Jaroslav Klíč

* 1959

  • „I met those younger folks, such as the Žuška brothers, and I thought that I should connect with the Libina people. I was still commuting to Uničov then. I became friends with the Žuška boys and I would visit them in their home. Mrs Žušková was glad, she knew that I was a good boy and I did not drink. We were trying some silly music at the time and then, for the first time, I tried playing the sax , Jirka Z played the drums and his brother Jarda played the guitar. I would say that this was the start of the Brix Bar Band but we did not perform at that time, we just did it for fun. Then we moved to the basement, I don‘t know when exactly, and we played there and the Uničov guys would come over to join us. There were many people who performed in the band one time or another and I do not remember them all. At the beginning, there was Ivo ocetek and for a while, the current Mayor’s deputy played with us [Dalibor Horák].“

  • "We had a friend who was in the army and wanted to deflect to the West and they caught him. We went through pretty tough interrogations but we did not know that he had wanted to do it. Then, in Libina, someone spread flyers that read "Death to Communism" with the stamp of the local council. I do not who had done it. Maybe it was Mr. Pospíšil who taught the violin in the Popular School of Art which I had attended back in the day. I do not claim that this is the truth but allegedly it was indeed him. I spent a whole day in Šumperk at an interrogation, it was a tough one. When they started to think that I was not involved in that one, they started to pull out various events, they just wanted to get me.

  • „Museli jsme to dělat. V té době jsme neměli jinou cestu, než dělat věci pro sebe a samostatně se bavit. Prděli jsme na ně, a proto jsme si dělali věci pro sebe a zakládali kapely, co neměly přehrávky a nesměly veřejně hrát. Hráli jsme na soukromých narozeninách. Bavili jsme se sami a to je štvalo a bylo nás čím dál víc. Kluci třeba dělali v Uničově triatlonové závody, kam jezdily máničky a oni s tím nic nemohli dělat.“ "We had to do it. At that time, there was no other way but do things for ourselves and make our own entertainment. We did not give a fuck about them and we did things for ourselves and started bands which did not have the approval and couldn't perform publicly. We played at private birthday celebrations. We had fun by ourselves and it angered them and there was more and more of us. Guys organised a triathlon in Uničov, the hippie types would come there and they [the authorities] couldn't do anything about it."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Šumperk, 14.05.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 01:20:34
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Šumperk, 17.05.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 21:25
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

In the hairiest community in Czechoslovakia

Jaroslav Klíč
Jaroslav Klíč
photo: Post Bellum

Jaroslav Klíč was born on the 26th of March in 1959 in Šumperk but he grew up in Libina. Since his youth, he was involved in the underground culture. He was one of the notable personalities in the legendary Čtverka pub in Uničov which, during the normalisation, had become a local centre of the other culture. He retyped samizdats using carbon paper and bank paper and then he spread them. He played the saxophone in the Brix Bar Band. They were different from the other undergrounds bands – they used sheet music. They performed exclusively at underground events, mainly in the then North Moravian district. Jaroslav Klíč worked in Šumperk and later in Oskava as a serviceman of weaving machines. After the Revolution, he remained one of the few in the culutural underground. He still plays the saxophone in a band with the tradition stretching back to the Brix Bar Band, now renamed Sibérija [~damn cold]. With this band, he got an award at the Malá Alternativa [Small Alternative] festival in 2010. In 2019, he was living in Šumperk with his wife Eva.