘Pepa’ Janíček, The Plastics’ keyboard man, was drinking in a bar - not demonstrating in Wenceslas Square. He was not ambivalent about the situation. Janíček continues,“The Bolsheviks knew the game was up when the sons of the Communists themselves wanted to become capitalists and entrepreneurs.”
On 17 November 2009, the demonstration on Wenceslas Square in Prague was recreated and Dan Bárta sang the national anthem in front of a tenth of the Czech population. Where were The Plastics that night? “We were drunk in Bratislava, it was a pleasant evening. I was glad I wasn’t in Prague in all that shit” continues Brabenec. “Politicians are still shits and musicians still play music”. According to Brabenec, the world remains the same.
Let’s get back to the music. The Mask Behind The Mask has something for everyone. It contains poems written by Josef Krchovský, Jiří Kolář, Martin Bauber and Ivan Jirous with a series of musical arrangements recalling the best of The Plastics’ psychedelic, rock, free-jazz and underground back catalogue. The highlights however are a series of poems by Vrata Brabenec set to music by Eva Turnova and other members of the band. Non-stop Opera, in particular, encapsulates their entire back catalogue and, as such, is possibly the finest song they have ever recorded. It begins with a rip-roaring opening guitar riff synchronized with the bass which is then joined by the widely misinterpreted “Velvet Underground violin drone” of Jiří Kabeš; before subsiding into a subversive “underground bass drone” for the opening verse. Brabenec, finally finding his singing voice in his late 60s, sings this opening verse with great passion. The psychedelia, dissonance and vision he describes can be distilled to one line:
I just envy the ashtray, it keeps all its butts together in good order.
When once the band were admired for behaving normally in the mad reality of a normalized Czechoslovakia, the band must now be admired for behaving like they are not dissident icons. This is because The Plastics remain a rock band. They always were.
So where is the poetry in The Mask Behind The Mask? Surely, it must be more than decadent whimsy and dandy pose. It must be more than the sum of Bondy’s total reality, the influence of the Velvet Underground’s drone and Frank Zappa’s freeform jazz-rock. Branenec, who wrote the lyrics to the title song, says only that it is “about transience”. The poetry in this collection of songs is more than the sum of its many parts, more than the legend. It is about being human in a world that often appears to be the opposite. It is The Plastics’ finest achievement to date.
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