The NY Sun Files: Plastic People of the Universe

Regimes and revolutions come and go, but the Plastic People of the Universe are forever.

Nearly 40 years after its members first switched on their amplifiers in the chilly aftermath of the Soviet invasion that ended the Prague Spring of 1968, the band is back on the road: grizzled, defiant, and rudely effusive with its lurching rhythms, untempered skronk, and philosophical jokes that seem partially lost in translation.

Vratislav Brabenec, the group’s 63-year-old saxophonist, was introducing one of the opening numbers in Czech before a crowded audience of about 150 fans at the Cutting Room in Chelsea on Saturday night — a rare New York appearance by the Plastic People, who will also perform tonight at the Knitting Factory.

Many in attendance were there in conjunction with a symposium at Columbia University, where former Czechoslovakian and Czech Republic president Václav Havel recently began a seven-week residency. So perhaps a translation of Mr. Brabenec’s comments was not entirely necessary. But Eva Turnova, the young, red-haired bass player who joined the group a few years ago, offered hers anyway: “What it means is, we kill a pig and then we eat it in one day.”

Turn that barnyard analogy to any purpose you please, but it does speak to a certain unvarnished folk wisdom. The Plastic People epitomize a whole-hog aesthetic that regards any element as useful, without much concern for tidy trimmings. Their songs have a tilted, out-of-focus feel, thanks to those old village dance rhythms and what can only be described as a curiously lustful melancholia — given the odd collusion of Jifií Kabe’s bittersweet violin and Mr. Brabenec’s frequently squealing saxophone.

The band, which took its name from a Frank Zappa tune, stuck to its classic material for most of the 90-minute show, evoking the American subculture hero’s fuzz-haired eclecticism in songs that, as Ms. Turnova offered later, were not so much explicitly political as merely oddball and artinflected. The Plastic People became revolutionary martyrs in the 1970s because the mere notion of American-influenced rock musicians creating a public spectacle was an inherent threat to Soviet dominance. Or, as the Talking Heads would put it back when these rowdy Czech hippies were still consigned to a kind of public exile: “Electric guitar is a crime against the state.”

At the Cutting Room, the band was mostly absent that weapon. The lead guitarist was sick, and only appeared for a song or two. And because they often sang lyrics as a chorus, the musicians sounded less like subversive rock legends than a wandering gypsy freejazz punk outfit that had missed its bus at the Port Authority and was gigging for free beer and cigarettes. And gloriously so.

There has never been anything trendy or even terribly commercial about the band’s choices. Czech communist rule forced the musicians off the public stage in 1970, and a notorious, aborted 1974 performance in the village of Budovice that attracted thousands of fans ended in police violence and arrests. During the late 1970s, when English punk-rock acts like the Clash preached revolutionary rhetoric that became a gesture of style, two of the Plastic People were living with the consequences of physically rejecting political oppression of free speech. They were in jail, serving out eightmonth terms for a 1976 conviction of public disturbance. That is, they were arrested for rocking.

Despite the arrest and the subsequent governmental ban on performances, the band thrived underground, inspiring the Charter 77 movement that anticipated the Velvet Revolution of 1989, which swept their friend and supporter Mr. Havel into power as the Soviet Union crumbled.

All these years later, the group’s current tour makes it seem as if it has popped out of a time capsule. Indeed, given their crazy-quilt history, the older musicians might feel as though they are now reaping the rewards of their struggle. Tom Stoppard’s new play “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” now at the Royal Court Theatre in London, celebrates the band’s insurgent saga (as did a 2001 documentary about the band). And while the death in 2001 of its founder, Milan Hlavsa, left the outfit with only three original members, its current multi-generational lineup appears fully invigorated.

Astonishingly, on Saturday the music shifted between comic a capella and fluid improvisational jamming in the space of a single song, implying that the band might be equally at home playing the neo-hippie Bonnaroo Festival as it would be at the late, lamented CBGB.

As Mr. Brabenec noted from the stage, the group has been traveling a lot, recently headlining a concert in St. Petersburg. “They were very nice,” he said later, puffing on a Chesterfield outside the venue, where fans young and old hovered for bits of conversation and autographs. “Russian people are very nice people.” Then he added, with a touch of commentary: “Russians and Americans are almost the same people. They know anything about everything.”

Mr. Brabanec looks quite a bit like one of the Fugs — the irreverent leftie rabble-rousers Tuli Kupferberg and Ed Sanders — who were one of the big influences on the Plastic People, and who have joined the group onstage during previous New York appearances. He was happy to be back in town, in part through the agency of Mr. Havel, for whom he offered affection but also criticism. The Velvet Revolution was, maybe, “too much velvet,” he said, suggesting that the hardliners of the old regime got treated too softly when they should have been kicked out of their apartments. But he had little else to complain about.

“I’m still playing,” he told someone in Czech as he finished his cigarette. “Still drinking. Still fucking.”

The NY Sun Files: Gary Panter

Published Sept. 15, 2006.

Gary Panter is explicating a painting that hangs in the attic studio of his Brooklyn home.”There’s a villain from a Japanese TV show,” the artist says, gesturing toward one menacing visage, which floats in a cosmic soup of images. “And that’s, like, a 1950s robot. And that’s a made-up tentacle brain monster.” The canvas, which radiates a sickly green, is also populated with a bikiniclad beach babe, an exaggerated cartoon puppy with its tongue sticking out, and a disembodied skull — among many other symbols, resonant with subconscious anxiety and desire.

“They’re about primal issues,” Mr. Panter admits quite cheerfully. “And the stupid way the sexes see each other. All those horrible clichés. It’s about people standing right next to their wishes and fears.”

Mr. Panter’s vivid obsessions make him one of the stars of “Masters of American Comics,”a two-part exhibition that opens today.The show, which features 14 artists and spans the history of the medium, is so large that it takes two museums to accommodate it.The comic strips of seminal figures from Windsor McKay (“Little Nemo in Slumberland”) and George Herriman (“Krazy Kat”) to Charles M. Schulz (“Peanuts”) are mounted in the Newark Museum. Meanwhile, the emergence of comic books in the 1950s and, later, underground “comix” and the graphic novel, is represented at the Jewish Museum, where Mr. Panter is joined by contemporaries (Chris Ware, R. Crumb) and artists who preceded him (Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Will Eisner).

“It’s like being knighted,” says Mr. Panter, 55, who may still be best-known for his Emmy Award-winning design for “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse,” the subversive 1980s kids show that has found new life on the Cartoon Network and on DVD. “There’s stuff in the show I have idolized since childhood, so just being in the room with it …” his voice trails off. “Is humbling the right word? I’m exhilarated.”

Mr. Panter’s presence in such an exhibit is a sign of the times.It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when underground comics acquired mainstream legitimacy. Perhaps it was in 1992, when Art Spiegelman, who championed Mr. Panter’s work as the editor of RAW magazine in the early 1980s, won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel “Maus.” (Spiegelman, whose work was part of the “Masters” exhibit first organized by the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, pulled it from the New York show, citing personal reasons). Or maybe the arrival of “The Simpsons,” a few years earlier, had something to do with it.That show’s creator, Matt Groening, came out of the same alternative media as his friend Mr. Panter (and joins him October 10 for a conversation at the 92nd Street Y).

Mr. Panter, a Brownsville, Texas, native, proudly dubbed “the king of the ratty line,” didn’t begin to draw seriously until after he’d already been painting for some time.

“What’s behind a lot of cartooning is a frustrated, shy person who wants to make something that shouts for them in the world. In the old days, people cartooned because they needed a job, and they started out at 12. I started after college. I remember, I went to see Jack Kirby, and he said [in doubtful voice], ‘Okay, but why are you starting so late?’”

He was lucky, though, to launch his career in Los Angeles during the mid-1970s. The city’s erupting punk rock scene meshed seamlessly with Mr. Panter’s artistic ambitions. His self-described “jaggedy” style made for some memorable Frank Zappa album covers (remember “Studio Tan”?), and found purchase in a local punk ‘zine called Slash, which invited the artist to contribute a comic strip.Thus,”Jimbo” was born: a post-apocalyptic Everyman who wanders the landscape of an imaginary city called Dal Tokyo.

Original panels from Mr. Panter’s magnum opus, “Jimbo in Purgatory,” fill a wall in the Jewish Museum, their shaggy mayhem and chiaroscuro tones offering a strong contrast to the precise, geometric figures and interior wit of Mr. Ware’s work, which shares the room.

“In my mind, I see him as a young Kevin Bacon,” Mr. Panter says of Jimbo, who strides through the densely allusive panels of “Purgatory” amid dialogue lifted from Dante, Boccacio, the Book of Isaiah, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Two Virgins.”Yul Brynner’s cowboy robot from “Westworld”makes a guest appearance, as does Zappa and a host of other free-associative references — all duly footnoted.

Another room contains a trove of Mr. Crumb’s grumpy, profane, and sexually effusive underground comics, which minted counter-cultural folk heroes like Mr. Natural (“Keep on Truckin’”) and Fritz the Cat. Mr. Crumb’s cracked sense of humor jostles easily with that of Harvey Kurtzman, inventor of “Mad” magazine, whose elbow-in-the-ribs style also had a strong social counterpoint. Panels from his Korean War comic book, “Two Fisted Tales,” relate combat stories with compassion, blunt humor, and even a kind of poetry.

More traditionally, there’s Mr. Kirby, whose cinematic style for the “Fantastic Four” (created with Stan Lee) revolutionized the superhero business and gave Roy Lichtenstein a key source for his paintings. Mr. Eisner, whose “The Spirit” arrived in 1940, a year before Mr. Kirby’s “Captain America,”is also celebrated for introducing adult themes and urban realism to a newspaper comic and anticipating the graphic novels to come.

The exhibit’s deep focus revealingly ties all the artists together, despite their widely divergent styles. But the days of conventional superheroes may now be something more for Hollywood to mine. “There’s a revolution in comics right now,” Mr. Panter said while reflecting on his experiences teaching at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts. “It’s not just Dungeons and Dragons anymore. There’s all kinds of genres now.More than half of my class is interested in doing their own stories.They want to go struggle.”

As for his own inspiration, though he cites the dystopian science fiction of Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, and the discordant sound collages he plays on a motley stack of old boomboxes, Mr. Panter only has to flash back to his Texas childhood — and the looming menace of his own imagination.

“I got scared by some kids in monster masks when I was 4,” he says, with a soft chuckle. “My mother said I never got over it.”