The Plastic People of the Universe

[ree]

Almost everthing you need to know:

www.furious.com/PERFECT/pulnoc.html

[ree]

ree said:

Almost everthing you need to know

I probably should have said, I was looking for the lyrics for
their songs played in R'N'R, anyone know where to find them?
I searched quite a few sites.

[maxx02]

There is a long long article in today's New York Times about Rock 'n' Roll and the Plastic People of the Universe. It doesn't mention Rufus but it is interesting. This is just the FIRST page:

COUNTLESS rock bands have sung about rebellion. One of the few that can claim it spurred a revolution is the Plastic People of the Universe, who — starting with no political agenda — catalyzed democracy in Czechoslovakia.

The story of the Plastics (as fans call the band) is central to Tom Stoppard’s play “Rock ’n’ Roll,” although it is told from the sidelines by fictional characters. It’s a story not of activism but of whimsy treated as sedition, stubbornness met by brutality and a regime unknowingly consolidating its opposition. Repression amplified the band’s impact, though at serious personal cost to the musicians.

Throughout “Rock ’n’ Roll” music is never mere entertainment. It’s not propaganda, either; there are no political or protest songs. (The Plastics have recorded only one directly political song during their career.) Instead music is variously a refuge, a cry from the heart, a flag of defiance and a token of freedom. “The play perhaps could be called ‘It’s Not Only Rock ’n’ Roll,’” Mr. Stoppard said. “Because it’s not.”

The Plastic People of the Universe got started in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the year Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and shut down the liberalization known as Prague Spring. The band was a gaggle of arty hippies who considered themselves outside politics. But in the mid-1970s the Plastics’ run-ins with an increasingly stifling Communist government spurred the Czech human-rights movement named after its petition and manifesto, Charter 77, which was a direct response to the trial and imprisonment of musicians. From a decade of resistance by Charter 77 came the bloodless Velvet Revolution that ended Communist rule in Czechoslovakia.

The Plastics’ dark, low-fi music is far better known to human-rights groups than to rock fans. It has appealed to downtown New York musicians with its angularity and intransigence, and the critic Ritchie Unterberger gave the band a chapter in his 1998 book, “Unknown Legends of Rock ’n’ Roll: Psychedelic Unknowns, Mad Geniuses, Punk Pioneers, Lo-Fi Mavericks & More.” A Czech label, Globus, has reissued the complete Plastic People catalog on CD, and most of the albums are available at tamizdat.org.

“They’re the kind of band that people who follow the history of underground music know about them or reference them, but almost nobody has actually heard them,” said Jimmy Johnson, chief executive of the mail-order company Forced Exposure, which carries many little-known bands and used to stock the Plastics. “We could sell hundreds of copies of their first album, if we could get it.”

Mr. Stoppard, 70, is Czech, but his family emigrated in 1939 and did not return. In an interview at the Bernard J. Jacobs Theater, where the play opened last Sunday, he said he had been aware of the Plastics as a human-rights case since the ’70s but discovered their music only when he began writing “Rock ’n’ Roll.” He also discovered articulate, contentious writings by the Plastics’ manager and strategist, Ivan Jirous, and by the playwright Vaclav Havel, a founder of Charter 77, who became president of Czechoslovakia in 1989. (The Plastics’ album “Leading Horses” was recorded in 1981 at Mr. Havel’s farm, after the farmhouse where the music was first performed was burned down by the Czech secret police.)

Characters in “Rock ’n’ Roll” recount actual events and take up longtime arguments — sometimes in the words of people who made them at the time — as they grapple with questions about ideology and pragmatism, politics and counterculture, materialism and spirit, language and lies, art and economics. As the play moves toward the present, one character proclaims, “‘Make love not war’ was more important than ‘Workers of the world, unite!’” And while the play shows the countercultural triumph of music, Mr. Stoppard said political change isn’t that simple. “Make love, not war: That’s another utopian idea,” he said. “And you can imagine it working very well in a utopia, whether it’s a desert island or a plot of land in the wilds of the Appalachians where 300 people are making love, not war. It might work that way. But it doesn’t seem to be a serious operating factor in the way the world goes.”

Like Mr. Stoppard’s other plays “Rock ’n’ Roll” is full of pairings and balances: parallel characters, contrasted events, dialectics. It takes place in capitalist England and in Communist Czechoslovakia, and it revolves around Max, a die-hard Marxist professor enjoying academic freedom at Cambridge University, and Jan, a Czech student he briefly mentors. Jan’s strongest passion is for the psychedelic LPs he brings back to Prague; his fervor for the Plastics derails his life.

Another thread in “Rock ’n’ Roll” involves Syd Barrett, who led Pink Floyd until the damage from drugs and mental illness left him a recluse in Cambridge; the play makes him one of Max’s neighbors. Rock songs blare between scenes while their discographical information is projected on a video screen, and the play’s finale takes place at the first concert by the Rolling Stones in Prague.

The Plastics themselves begin and end the current Czech production of “Rock ’n’ Roll” at the National Theater in Prague, performing live.

Ivan Bierhanzl, who has worked with the Plastics intermittently since 1979 and is now the band’s manager and plays upright bass, said the Plastics were the first rock band to perform at the National Theater, which is more likely to present opera or Shakespeare. Once, the government would not permit the Plastics to perform in public at all, much less at the capital’s highbrow showplace.

The Plastics started as fans, and mimickers, of iconoclastic American bands including the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention and the Fugs. Like other late-1960s rockers worldwide, they turned shows into happenings, collaborating with visual artists; the Plastics performed in wild makeup, wearing robes made of bedsheets. “We were just a band of freaks, playing rock and roll,” Mr. Bierhanzl said by telephone from Prague before one of the Plastics’ National Theater performances. “It was the problem of the Communist government and the party that they didn’t like us. They didn’t like our aesthetics because it was something from the West — longhairs, capitalism.”

www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/arts/music/11pare.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th