Do The Warhol—Part 3: The Velvet (Underground) Revolution

“They say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” —Andy Warhol

"I adore America and these are some comments on it. My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, and practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us." —Andy Warhol, 1962

Americans love rebels, even without cause or clue. Enough hip, smart, young people who are tired of having their faces and futures pushed into to sewage of bad ideas, pointless existences, and totalitarian ideologies, with strong support and encouragement, could really make a difference in the world. In contemporary context, they would be true anti-heroes, rebelling against the brave new world of ersatz freedom and the all-powerful fascist state, against crushing conformity and the annihilation of the rights of the individual.

Such things can and do happen.  Some might say they happened in the nineteen-sixties.  And they did—in Czechoslovakia.

Those who may lack familiarity with the recordings of The Velvet Underground have nonetheless heard their style reflected for decades in everything from pop songs to TV commercials.  The V.U. is one of the most influential musical groups of all time.  Their debut album, driven by poet/guitarist Lou Reed, avant-garde musician John Cale, drummer Maureen Tucker and guitarist Sterling Morrison, also featured the voice of Warhol Superstar Nico, actress and fashion model.  Warhol “produced” The Velvet Underground And Nico by paying for the recording, designing the album cover, and lending the band his image.  Released by Verve records in 1967, the music, starkly contrasting the “hippie love” stylings of the day with a primitive, hard edged anti-romantic realism, was almost universally reviled by critics and ignored by the public.  However, as the legend goes, “they only sold a few thousand records, but everyone who bought one started a band.”

The impact of this fusion of art and music should not be underestimated.

In January of 1968, Alexander Dubcek became leader of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia following a period of economic recession that had weakened Marxist power and authority in the country.  It soon became apparent that Dubcek was no typical Soviet-style bureaucrat, but a genuine reformer.  Censorship rules were relaxed.  Plans for policy changes began to take shape.  Czech baby-boomers caught scent of the winds of freedom, and while leftist ideology fueled anti-war, anti-establishment protests in the USA, Czech youth took hold of the idea that the communism they had been born under could be replaced by a liberal democracy.  The “Prague Spring” had begun, Dubcek’s popularity soared, and citizens of Poland and other Soviet bloc states watched closely as events unfolded.  Special elections were scheduled for September—not, by any means, with the goal of overthrowing the State, but to address the impatience of the people with the entrenched bureaucracies of the Party regime and provide the opportunity for some house-cleaning.  Loyal apparatchiks were in the hot seat.

The Kremlin was not pleased.  On August 21, 1968, Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia.  At a time affluent American radicals were marching in the streets and on college campuses chanting “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong is going to win,” adherents to that same philosophy dealt a crushing blow to aspirations of human freedom, soon occupying a nation where they had been welcomed as liberators at the end of WWII.  Dubcek was allowed to retain figurehead status during the transition, but was forced to resign within the year and finally expelled from the Party.  Any leftover illusions about the nature of communism were dispelled as totalitarian politics made a fully armored, locked-and-loaded comeback.

Wenceslas Square: Beautiful place, fine people. Now picture it crawling with Soviet tanks.

A month later the rock group Plastic People of the Universe was formed in Prague, named for a song by Frank Zappa and heavily inspired by the music of the Velvet Underground, whose dark, dreamlike, and aggressive songs filled the PPU’s set lists.  They also had a mentor and manager, art historian Ivan Jirous, whose role in the development of the group was similar to that of Warhol’s with the Velvets.  The setting, however, provided no tolerance for free expression, and, for refusing to conform with the politically correct standards required of musical artists, “the Plastics” license to perform was revoked in 1970.  Ivan Jirious, member of the Union of Artists, then staged lectures as an art critic, discussing the work of Andy Warhol, followed by a PPU performance of Velvet Underground songs.  When the Party caught on, they continued underground.  They no longer had professional status, so they could not be paid for their shows.  Their hair was too long. Nor would they state their “approval” of military occupation, perform apolitical songs or write the occasionally “requested” anti-American tune.  They were banished from Prague and literally played in secret, sometimes outside remote towns and always at private events.  Meanwhile, the underground grew around them.

They were finally busted in 1976 and brought to trial for, ahem, disturbing the peace, the result of a thousand fans showing up at a clandestine PPU event.  They were sentenced to jail terms of up to a year and a half.

But the revolution was not over, and echoes of the Prague Spring still resonated.  Since the signing of the 1975 Helsinki Accords by US President Gerald Ford, Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev, and 33 Western and European heads of state, what promised to be a relaxation of Cold War tensions between opposing powers soon evolved into an carefully orchestrated assertion of human rights and liberty within the Soviet Bloc states.  The Accords spoke to equal rights, national sovereignty, and self-determination; dissidents could now lay claim to the right to freedom of speech, if they had the courage.  Among the first to do so was the Czech opposition group Charter 77, named for their guiding document and formed in large part to protest the arrest and imprisonment of the Plastic People.  Among Charter 77 founding members was playwright Vaclav Havel, future President of Czechoslovakia and later, the Czech Republic.

Charter 77 was roundly condemned by the authorities, its manifesto circulated outside the official media via hand-written and machine-duplicated copies, propagandized against by the government, and kept alive for the next dozen years by the efforts of its leaders and supporters, among them artists, writers, and unkempt musicians.  The Plastic People of the Universe managed to record albums, notably Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned, named for writer, philosopher, and Plastics contributor Bondy, whose works were, indeed, banned.  Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and glasnost and perestroika, entered the public vocabulary.  French President Mitterrand visited Prague in 1988 and insisted he be able to meet publicly with Charter 77; Vaclav Havel spoke at the outdoor meeting.  By June of the next year, the original few hundred signatures of the charter had grown to forty thousand.  Soon, Solidarity brought down communism in Poland, Boris Yeltsin was in power in Russia, and by November 9, the demolition of the Berlin Wall was unstoppable.

On November 17th, 1989, the Velvet Revolution began in Prague following a peaceful demonstration the previous day in Bratislava.  Thousands of students took to the streets in non-violent protest where the Communist police confronted them.  Numerous injuries were reported, some serious. Such protests continued, supported by artistic and literary associations, growing in size until their numbers at some gatherings exceeded a half-million.  Alexander Dubcek appeared with Vaclav Havel on a balcony overlooking Wenceslas Square to thunderous approval.  Tensions were high as tanks and police sat in Prague, waiting for orders that never came.  A national general strike on November 27 brought work to a halt for two hours everywhere in the country, with seventy-five percent of the population participating.  Within weeks, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia fell to ruin, and through transitional parliamentary processes, which avoided the necessity of immediate elections, democratic government came to the country for the first time in forty years.  On December 28, Dubcek was elected by Parliament as Speaker.  The next day Havel, the rebel playwright, was elected President.  And artists, writers, musicians, poets, actors and intellectuals were now free to pursue their own dreams and visions.

Thus ended the Velvet Revolution.

The Plastic People, who broke up in 1988, reunited in 1997 for the twentieth anniversary of Charter 77.  They continue performing today and have many CDs in their discography.  Their music is most recently featured in Tom Stoppard’s play “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” as are songs by the Velvet Underground.

The Velvet Underground reunited briefly and performed in Prague in 1993.  Of Andy Warhol, Lou Reed has said, “If it wasn’t for Andy, who knows, I might have been driving a truck.”

Lou Reed fan Vaclav Havel once told Reed, “Because of you, I am President.”

President Havel was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2003.

Andrew Warhola was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania  His parents emigrated in the early twentieth century from the village of Mikova, in Austria-Hungary, later known as Czechoslovakia, and now as Slovakia.

The next time someone dismisses or demeans the value and importance of pop culture, the next time you hear a pop artist complain that his or her right to free speech has been violated by the free speech of someone else who does not like what the pop star has to say, the next time you hear some smug leftist lauding another in stereotypically affected, NPR-inflected, dulcet tones for “speaking truth to power,” think on these things.

YouTube "I'll Be Your Mirror," Live in Prague

“He who is late gets punished by life.” —Mikhail Gorbachev

“If conservatives don’t figure out popular culture soon, the movement will die a deserving death.”  —Andrew Breitbart

Tomorrow: Do The Warhol—Conclusions.