Accidentally political People

Czech psych band suffers for their art

 Britney Spears wouldn’t have had an easy time in Communist Czechoslovakia.  

Take Eva Turnova, bass player for the Czech psych rock band The Plastic People of the Universe; she was thrown in jail for two days for wearing a bikini. True, she was in Prague’s Wenceslas Square at the time, protesting a brutal government that finally fell in 1989.   

“You never know what they’d come at you with,” says Turnova, recalling the 1980s, when she was a student. “Once they took us to the police station just because we were buying Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’”  

Plastic People formed in 1968 — Turnova joined after the reformation in 1997 — when the founding members were simply music-loving teens. The band was immediately targeted by the Czech Communist regime. Three members were jailed for years at a time, but the story is far more horrifying than that, as their children were threatened and in one case killed. For playing rock ’n’ roll.

“They became political against their will,” says Turnova, who, like many of her generation were endemically political and inspired by the Plastic People.

“They just wanted to play music. They hadn’t any political text at all. They wanted to express themselves freely; they wore jeans and long hair. The establishment picked the Plastic People because many people listened to them. That’s why they were so persecuted.”

With recent “Cold War” revival fears and the violent skirmish in Georgia, are Czechs worried about latter-day Soviet aggression?

“Yeah, sure … It’s a problem with countries that have power. It’s the same with the States,” she giggles. “I don’t feel it as a direct threat. Many Russians are just great people. We played in Russia last year and I don’t think we’d go there again. ... Mafia clearly rules the place.”

Nowadays in the area that is the Czech Republic and Slovakia, people are free to express themselves. However, possibly as a knee-jerk reaction to being defenseless and unaided as those Soviet tanks rolled into its streets in 1968 while the world watched, Czechoslovakian’s are, Turnova says, “obsessed with money.”

“After the revolution, we were so enthusiastic for our country to be more spiritually awake. But it’s become more about product than relationship. I am quite disappointed.”

The Plastic People
Friday, 8 p.m.
Somerville City Club
20 Innerbelt Road, Somerville
$25, 617-625-5730
www.somervillecityclub.com