Miloslav Musil

* 1951

  • "Then, when I went to the industrial school, there was a time when Paleček and Janík played on the Charles Bridge, Hutka played on Wenceslas Square. Just playing guitar with an open case, and whoever walked by would throw in a coin. And my friend and I were playing there together at the time - and we were writing our own songs. We didn't know those songs were coming out anywhere, we thought everybody could only play what they wrote. And my parents were on vacation at the time, and they left us money for food. And we were influenced by Woodstock and flower children and stuff like that, so we bought flowered shirts with big collars and spent all the money we had on food. And then we used to go to, it was Stalinka in those days, Třída Míru, and the young girls who sold ice cream there, they always gave us ice cream cones, and that's what we used to feed ourselves. And then we found out that no, if we sat down, for example, on the Přihrádek or on Perštýn Square by the fountain, we would open our cases and play. And we found out that it was a nice way to make a living."

  • "Those were simpler times in one thing, we all had a common danger, which was the communists. So everybody was in league against them. It was all very different, like a different time. There were no department stores, there were no cell phones, there were no social networks. Here there was one television, Czechoslovak Television, and we had to believe what they said."

  • "And before the revolution, it actually started with the student demonstrations in Prague, and we were playing with Vláďa Just at that time. He came, we were supposed to go to Dobruška to play there, he said that the artists in Prague had agreed that they wouldn't perform until it was sorted out somehow. That they would always come to perform according to the contract, but that Vláďa would be there to tell us what it was like in Prague. We just didn't know that there were any demonstrations, even in Pardubice nobody knew that there were student demonstrations in Prague. And at that time Vláďa Just had a son who went to high school, and he was so full of it that the militia had cleaned him up. And so we came to Dobruška, and they had no idea, because there was no talk about it on the radio, there was no TV, there was nothing in the newspapers. There were even towns where they turned off the power so that nobody would know anything. And so we used to go like that and instead of performing, a week, a fortnight before the revolution, and we would always come and say what was going on in Prague and how it was working and these things. That we were doing more like, like, we apologized for not doing our show, but we were going to tell them here about it."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    ZŠ Polabiny I., 23.09.2019

    (audio)
    duration: 55:32
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

Never let freedom be taken away

Miloslav Musil was born on 19 December 1951 in Pardubice, but he also spent a large part of his childhood at the family cottage in Seč or at his grandmother’s house in the village of Dřeveš. He graduated from an industrial school, but from his youth he was devoted to music, playing the guitar since childhood. Later he studied theatre directing while working remotely. From the 1970s he worked at the Na Drážce Outreach Club in Pardubice, where he often invited artists from the fringes of the cultural scene of the time. Thanks to this, he met a number of personalities from both the official cultural currents and dissent. He also organised English language courses for pre-school children at the club. In 1989, he worked alongside the publicist Vladimír Just, with whom he visited the theatres of East Bohemia and with whom they informed the audience unbiasedly about the events in the metropolis on the eve of the Velvet Revolution. In November 1989, he joined the Pardubice Civic Forum and travelled to the regions during the Velvet Revolution. To this day (2019) he runs the music club Doli.