Milan Hlavsa; Bass Player Led Influential Czech Rock Band

If ever a case could be made that a rock band was at the center of a political revolution, that case could be made for Plastic People of the Universe.

The seminal Czech group, formed by bass player, singer and composer Milan Hlavsa in the late 1960s, became a rallying symbol for leading dissidents nearly a decade later. Those dissidents, led by the playwright Vaclav Havel, formed Charter 77, which became one of the East Bloc’s most influential human rights monitoring groups.

Hlavsa died Friday of lung cancer in Prague. He was 49.

Plastic People of the Universe came into being during a period of liberalization after the Prague Spring reforms of 1968.

The band found its inspiration in the darker corners of Western rock as embodied by groups like the Doors, the Fugs and especially the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa, taking their name from the Zappa song “Plastic People.”

“The group’s early sound featured equal parts of the Velvet’s brooding mystique and Zappa’s neo-Dada disjointedness and cultural satire,” said Steve Hochman, who writes frequently about pop music for The Times.

During the 1960s and ‘70s, the band’s concert performances were reminiscent of San Francisco-style happenings of the psychedelic era. They featured set pieces, outlandish makeup and costumes, and light shows.

And despite the fact that the band didn’t play out of its homeland until the late 1980s, it attained legendary status throughout Eastern Europe.

Bootleg copies of the band’s albums did brisk business in the old East Bloc and eventually found their way to the United States.

But their band’s official sanction was withdrawn soon after the Soviet-backed authorities crushed the reform movement in Czechoslovakia and began a “normalization” process to reestablish hard-line social and behavioral norms.

By 1970, the Plastics’ nonconformity led to the government revoking their professional license to perform. This move meant they lost the use of their state-owned musical instruments and access to rehearsal space.

At the time, the Czech Communist organization, Rude Pravo, dismissed the band members, calling them “long-haired neurotic drug addicts and mental cases who took delight in the grossest of perversions and deliberately sang vulgar, anti-social songs.”

But instead of giving up, the Plastics went underground. They made their own instruments and found rehearsal space at the homes of friends, one of whom was Havel, who would advise them on lyrics. The band recorded one of its early albums at the writer’s country home.

Many of their friends paid a price for supporting the band, however. One man was sentenced to three months in jail for letting the band play at his house.

Another supporter had his home burned after the group performed there.

Inevitably, the police would show up and stop the performances. In one such incident in 1976, secret police arrested all the members of the band, as well as a number of their friends, for going “beyond” state-controlled cultural boundaries.

The trial of the band members fueled Havel and other dissidents to form the human rights movement Charter 77, named after a statement of principles issued on Jan. 1, 1977.

“The ironic thing about the Plastic People is that our music had absolutely no political message,” Hlavsa later said of those early years.

“But after a while, our reputation for being at the center of ‘trouble’ became so strong that it didn’t matter. Whatever we did, we’d be hounded by the cops. The harassment never ended.”

Pop music writer Hochman agreed.

“The music is not a manifesto for political action, but a crying out of repressed spirit. Most importantly, though, it is compelling, even visionary, music that today still stands apart from the Iron Curtain crowd and tall alongside its influences.”

According to Hochman, the centerpiece of the band’s music was always the playing of Hlavsa:

“The foundation of the music was always Hlavsa’s bass, around which he composed most of the material,” Hochman wrote. “Rumbling and insistent, his playing evoked an unstoppable juggernaut moving steadily and purposefully on a mission. He was never showy in his style, but also never pedestrian, revealing a vibrant imagination informed not just by rock, but jazz, classical and Czech folk traditions as well.”

Just as restrictions were beginning to loosen in the late-1980s, Hlavsa and two members of the Plastics teamed with three younger musicians to form Pulnoc (“Midnight”).

The band toured the United States in 1989 and earned excellent reviews.

“We don’t play to change the political system,” Hlavsa told Hochman before a show in San Francisco. “We play because we’re musicians. The system forced us to be political.”

A native of Prague and a lifelong resident of the city, Hlavsa was born to a banker-clerk father and a seamstress mother.

He later said there was no musical ability in his family nor did he share any of his parents’ talents.

‘I’m hopeless when it comes to money,” he told a Prague newspaper. “And I can’t sew.”

But Hlavsa also needed to make a living in the former East Bloc, where being a rock musician is not a lucrative proposition. The man who founded Plastic People of the Universe often made his best income working at home--manufacturing plastic bags.