After the Soviet Union took control of Czechoslovakia

and turned it into a satellite state in 1968, the Czech art

world took a massive hit. Things were especially tough

for musicians. Busking was illegal. Any music broadcast

over the radio was heavily censored. Only the most banal

pop was permitted. Musicians were not allowed to write

songs with English lyrics or to wear their hair long in the

fashion of American hippies.

Not the place, one would think, for some down-n-dirty rock n’ roll.

It turned out that Czechoslovakia was precisely the place rock n’ roll needed to be. Jensen and other writers have described how the flame of rebellion was kept alive by listening to such “decadent” Western groups as the Velvet Underground and The Mothers of Invention, Frank Zappa’s iconoclastic conglomeration of freaks and geeks. The dissenters didn’t just listen – many of them started their own bands.

Zajíček provided lyrics for The Plastic People of the Universe and later founded DG 307 – described as Czech underground sound poetry. The Communist authorities did their best to silence him. As Prague Radio International reports:

In one of the most notorious incidents of the political

clampdown of the 1970s, Pavel Zajicek was among

several musicians charged and sentenced for

“breaching the peace.” As a blatant violation of basic

civil liberties, the episode was one of the catalysts for

the most famous initiatives of the dissident movement,

Charter 77.

Like many lyricists, Zajíček wrote poetry that came out in samizdat form – banned literature that’s clandestinely printed and distributed often by hand. He’s the author of hundreds of song lyrics and twenty poetry collections. In 1976 he and members of the band The Plastic People of the Universe were arrested and Zajíček was sentenced to a year in prison. In 1980 he left Czechoslovakia for Sweden, after which he lived in the United States of America. In the wake of 1989’s “Velvet Revolution” – which ended 41 years of Communist rule – he returned to Prague, where an erstwhile colleague named Václav Havel had been elected President.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelly once observed that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Havel and Zajíček and their compatriots helped shape contemporary Czech history and culture. It’s safe to say their achievements have been acknowledged.

In the dark times

will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.

– Bertolt Brecht, 1939

Poet, Pavel Zajíček Typing – Photo by Minna M. Pyyhkala