Josef Vlček

"Of course they sometimes called me for interrogations. These were classic interrogations of who, when, with whom and such. All those things were relating to the Jazz section rather than to organizing those concerts. I trusted Karel Srp completely, so when the interview ended, it was hard to call it an interrogation, we met around the corner in a pub and I told him everything they asked and were interested in. We formed a confidential couple who worked together in some way. This then evolved into my biggest trouble, because the police offered me cooperation. I told Srp about it, and he said, 'Um, it's not bad, we could give them various misinformation in this way. We could create some trouble with them that would be problems for them. That it would create tension - because the left also didn't know what the right was doing there - which could help us, the Jazz section. 'Then sign it.' I was scared to sign something like that. And Srp told me, 'It's simple. It's just a signature. You just sign something there and that's fine. You don't have to follow anything. This is no obligation. It's like signing a letter.' Okay, I was a bit of a dummy, so I signed it. It created a lot of trouble and problems for me in the 1990s.”

“The pubs in Malá Strana were very important because they formed the core of social life in Prague. Who belonged to the pubs in Malá Strana had the best information about what would happen where. If we took it from the top - U Dvou slunců, it was more of the center of the underground. Bondy was going there, Martin Němec and Sahara used to go there. Then Bonaparte [pub U Bonaparta], we were going there, there were four table companies: one were artists, one was the Club of Friends of Glen Miller, one was Golden Prague and we were "the young people from Golden Prague", as they called us. There were a lot of people from the Classic Rock'n'Roll band sitting there. If we went further down, then U Kocoura, it was a very interesting pub, for regular guests, almost no one managed to get in there. They watched over it a little. And they had to, because on Malostranské náměstí was VUML, the Research Institute of Marxism-Leninism. And VUML students still wanted to go to U Kocoura. The pub opened at three or four, and it was already full at four. The regulars went through the door through the houses, the back entrance, it was already occupied for the VUMLaks. The U vola pub, on the top [U Černého vola], was also important. Ruda Zeman, Karel Pecka sat there at the end, when the Bonaparte was no longer as it was before. We always sat there with them. And, of course, an important pub, although closed for much of the 1980s, was the U Glaubiců pub. It was a key pub to the underground. But it was so full of informers that we didn't go there."

"But those things were very unpredictable. Sometimes everyone thought it would be a trouble, and nothing happened. Sometimes there were moments when something was halfway there, some punk people or something, everything was fine, and yet it was a trouble. Pavel Zajíček from “Dégéček” [band DG 307] used to say - right after when there were the proceedings with them: 'You know, you feel like you're in a goulash that's bubbling, and someone just rakes in the dipper and digs something up.' That's how he described it then. I think that's a pretty accurate statement. It was all about coincidence.”

"It's an interesting story. Joska Skalník and I went to the pub U Plzeňského dvora, today there is a casino, on Belcredka [formerly Belcrediho třída], on Milady Horáková. Every Thursday, such a group met there for Pilsen around Hrabal. Some writers, I saw the philosopher Dubsky, directors and likewise. Somehow there was a chatter, a chatter, a chatter. I was reading I Served the King of England in a samizdat at the time, and I really liked it. So, I was provoking Joska, who knew Hrabal better, what if we released it. Joska as he was all into it, he would go for it immediately. So, we asked Hrabal if he would give us permission to print it. And because Joska had a printer which, even though, was corporate, things like that were printed there for the Jazz section at night, he said he would arrange it. And we really released Hrabal. I would estimate that there could be 1,000 pieces. That's my guess, maybe it has grown a bit over the years. We then took the King of England with Joska's cover to Hrabal's house, as the first copy, to the Sokolníky housing estate in Kobylisy. We went to the sixth or seventh floor, where Hrabal lived. There was a bit of a mess, he moved from Palmovka, from Na Hrázi Street to Sokolníky, a lot of things even after ten years he still did not unpack from the boxes. We gave him the author's copies, he said, 'Guys, I can die now.' We were moved and proud that we did something that made sense for the Czech culture.”

“The greatest breakthrough was that the Jazz Section published I Served the King of England by Hrabal. It was sometime in 1983 or 1982, I would have to look it up at home. It was like a blast. It was an explosion, and it was perhaps also one of the things that later caused the downfall of the Jazz Section, because nobody wanted it, it was simply… One of the fundamental books of the two decades and at the same time it was a book which was so… I would say it was very free, this book, I would define it like that, because it was a great event. And it happened in a kind of a curious way: Joska Skalník was going to the pub Plzeňský dvůr with Hrabal, the pub is on the present-day Milada Horáková Street, and that building is now full of some slot machines or something like that, and I went there with them about two or three times. We would always have a chat, and he was an entertaining companion in that pub. Well, and one day we came there to see him and we said: ‘Hey, we would like to publish your I Served the King of England for you.’ And he said: ‘Are you nuts?’ – ‘No, we will take the risk, we will do it as part of the Jazz Section, we have a printing shop that will print it for us.’ They always printed for us at nights, and the guys in the printer’s would be able to print about a thousand copies. He said: ‘If you print it and if you publish it, then I shall not want anything else in my life, because that would be the happiness of my life.’ And so we tried it, and it was quite a nice publication, and people were crazy about it. But there were many other books like that in the Jazz Section, too.”

“Anyway, as we talk about all those prohibitions, the Bolshevik regime worked in a curious way. They have actually never drafted some list of banned books. There was something like a list, from 1970, but it was not complete and obviously it was not available anywhere. Our boss saw that list, but he never got hold of it. We thus worked with such uncertainty. Is this book on the list, is it not on the list? If it is on the list of banned books and we are selling it, we will be headed for great trouble, or will we not? It was all as if on water, nobody knew anything. Obviously, we would have never displayed a book from Škvorecký, let’s say, in the shop window. But there were great many authors who wrote just one book and then they have not published anything else. But there could be something inconvenient in the content of the book. Well, to be honest, if we bought a book like this – and people were not selling them much, because they kept them like treasures – we obviously did not display it in our shop, because there would always be twenty of our friends and acquaintances waiting for us to buy it sometimes and they wanted it. So there was no risk that we would get into trouble for that. But there were various stories that people told... We were in the secondhand bookshops, and many of us working there shared a fate similar to mine. It meant that they liked books and that the school was not giving them anything, and so they went to work in secondhand bookshops instead of studying. It was one of the lowest paying jobs. I started with eight hundred crowns per month, but on the other hand, we were at the source of the books.”