BENEFITS

Former members of Czechoslovakia’s banned rock group, Plastic People of the Universe, joined U.S. musicians at a benefit concert Sunday in Manhattan for Ivan Martin Jirous, the group’s manager and guiding light who was jailed in Prague last October after his public reading of a manifesto protesting human rights abuses in Czechoslovakia. The rock group has become a symbol of resistance in Czechoslovakia since its inception in 1968. Veteran members of avant-garde bands the Fugs and Captain Beefheart also took the stage Sunday with poets Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders, as films and slides from the banned group’s 20-year history were projected.