"We started this with Pepa. We started to go there, the long-haired guys joined us and it became a place similar to U Glaubiců, U Slunců pubs - we used to go to Podolí Na Čurandě every Thursday. Because we had rehearsals on Thursdays. Then we went there on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. On Sundays we didn't go partying so much because we had to be fit for work, which was quite physically demanding. By the way, Pepa Vondruška was also a room painter. So on Sundays, we would drink beer only slightly. Various people used to come to see us there - [Egon] Bondy, [Svatopluk] Karásek, [Mejla] Hlavsa. It was good, the pub had a character and people really gathered there. Then Pepa brought some reel-to-reel tape recorder, it was there permanently and didn't have to be taken away, so we listened to music there. He liked Lou Reed, Velvets. So we played that stuff." - "Didn´t the other regulars mind?" - "They were sitting in the bar, there were a couple of tables. One or two. The place wasn't big, it was more or less for us. Nobody sat there with us. They had Braník beer on tap. It was called Na Čurandě [At the Pee Place, trans.] because there was a small toilet, only two people could fit in there. And when it was full, there was a backyard and a drain in the backyard - that's where people would go to pee, on the drain. That's why it was called Na Čurandě."
"It was a huge flat with a living room, a library, where Jirka Němec was. A big kitchen. The children had their own rooms. A huge apartment of about five [rooms] plus one [kitchen] on the third floor. Beautiful, big apartment. That's where we used to meet. I think the first time I was there was when Umělá hmota was playing there. Then I used to go there for various lectures by [Ivan Martin] Jirous, we used to play there, Mejla Hlavsa used to play there. A kind of a commune would gather there. Drinking beer, reading. People from out of the city used to come there, they stopped there, the door kept opening. Someone was always ringing the bell. You met interesting people from outside of Prague who had something to do with the underground. From Moravia and like that, that I wouldn't have known otherwise. By the way, I also signed the Charter in Ječná, in 1977 or 1976? Probably in the winter of 1976, with Pepík Vondruška."
"I was there. The concert was totally dispersed. The band Adept played there, I think the whole block they were supposed to play. Then the cops came in with dogs and 'we are shutting it down', that the concert wasn't going to happen. We were brought out. They didn't check us there. Someone left by trolley bus, bus, on foot. Pepik and I walked across the field to the Budějovice station, where they caught us. They gathered us in a group and policemen with German shepherds were watching us. A fast train to Prague came. They herded us into a carriage. Even though the train was half empty, we were crammed - about two hundred people in one carriage. And there they took pictures of us, we had to sit on a double seat, and there they took pictures of us. We had to show them our ID cards. The train arrived at the main station, and there was a cordon of policemen. There was some questioning and what happened above all, that without any discussion, they fined us five hundred crowns, which was a lot of money. Normally it was deducted of our salary, the deduction was written on the salary stripe... You were there, so pay the fine."
"They offered me emigration, it happened again and again. They said, 'Hey, Mr Vopálka, you'll be better off abroad. We will arrange it for you here, you will get an emigration passport, you will come to Vienna, they will take care of you there, if you want to stay in Austria, you will stay there. You have a family, they'll give you a flat there, you'll learn German. If you want to move on, you will choose a country that is taking people now.' I said I wouldn't take it, that I wanted to stay here. I don't want to go abroad. 'But others are already going. You're making trouble yourself for nothing, we'll always be... always after you,you will be always watched, always in trouble. Is it worth it for you?' I said: 'It's worth it for me, you [communists] won't last long anyway. They said, 'How could you know?' I said, 'Nothing lasts forever, not even love for a girl.'"
"They more or less didn't mind Umělá hmota (Plastic Material band). They were more bothered by the fact that I used to go to Ječná Street, where the intellectuals were. That bothered them. They said: 'Why do you go there, they are dangerous people, they want to subvert the state. Don't you know that? You're from a working-class background, society supports you.' I said: 'It doesn't. We can't do anything, we can't play music. We can't buy a record.' - 'You can buy records at Supraphon, at Panton [official music publishing houses, trans.].' I said: 'You can´t be serious, what am I supposed to buy? Katapult? Karel Gott? Hana Zagorová or Helena Vondráčková?' - 'Well, they're artists too, aren't they?' I say: 'But we don't listen to that. We want other bands, rock bands, American bands. And that style is not played here. And when it's played, you ban it.' That's what I told them in the interrogations. They were more pissed off that I used to go among those intellectuals. Němec, Battěk... There used to be seminars. That pissed them off. But they'd throw someone out of office job, the intellectual had to go to work in the boiler room. But they didn't fire a worker. If the Voice of America had heard about it, they'd have said they were throwing workers on streets. They didn't dare. They only reported to the manager at the Prague Construction Renovation (PSO), Holeček was his name, if he knew there was a [Charter 77] signatory among them, that I was doing this and that, that I was playing music that was damaging the establishment here, that it was not in line with the ideology of the young people, that we were wearing long hair. That's the kind of bullshit they were saying."
"It was escalating, because then it was cancelled there [on Wenceslas Square in front of Hotel Evropa], they banned it on the pavement. I think it was moved here to Na Smetance Street. Here it always worked, I think, on Saturday or Sunday mornings. Saturday was free, even Sunday... There were several Sunday mornings markets organised here. Of course, it was dispersed by police, too. People learned about it by word of mouth, there were no mobile phones and not many people had landlines. There used to be rumours around the pubs about where the market was going to be again. Then it was in Riegrovy sady, in Krčský Forest. It rotated like that." - "And how should I imagine it? Did the dealers or the ’veksláks’ [illicit moneychangers, trans.] come and unload the goods?" - "Normally they put it on the ground or were holding it in their hands. Mostly it was on the ground. There were no tables. The records, the vinyls, were stacked on the ground, the guy who owned them was standing there. You asked him how much Blue Cheer was, he told you the price, you could even haggle. Maybe he could knock off fifty, twenty or thirty crowns. Or he insisted on the price. Or we could make exchanges. I had my records in a plastic bag, and I said, 'I have this, would you like to swap it for this record?' So he took it out of the sleeve and looked at it to see if it was not scratched too much. That's how it worked. That way we were introduced to foreign rock music. Because there was nothing on TV, there was just brass bands and variety shows. There was nothing on the radio either. They played Olympic, or Liška, or Karel Gott. These socialist artists who were favoured."
Milan Dino Vopálka was born on 27 September 1955 in Prague. He never knew his father, his mother, who worked in a dry-cleaning shop, soon remarried and Milan grew up with his grandmother in the same tenement house where his mother and her new family lived, in Prague, Na Topolce Street. He trained as a room painter and soon became interested in rock music, bands like Captain Beefheart and Led Zeppelin. In the early 1970s, through his friend Josef Vondruška, he got to see the concert of the bands Aktual by Milan Knížák and (at that time still officially performing) Plastic People of the Universe in Prague’s Music f Club. It was an extraordinary experience, which later inspired him to establish his own band, Umělá hmota (PlasticMaterial), which did not try to make official recordings and from the beginning performed illegally. From 1974, the persecution of underground bands was growing stronger. Dino Vopálka took part in the concert in Rudolfov, which was dispersed by a brutal police intervention, as well as many other banned concerts. At the end of 1976 he signed the Charter 77 declaration and subsequently became involved in collecting more signatures. He was arrested and interrogated many times by State Security. In the late 1970s, Umělá hmota stopped giving concerts, and Dino Vopálka devoted himself more to family life. He refused State Security offers to emigrate to the West. Umělá hmota band resumed its activity at the very end of the 1980s and continues to perform to this day.
