Momentous events in history have a way of shrinking time so abruptly that the past suddenly seems no more than a blip. The events of late 1989 were no exception: for those in the midst of it, the previous forty years of totalitarian rule in Central Europe were swept away in the space of a few days like stale smoke in a freshening breeze. The fear that had kept those regimes in power for so long simply vanished, leaving in its wake euphoria, and an overwhelming question: if that fear was so fragile, so insubstantial, so evanescent, what kept the system in place for so long? What made it seem as though it might have lasted forever?

Of course, those regimes were shored up by the Soviet Union, which had the will and the power and the ruthlessness to keep its puppet governments in line. And the fear was reinforced by the secret police. But once they abandoned the terror tactics of the 1950s, those regimes, as Vaclav Havel saw more clearly than anyone else, depended more and more for their survival on the silent consent of the governed, however unfreely given. In the 1970s and 80s, that consent gradually eroded, as writers, musicians, and artists made their voices heard. This groundswell constitutes the hidden history of those years, the deep dark secret the regimes tried so hard to conceal. A Czech rock band, The Plastic People of the Universe, was the most visible example among many communities of people who withdrew their consent, suffered the consequences and then, in those miraculous days in 1989, triumphed.

To shed more light on the role that the Plastic People played in the events of 1989, we’ve included an excerpt from Paul Wilson’s essay “Tower of Song: How the Plastic People Helped Shape the Velvet Revolution,” which appears in The Wall in My Head :

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Tower of Song: How the Plastic People Helped Shape the Velvet Revolution

“When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.”

—Plato, The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett.

“When the mode of the music changes
The walls of the city shake.”

—Tuli Kupferberg, The Fugs.

Washington, D.C., May 2005. We’re in a night club called The Black Cat—a long, low basement room with a bar running along one side and a stage at the far end where a band is playing very loud, eccentric music. To all appearances, it’s a conventional rock ensemble: two guitars, bass, sax, viola, keyboards, and an electric cello, but what they’re playing is definitely not mainstream rock. It’s a gloomy, rhythmic, throbbing, repetitive kind of music punctuated by wild, free-form solos, or by lyrics, half spoken, half sung in a strange, dissonant language, something perhaps best described as “rock noir.” Some of the musicians seem grizzled and old—at least as old as Bob Dylan or the Rolling Stones, without the benefit of fitness programs.

There’s a cluster of tables at the back of the room and around one of them is an odd collection of people—let’s call them The Formers. There’s a former U.S. Secretary of State; a former Canadian diplomat, once stationed in Prague; a former Czech dissident who is now the Czech ambassador to the United States; a former Czech president, Václav Havel, nursing a Manhattan and trying to explain to a couple of guys in tuxedos, who work for the National Endowment for the Arts, what the band on the stage is all about. And there is one final “former,” me, a former member of the band.

The band is the Plastic People of the Universe, and it’s been around for almost thirty years, which automatically makes it a bona fide rock-and-roll cliché: the “living legend.” They still rehearse every week, and regularly tour the Czech Republic, Europe, and occasionally, North America and Asia. They still have a large following at home, though some of the followers are the children of the band’s original fans. You can buy their complete works on CD at discount stores in Prague for the equivalent of about twenty bucks. Apart from improvements in musicianship, some new blood, and vastly improved technology, the music they play sounds pretty much the way it did back in their heyday in the 1970s and 80s, when the Communist regime treated the band as a public enemy and they recorded their music clandestinely, on two-track, reel-to-reel machines. For the most part, their repertoire is the same too.

This fidelity to their roots moved a long-time fan, now living in New York, to dub their current appearances “musical archaeology,” though with equal truth he could have said that their music still had the power to rise above its totalitarian origins. The fact is that different people see different things in The Plastic People. Before this concert in Washington, the/ New Yorker/ called them “a symbol of Eastern European dissidence.” A blogger referred to them as “the greatest obscure rock band of all time.” Most extravagantly of all, the publicity material for Joe’s Pub in New York, where they played for a couple of nights before coming to Washington, said: “Their music demands that we re-examine the way we live our lives.”

That night in the Black Cat, former president Havel was trying to explain The Plastic People’s enduring appeal to the two NEA men in tuxedos, but it was hard over the din of the band, especially given his limited English and the frail state of his health. I could see him flagging, and knew what was coming next. In a pause between numbers, he turned to me and said: “But here is Paul. He can tell you how it was.”

Like many rock’n’roll sagas, the story of the Plastic People began in the ‘burbs, in this case a residential neighbourhood on the edge of Prague called Brevnov, where a young man had a dream. Milan “Mejla” Hlavsa, who died of cancer in 2001, was a teenager in 1968 when the Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague and put an end to the Prague Spring, but his head was so filled with visions of rock stardom that he barely noticed the invasion. He had already played in bands with names like “Glow-Worms,” “Black Stockings,” and “The Undertakers” when, sometime in the fall of 1968, someone lent him a copy of the Velvet Underground’s first record. He took it home, and listened to it all night. From then on, his ambition was to put together a band that would play that kind of music and present it with a proper “psychedelic” flare.

He got together with two schoolmates, Jiří Števich and Michal Jernek, and formed a band. They tried out several names before settling on “Plastic People,” a name they’d taken straight from one of Frank Zappa’s early songs, but without really being aware of Zappa’s withering sarcasm. But the name felt too short, so they added “of the Universe,” and then set out to conquer Prague.

The reigning psychedelic band in Prague at the time was an art-rock ensemble called “The Primitives Group,” who had a team of artists managing the visual side of their show. One of this team was a young art critic called Ivan Jirous. One night, Jirous saw the Plastic People perform, and, as rough as they were, he saw their potential to take the music further, so he left the Primitives—which were about to break up anyway—and joined forces with the new band.

Jirous was from a country town in the middle of Bohemia. He was a rebel in school, but despite his grades and his “bourgeois” background, he managed to get into university to study art history. His main passion at the time was renaissance music, but when he saw the first Beatles movie, A Hard Day’s Night, he was an instant convert. He let his hair grow long, sought out like-minded souls in Prague and began looking for ways to make a contribution to the city’s growing music scene, though he could scarcely carry a tune.

Many of Jirous’s peers thought he was mad, or just plain wrong, to embrace “Big Beat,” especially with the country now under military occupation. Sometime in June 1969, almost a year after the Soviets had invaded, Jirous and Hlavsa were walking through Prague, distributing tickets to an upcoming Plastic People concert when they ran into an acquaintance and tried to sell him a set. The acquaintance was aghast: “You can’t be serious!” he said. “The whole nation is on its knees and you guys are going around strumming your guitars?”

“The nation may be on its knees,” Jirous retorted, “but we’re not.”