composed by Egon Bondy, Vratislav Brabenec, Milan Hlavsa, Josef Janiček, Jiří Kabeš, and Jaroslav Vožniak
This first album by the rol-a-rok heroes of the post-Prague Spring crackdown has never been more than barely available since it was secretly recorded in an abandoned Bohemian castle in late 1973, and it is even currently out of print in Česká Republika. But Václav Havel did not revere them just because they were Velvet Underground and Zappa fans, since they sounded like neither. They barely sounded like rock and roll, for that matter (only one song on this album even has a backbeat), but rock they did in a strange, clamorous way wholly appropriate to culture mavens who went to jail for expressing themselves, sounded like they knew it was coming any minute, and did not give a flaming fuck. This song is atypical of them only insofar as the only instrument is an out-of-tune piano playing a folk dance rhythm accompanying a chorus of croaky voices, and preceded by weird echoey claps that sound like someone looking for a pilot light. As Paul Wilson's English trot provides: “Look at you, all sound asleep; And you haven’t the remotest notion; How, high on alcohol and beer; I shine like a jewel of the universe.”
Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.
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