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Music / Musik » alt.fan.frank-zappa » Czechs and thugs and rock’n’roll
| Czechs and thugs and rock’n’roll [message #283139] |
So, 11 Juni 2006 05:05 |
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Czechs and thugs and rock’n’roll
Tom Stoppard’s new play centres on the pop band whose arrest launched
a human-rights movement. He discusses how artists change the world
with Brian Eno and Mark Edwards
The Sunday Times June 11, 2006
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-2214726,00.html
After years of writing about rock bands who think they are rebels, but
whose rebellion consists mainly of wearing a certain kind of clothes
(ones that might have been a bit rebellious when Marlon Brando wore
them half a century ago), or spitting on stage or getting a bit uppity
in business class, I have finally located a band who can genuinely lay
claim to the title of rebels, a band who altered the world they lived
in, a band who brought down an entire political system. “Let’s get
this clear,” says Tom Stoppard, sensing the way the journalistic mind
works. “The Plastic People did not bring down communism.” Bother.
The Plastic People of the Universe may not have toppled a regime, but
when two members of the Czech band were arrested in 1976, their trials
became a rallying point for dissent and set in motion an extraordinary
sequence of events that Stoppard has incorporated as one of the main
threads that weave through his new play Rock’n’Roll.
The trial of the Plastic People of the Universe band members
effectively refocused on Czechoslovakia the international attention
that had wandered since the Soviet invasion eight years previously,
led directly to the formation of the human- rights organisation
Charter 77, and thus kicked off the chain of events that would
culminate in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, when Vaclav Havel became
president.
To mark the opening of Rock’n’Roll, I have been invited to listen in
on a conversation between Stoppard and the musician Brian Eno, which
is talking place backstage at the Royal Court Theatre during a break
between technical rehearsals. My role, I assume, is to sit in the
background and make sure the tape recorder is working; but Stoppard,
who began his own working life as a journalist, is quick to draw me
into the conversation when he reckons that my hunt for an angle may
distort the facts.
“Milan Hlavsa, who founded the group, said in several interviews that
they weren’t interested in bringing down communism. What they wanted
was to play rock’n’roll music,” says Stoppard. “A question to ask,
then, is: were those two things as separate as he thought at the
time?” The band were clearly not dissidents; in fact, they were rather
disparaged by those actively opposed to communist rule as a bunch of
lazy hippies who remained wilfully disengaged from the political
debates of the time. But their decision to remove themselves from the
official culture made them the perfect example of “living in truth” —
to borrow Havel’s own phrase. Doggedly pursuing their own artistic
vision was itself a resistance to totalitarian culture.
“Simply playing rock’n’roll was not a wasted, isolated gesture,” says
Stoppard. “And, by extension, one could make a grand claim for the
potency of art in general — including rock’n’roll — and its ability to
alter society. Do you think that’s a romantic view?” “No, no,” says
Eno. “I think they were very clear about not taking a political
position, but being artists — for them — was definitely a moral
position. They very much chose what kind of artist they wanted to be
and which kind they wanted to emulate. They were very clear that
certain bands were good, the Velvet Underground in particular.
Identifying with that band was a clear moral position to take.
“What’s interesting is that their two heroes were, to most western
people, I would say, diametrically opposed: the Velvet Underground and
Frank Zappa,” Eno continues. “This is a very strange combination. The
Velvet Underground represented an intuitive, streetwise, un-arty
approach to making music, and Zappa was the exact opposite: his music
was very hard to play and he was very engaged politically, aiming his
music and his message at the system. The Velvet Underground didn’t
even acknowledge that there was a system.”
It’s not easy to locate Plastic People albums these days — but not
impossible, thanks to the internet. They are well worth the effort.
Don’t expect them to sound like either the Velvets or Zappa: it is the
tension between the two styles that seems to create an entirely
original hybrid. Its closest relations probably lie among the German
prog-rock bands of the 1970s.
The Plastic People were introduced to the music of the Velvets by Ivan
Jirous, an art historian who assumed the role of the band’s artistic
director, helping to stage their concerts — psychedelic happenings,
complete with outrageous costumes and elaborate light shows. There
aren’t many bands who have had an opening for an artistic director:
the VU themselves, of course, for whom Andy Warhol played that role;
and, you might argue, the Sex Pistols, for whom Malcolm McLaren went
far beyond the usual scope of a band’s manager. There are other
parallels between the Plastic People and the Sex Pistols. Both bands
were at times effectively banned from playing live, although the minor
scuffles endured by the Pistols were never on the same level as the
major police actions used to disrupt any attempts by the Plastic
People to play a gig.
“Do you think the Plastic People’s status was conferred on them by the
authorities, that if the authorities had been a little cooler about
it, just ignored them, nothing would have happened?” asks Eno.
“It’s an interesting point,” says Stoppard. “I’m not even sure the
authorities at the top did worry too much about them. I think they
simply annoyed the cops.”
The authorities can confer dissident status on just about any band, it
turns out. Eno has brought a book with him, Alexei Yurchak’s
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, which documents the last
Soviet generation. It contains a copy of a document sent out to the
regional committees of the Young Communist League, headed, “an
approximate list of foreign music groups and artists whose repertoires
contain ideologically harmful compositions”. For each of the 38 bands
listed, the document cites the “type of propaganda” they are guilty of
spreading. You might expect to see the Sex Pistols on there (guilty of
“punk, violence”) and perhaps Black Sabbath (“violence, religious
obscurantism”), but how about Pink Floyd (“distortion of Soviet
foreign policy”), Van Halen (“anti-Soviet propaganda”) or Talking
Heads (“the myth of the Soviet military threat”)? “I can see why the
authorities were worried about those things,” Eno says, “but I can’t
see how they identified those things in these groups. I think the
difference between the communists and us was that they believed in the
power of art — and we don’t, in a way. They believed that it could
make a difference. You only have to think of the Russian
socialist-realist painters — artists being very clear that they should
take on the mantle of being part of the great leap forward of
society.”
“Here, if an artist wants to save the world, if one takes Bono as an
example, they don’t try to do it through the music,” says Stoppard.
“The music, or their celebrity, is there to promote or finance the act
of saving the world. This seems to be the inverse of what Jirous and
his friends were predicating their lives on: that the way you save the
world is by looking after the way you live yourself, by making sure
that you yourself behave in a certain way.”
Isn’t this exactly what people mean when they say things like “The
Beatles changed the world”, or “Elvis changed everything”? “When you
make a piece of art, one of the things you’re saying is: imagine a
world where we could be like this,” says Eno. “So it does force a
change on you — even without an overt message.”
So, rock music can be powerful despite a lack of content. In fact, the
Plastic People suggest an even stronger argument than that. Their
political significance is directly attributable to the lack of any
political content in their songs.
“Prosecuting rock’n’roll musicians was, if anything, more significant
than arresting some famous scientist or academic,” says Stoppard.
“Because the scientists, the poet, the essayist were actively opposing
the regime, whereas the musicians were just a pain in the arse. What
Havel realised was that this represented something very dangerous: now
the state could put you into jail simply for being the wrong sort of
bloke.”
When Havel began to organise a protest against the musicians’ arrests,
“he expected to encounter resistance,” says Stoppard. “But the others
understood the significance quickly. He found it easier to whip up
support than it had been to get people to sign petitions for this or
that intellectual.”
“I’m sure that was because there was no content,” says Eno. “ If
you’re asked to sign a petition to support some intellectual, you
might think, ‘Hmm, I’m not sure I fully agree with his position on
this or that point.’ But with the band, there’s nothing to disagree
with. The fact that they weren’t dissenting made them a better
rallying point.
“Thinking about this really confirmed what I’ve always thought about
art. That it’s not a marginal activity. It’s central. But if I really
believe that, why don’t I just concentrate on it? Why don’t I stop
pissing around with politics?” “Perhaps,” suggests Stoppard, “you
should commute between the two.”
“But,” counters Eno, “nobody likes commuting.”
Rock’n’Roll is at the Royal Court, SW1, until July 15, then at the
Duke of York’s, W1, from July 22
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