Bedřich Ziegler

"Here in Vary we played in a summer park, it was some festival. And because every musician should be a bit different from the others, something different in front of the audience, I would wear a folding top hat on my head during concerts. It used to be our sound engineer's grandfather's, from the first republic. And he gave me a fiddle to go with it. We played in a summer cinema in Vary. And my guitarist, Karel Idlbek, wore a kimono with Chinese characters. And when we finished playing, the guys in coats came in: 'Come on.' So we went. They took us to the police station in Vary, to the Gestapo, as it was called. And there we were interrogated. And I asked what was going on, and he [the policeman] said, 'How can you allow yourself to portray a representative of bourgeois society in a socialist system?' I was looking at him. I thought it was some kind of a joke. So I told him, 'Look, it's a pity for you, you could write books or something. Or some movies, screenplays.' And that's when I got hit, right? I got hit with a baton. So then, they let us go, and I never put that top hat on my head again."