Vítězslav Škorpil

"When I mentioned 1977 and the Charter, the year before, in 1976, the Plastic People media scandal broke out. I remember my mother bringing The Young World [Mladý svět] and saying, 'Read The Young World.' I said, 'Please, I don't care, I'm too old for that,' and she said, 'Just read it.' So I opened Young World, and it said: The Magor case. I still somehow didn't quite catch what the article was all about. I read it, and of course it was about Jirous. From there, I learned that the Plastic group, as he told me at the time, the Plastic People, had been arrested and so on. In that article, they were presented as the worst monsters, the biggest drug addicts and lunatics and whatnot. And it wasn't just the Young World, the campaign went on the radio and TV with the programme Assassination of Culture. Dikobraz joined in, and a kind of series called Dwarfs Have Priority started to come out, where these musicians were parodied. For me, it was initiatory, absolutely, for me, it was totally initiatory. The first time I saw Plastic People on TV [on Assassination of Culture], but especially DG 307, I was absolutely mesmerized. I was like, 'Oh, this is just amazing.' I was holding my breath. And yet, apart from Jirous's mention of the 'Plastic' band at the time, I knew nothing about the group until then. I absolutely loved it. And I don't think I'm alone in that, a lot of people said that. I think Vladimír Lábus from Louny also said that [Assassination of Culture] was the initiation show for him. That he saw it and understood that these were exactly the people he wanted to know and like. But now in Humpolec, my cousin and I were in a difficult situation because, in Humpolec, it was known that Jirous was our uncle. That's when we became interesting. And the others asked us: 'What is he playing at?' We didn't know. We didn't know what role he had in the band. So we quickly asked around at home, and my grandmother said, 'I don't know, but he played piano when he was a kid.' So we said he played the piano. And we picked up the details later from older friends. In Humpolec, there were witnesses of the 1971-1972 Plastic Forest Brigade. So then we somehow picked up the bits of intelligence, put the information together, and it started to become clear to us."

"We absolutely loved Ivan Jirous, as we called him then, Uncle Ivan, as children. I don't even know how to say it, how to describe it. He exuded tremendous energy. When he came to visit, there was immediate cheerfulness, immediate action. Apparently, he radiated an energy that we, as children, felt. And he never came alone, he always came with his crew, whether it was his wife Věra, whether it was the Ságls, Honza and Zorka. He also came to visit several times with Karel Voják, who is supposedly some legendary figure. I don't know him as an adult, but I remember him from childhood. We loved Karel Voják as kids. Věra [Jirousová] always said, 'The army is coming,' and we knew that Karel Voják was coming too, and we were happy. Something was always going on, he never forgot to bring us some kind of attention, whether it was a ball... One time, I got this parachutist from him with a parachute, and on the parachute, it said 007. He told me, 'That's James Bond, remember that.' Those are my earliest memories of Ivan Jirous, and as I say, they're only positive, very nice. He even, when Plastic People or The Primitives Group played sometime in 1967-1969, came to invite our parents to a concert at the National House in Karlovy Vary. Ten years later, I sincerely envied them. But my parents yawned a lot back then because they were more fans of the Neckářs and the Matuškas, the middle stream. So those are probably my earliest memories."