Jan Tyl

"They took issue if a person had long hair, that was the first problem. The second problem could be the lyrics, but mostly it was the music. It was such an interesting culture at that time, at least in southwest Bohemia, because people had access to German television and knew the songs. They knew they couldn't go to the store and buy a record, there was no way, so they went to dances and asked the bands to play exactly what they had heard on Radio Luxembourg or seen on TV. That's pretty much what bands did back then. There wasn't much room for original music - it was the seventies, early eighties - and the people who went to the dances wanted to hear specific stuff and not your own music. That was definitely the case in the 1970s. That was another thing. And then, if there were too many people coming to see an artist, that was a huge problem. I still remember an incident that happened in a town called Slavonice on the Austrian border. We went there maybe three times. One time, I do remember, it was really nice, just an ordinary rural dance, really crowded. Afterwards, the person who was in charge, the 'bandleader', was summoned to the police station and there was somebody from the StB. I wasn't there so I can't say exactly who they were, but they asked him how it was possible that so many people were coming to see the band and why. What was so interesting about them? Why would a band like theirs, of local calibre in Slavonice, draw five thousand people. That's the first time I heard that. I didn't know that there were so many people - I still don't know, I doubt there were that many, but that's what he was told - and the band was also banned for that, for having too many audience members. That was wrong too."

"Most importantly, from what I remember, was that the people were kept in custody for 48 hours without being told any reason; then they were fired from their jobs immediately while also there was a statutory duty to have job. In about a week, they got prosecuted for not having a job. It was just bullying, that's what was happening, yeah."

"The band bans started. At that time there was an institution called the Municipal Cultural Centre in Strakonice. I started out in the Strakonice district, and for as long as I can remember, which was actually ten or eleven years before we fled, there were two people there who took it upon themselves to eliminate the enemy of the working class. Long story short, the first ban I experienced came in 1974 or so. When we got seven bans - I still remember there were seven of those bans - that was the moment I said I don't want to be in this country because it doesn't make any sense. It was such a change. I remember listening to Free Europe and Voice of America and the BBC, and I remember that when they were talking about what happened in Rudolfov in 1974, the Plastic People and then more bands like that, like when they arrested and locked up Havel and the others... I was sitting there, and thinking back about it today, I'm not one of those people who had any... I remember sitting by my radio station and being like, dude, where the hell do they get it? They don't stand a chance, you can't fight them (the communists). That's why those people who openly opposed the regime, I mean openly stood up... It's one thing to make fun of them at a rural dance, and it's another when you stand up openly. I guess I stopped right at making fun and mockery, but I didn't have the guts oppose them. So that's why, the people who did this and had the guts to do it at the time - well, anybody can say anything nowadays because it's easy after forty or however many years, but not me, I do remember it - so those who really stood up and opposed the were just a few."