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The frustration of the 1970s, when Czech society submitted to the Soviet occupation, was particularly difficult for members of the younger generation. It was difficult to protest against the communist apparatus, which at that time relied on harsh repression, to preserve a sense of freedom as much as possible by not cutting hair and avoiding service in the Czechoslovak People’s Army.
Nevertheless, there was an underground, basically a few bands that played rock music that was banned at the time, and no one even approved their lyrics. After Plastic People of the Universe, the biggest hit was DG 307, named after a psychiatric diagnosis that allowed many conscientious objectors to avoid military service. Even better than the Plastik’s music, the lyrics written and interpreted by Pavel Zajíček for “Dégéček” formulated a radical break with the glaciated normalization society.
“When you are gripped by the morning vise, you think that the dead man would free you.” “I drown in the shit of my thinking, I drown day by day, nothing changes.” find every teenager or young man over twenty years old. Many also found themselves in them. Nihilism was common to revolutionary youth at all times throughout the world, for the Czech conditions of the 1970s it was expressed by the legendary verses “I would like to have worlds made of paper, and also paper people, and a little gasoline, and grated mica”.
Whoever played such songs at that time, moreover, without the permission of the authorities, had to count on the fact that he would become a victim of police violence, that there would be a few idiots among his friends, that criminals would join the underground community. Regardless, it was possible to experience a sense of uncompromising or absolute freedom in the wider company of Plastik and DG 307, perhaps even precisely because it could end with one ring at the door.
Pavel Zajíček (April 15, 1951 – March 5, 2024)
Czech poet, lyricist and musician. One of the most famous members of the Czech underground. In 1973, together with Milan Hlavsa, he founded the band DG 307, and three years later he was convicted of disorderly conduct in a fabricated trial together with the members of Plastic People of the Universe. Pavel Zajíček spent a year in prison.
He signed Charter 77 and emigrated in 1980, residing in Sweden and the USA. From 1989 he lived alternately in Prague and New York, returning to the Czech Republic permanently in 1995.
DG 307 – Texts 1973-1980musical textsBook written in chaos a collection of poems and prose texts Time is a scream in the middle of the nightpoetry collection Everything is completely different…poetry collectionNotes from the Underground (1973-1980)poems and diary entriesBook of sea poetry collectionAs if…The world in a grain of sand.. .prose Book urban poetry collection
The introverted poet Pavel Zajíček, with admirably long hair, was a star in his environment, which even the State Security was aware of. Together with Ivan Jirous, Svatopluk Karásk and Vratislav Brabenec, he therefore received an unconditional sentence from the so-called Plasty trial for “committing gross indecency in public” by reciting his lyrics at concerts, thus fulfilling the criminal offense of disorderly conduct.
The continuation of the story is known from the memoirs of Václav Havel, who founded Charter 77 in response to the fact that the communist justice system violated the human rights of persecuted musicians. The appearance of a group of intellectuals rarely has a major impact on the life of society, the poet Zajíček became a prominent member of one such group against his will.
As a Czech artist in Sweden and New York, he found it difficult to find employment, so he got to know freedom even from its less pleasant side. He definitively returned to Prague to Vinohrady in 1995. The response to his musical, poetic and artistic output did not, in principle, go beyond the circle of connoisseurs, yet in certain circles it always remained the object of even cult worship. For Zajíček, as a long-term non-payer of social and health insurance, it was lucky during several years of illness that relatives and acquaintances could pay for his health care.
2024-03-07 06:25:40
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