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Vladimír Drápal, nicknamed Labus, was born on 27 March 1964 in Louny in northwest Bohemia. His mother was a teacher, his father a professional soldier and later a communist functionary - chairman of the local national committee. Vladimír went to language school in Louny (he learned English), read beatnik literature and listened to rock music. In the seventh grade he saw a propaganda programme on television called Assassination of Culture (1977), which was supposed to dehumanize the underground and long-haired independent musicians in the eyes and minds of the audience, but in Labus’s case it worked in the opposite way. A little later, a friend lent him a magnetic tape with amateur-recorded music by Artificial Matter: "At the time I was listening to Deep Purple, Kiss and so on, and suddenly I heard music that nailed me to the ground. It was a raw and authentic statement. I hadn’t heard anything like it before and I was absolutely fascinated by it."

Wladimir Drápal gravitated towards the underground and the chic independent cultural scene for the same reasons as many other teenagers and more impressionable young people - he was looking for something to believe in a world of normalising grey, official hypocrisy and spine-bending. He wore long hair, which in the communist Czechoslovakia of the 1970s was not a fashion trend, but an expression of a shared free attitude. Because of his views, he came into long-term conflict with his parents, who imagined that their son would grow up to be a "respectable citizen" and have a career, and he had no support from his siblings (his brother Tomáš is 12 years younger).

Lábus did not want to go to high school, where students were required to be too conformist, and because he liked animals, he enrolled at the Secondary Agricultural School in Žatec. He looked for kindred spirits, took the bus to Prague, walked the streets and looked for someone with a similar appearance that would signal a common interest. In high school he met musicians Jiří Zelenka and Pavel Škarýd (both played in the É Ucho Accord Debil Band, later Orchestr Bissext) and Borko Holeček, who invited alternative bands to the Žatec jazz club. In Louny he became friends with the local signatory of Charter 77, Zdeněk Buka. "I do not claim that every weekend there was a private or semi-official concert of five bands, but at least there was a meeting in a pub where at least one musician performed. Travelling around the country had the charm that the Maniacs really formed a kind of brotherhood back then. You arrived somewhere, you met the first guy with hair, he told you where they were meeting, and if you didn’t have money, he helped you, gave you food, sometimes you could stay for a few days without a crown in your pocket and there was nothing strange about it. "

Labus devoted considerable effort to not having to go to the army and to obtaining a so-called blue book, i.e., an exemption from service - compulsory military service in the occupied Czechoslovakia represented "better criminality," two years of harassment and ideological hazing. He was conscripted every year, and in order to get at least a reprieve, he pretended to be mentally ill and briefly stayed in a psychiatric hospital in Most. At that time, he earned his living as an agronomist, and when he was later allowed to perform the substitute civilian service, he worked for a while as a worker in the power plant in Počerady.

Lábus recalls many important meetings (for example with Milan "Svědek" Padevet and his band Hally Belly), but the most important in his life was a chance meeting with František Stárek or Čuňas, the publisher of the samizdat underground magazine Vokno (see his portrait). So I approached him and told him that I was looking for this magazine in vain and if I could buy it from him. He replied that I should come to the boiler room at St. Thomas’s in Mala Strana on Saturday at so and so many hours. And that was Piggy. He lovingly accepted me into the ’hard’ underground, and I then did the distribution of Vokno and Voknovin for the whole of North Bohemia."

Immediately upon leaving the boiler room, Drápal was interrogated by the Public Security and subsequently summoned to the State Security in Louny for questioning. In the second half of the 1980s, he was very active in the opposition and in the independent culture, regularly going to opposition events, concerts and to the capital to maintain contact with the Prague underground and dissent, and became a member of the Movement for Civil Freedom (HOS). At that time, the state security naturally took an interest in him; the fact that he was in the so-called glitch milieu - to use the period Aesthetic jargon - and that underground bands and musicians (Svědek, Orchestr Bissext, Křik, J.S.V. and Forced Cut) played at his wedding in January 1987 would have been enough to do so. However, Drápal did not hide his anti-regime attitudes; long before that, for example, he had declared that for principled reasons he refused to join the Socialist Youth Union, so that from 1988 the StB registered him as an enemy person, and he was constantly summoned for interrogation and restricted in his freedom. I was always being harassed. They would come to my work, if there was an event, they would pick me up at five in the morning and I would sit in the police station until eight in the evening. Often they didn’t even ask me to do anything, I just squatted there and they brought me some police books to read. It was unpleasant, of course. One of them, Milan Havelka, was a real beast, a kind of a cop from the 50s. He kept telling me that I should hang [...] and so on. That was the bad cop, then there was a ’good’ one, his name was Knotek. It used to happen that I would come out of the interrogation, run down the stairs, and after fifty metres other Estebians would come towards me, saying that they were arresting me. I said, ’I’m coming out of the interrogation now!’ And they said: ’Did you tell them anything?’ - ’I didn’t.’ - ’Then maybe you’ll tell us.’ "

Vladimír Drápal says that the Aesthetic harassment made his life very unpleasant, but otherwise he was happy - he did things that seemed meaningful to him, he did not go to pseudo-vacations or take part in official regime events at work, and he was lucky because he was never convicted and was imprisoned for a long time. He had no major problems at work - but he later learned that even there he was under surveillance: ’I was an agronomist and a guy in the same company was a mechanic. He always said, ’Hey, they’re after you. I’ll lend you a car so you don’t get caught. Where are you going?’ I said, ’Fine, you’re great!’ I thought of this guy as an ally, but then I found out that one day they caught him drunk driving and told him that they would either take away his license, which would put him out of a job, or he would turn me in. He made a point of informing on me to the police every week. I had no idea. He was a drummer, a rocker, he was always swearing at the communists, we had a nice conversation..."

Vladimir Drápal had the added disadvantage of living in a small town. After all, there were almost no dissidents in Louny, and so the State Security paid him increased attention, there was even a kind of State Security Committee that dealt almost exclusively with him and his activities. Eventually I understood that it was futile, and I just kept quiet. But sometimes they could provoke a person, and there are things that I still feel a bit guilty about. I never gave them any information on purpose, of course, but they were good psychologists, they could provoke people, and stubborn silence was the only effective defence."

Even at the end of the Communist regime, he didn’ have it easy. Labus, like other memoirists, refutes the myth that in the second half of the 1980s it was possible to live without fear and almost freely in the decaying communist regime. The policemen were constantly checking and loading their guns in front of me, shouting at me if I wanted poverty and hunger like in Poland and so on. They were scared of what was happening, they didn’ know which one was hitting, and that made them all the more aggressive and dangerous."

When the communist regime began to collapse in November 1989, Vladimír Drápal took part in the political scene and co-founded the Loun Civic Forum, for which he then served on the local council for four years. He then travelled, ran a business, worked in the Municipal Cultural Centre, ran a bookshop and rock clubs. In 2001, he founded Guerilla Records, which publishes, distributes and promotes non-commercial music and literature. In 2002, he won the tender for the director of the Vrchlický Theatre in Louny, and later became the director of the Louny City Gallery, which he founded. In 2014 he started working at the Cultural House Zastávka. In recent years, he has been strongly concerned about the bad political situation in the Czech Republic and the growth of undemocratic tendencies. In June 2018, he resigned as director of the theatre and from his other positions on the grounds that "I cannot be a loyal civil servant if the head of state [Miloš Zeman] and the prime minister [Andrej Babiš] embody for me everything I despise".

Author of the text Adam Drda