Everybody

Olympic - Everybody [sample]
from album "Pták Rosomák", 1969, Supraphon 1130589 (stereo) or 0130589 (mono), Supraphon 100589-1311 (vinyl reissue 1990)
produced by Jaromír Tůma


original 1969 LP sleeve, 1990 reissue sleeve

Everybody seems to be dying lately... Last Sunday another friend and client of mine (actually he was more a friend of my mom) passed away after spending a couple of weeks in coma. Although he was of Slovak origin, he was a cook and not a musician - and therefore he's not the actual subject of this post. Nevertheless: Rest in peace, Karol!

Also last week, on Friday, an important personality from the Czechoslovak rock history passed away, too: Jan Antonín Pacák (1941-2007), also known as Jeňýk or Sorry, who was from 1965 until 1971 the drummer of the legendary beat group Olympic. He suffered from leukemia.

The story of Olympic is long so I'll tell it some other time. In short, they were likely the most important Czech group of the 1960s. Initially they played rock'n'roll and they worked as a backing combo for various pop singers. Two years later, in 1965 they were possibly the first rock band that began to compose, play and record exclusively their own material sung in Czech language instead of the ubiquitous English covers. And of course they were also the first rock group to have a full blown long play album, the legendary Želva (The Tortoise), released by Supraphon in 1968. Well, Želva was okay, but their second album from 1969 was even better: Pták Rosomák (The Wolverine Bird). Fuzz guitars, psychedelic soundscapes, sitars, freakbeats and a couple of timeless songs - an album that still sounds fresh 38 years later. The classic line-up consisted of Pacák on drums, the lyricist Pavel Chrastina on bass, Miroslav Berka on keyboards, the rhythm guitarist Ladislav Klein as well as the band leader, composer and lead singer Petr Janda.

Jan A. Pacák was not only the band's drummer during their best years, he was also the "comedian" of the group as well as their graphic designer. And being a graphic designer myself, I have to state that he was an excellent one! The first three LP covers were his work, including the great 1971 album Jedeme jedeme (We're Driving We're Driving). After leaving Olympic he concentrated on art painting, graphic design and book illustrations, for which he won numerous prizes. He returned to playing music only sporadically with several dixieland combos or in the 1990s for occasional Olympic revivals.

Despite its English title, the song Everybody is sung in Czech. Chrastina's lyrics tell a funny story of a guy who runs around and shouts "everybody" (hence the title). Not only does the track begin with Pacák's funky drum break, he's also the lead singer on it and he shows off some of his "expressive" scatting towards the end. This is definitely one of my favorite Olympic tunes.

Being one of the main Czech rock classics, the Pták Rosomák album is available on CD, of course. The original vinyl is a sought-after collectors item, however. It shows up on eBay regularly, but don't expect to get it cheap if it's in excellent condition. Auctions going beyond $50 are becoming the rule nowadays, even for the less attractive mono edition. But don't despair, I've got the original stereo issue for sale! And it's not even nearly that expensive. Of course, there's a caveat: the record is not in a great shape; obviously it must have been played a zillion times in those 36 years before it got into my greeeedy hands (I'll rather keep the 1990 reissue which I bought mint 17 years ago, as I'm not a fanatic collector of original pressings). In my WebShop I've got also a couple of original Olympic 45s from the 1960s for sale, just search there for "olympic". There's e.g. the seven-inch-only Strejček Jonatán, yet another tune sung by Pacák. And there's the ÜBER-rare original pressing of the Želva single, which is a slightly different version than any other subsequent release of the song. (The background story according to the official Olympic web site is actually quite funny: Towards the end of Želva when the group starts to sing the ad lib vocals, someone shouts "oh no". That version has been initially released on this very seven inch. But shortly thereafter, when the group was compiling their already recorded material for the debut LP, some Supraphon apparatchiks thought that the guys must have been singing the word "hovno" - which means "shit" in Czech. So they forced them to overdub the vocal track with a choir to make the alleged "bad word" disappear - which is what they did. That new version has then appeared on any release ever since while the very original master seems to be lost.)

P.S. I never met Jeňýk Pacák personally but he was a close friend of another friend of mine and my neighbor here in Switzerland, Pepík Voříšek. In the sixties Pepík used to be a roadie for another famous Czech rockers, the Matadors, and he used to hang around with all the guys from the Prague beat scene back then. He knows a lot of insider stories from those days, so his name might pop up on Funky Czech-In every now and then. I couldn't ask him to help me with this post though, because right now he's in Prague to partake on Pacák's funeral which took place yesterday.

Rest in peace, Jeňýk.

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Can't buy me love

Eva Pilarová & Karel Vlach Orchestra - Can't Buy Me Love [sample]
from album "Zpívá Eva Pilarová", 1966, Supraphon DV10206; reissued for export as "The Fascinating Czech Star" between 1966 and 1974 on Supraphon SUA15719, 55719 or 1130667


original 1966 LP sleeve, 1966 export sleeve, 1972 reissue export sleeve

Now, let's move back into time even further and also away from any funk or soul for a moment, although we're staying quite close to jazz. The Czech female superstar of the first half of the sixties was Eva Pilarová. She grew up in Brno but like many other pop singers of that decade, her career kicked off in Jiří Suchý's original Semafor Theatre in Prague. Yet ironically, it was in fact also her talent that massively helped to establish the relatively experimental Semafor stage in 1960 in the first place.

Pilarová has never been fixated on a particular genre or style: jazz, swing, pop, twist, rock'n'roll, blues, ballads, R&B, beat - anything goes. She had already won various awards and recorded numerous single and EP sides [link to an external MS Word document] before her first 12" LP has been released in 1966. On that album entitled simply Zpívá Eva Pilarová (Eva Pilarová Sings) the Supraphon editors decided to show off her jazzy side, however, and that was definitely an excellent choice. After all, her public nickname was "Fitz-Pilarka" which she received as a reference to her famous US idol. Recorded in the era of relative political freedom between 1964 and 1966, the album presented two popular Lennon/McCartney songs and ten American standards. Summertime, Night And Day and Moonlight In Vermont were recorded with the Dance Orchestra of the Czechoslovak Radio alias TOČR/JOČR. Anything Goes, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Misty and others have been done with the Karel Vlach Orchestra. Vlach is also backing both Beatles covers, Can't Buy Me Love and I Should Have Known Better. The latter however disguises a weakness of many "old school" jazz drummers (here probably the legendary Vladimír Žižka) when it comes to playing a straight and simple binary rock beat: sometimes it fails to groove as such...

Can't Buy Me Love on the other hand captures both the singer and the band in an excellent state. It takes the Beatles' rhythm'n'blues tune one step further to swinging big band jazz, like if Lennon & McCartney never had anything else in mind. A classic. According to the list mentioned above, it has been originally released with Czech lyrics as Já čekám dál (I Keep On Waiting) on the Supraphon single 013663 - which seems to be a pretty rare item as far as I can say.

The album also used to be very popular abroad and it has been reissued for export a couple of times (see images), so it's not hard to find it on vinyl at all. As a matter of fact, I'm selling a copy of the Czech edition for 1 Euro only in my WebShop. There's a snag though: the first track (Moonlight In Vermont) ist damaged albeit still playable - but the rest of the record plays fine, i.e. "Very Good". Actually this very MP3 has been ripped from it last year, though I may have likely filtered some pops and crackles here and there. (In the meantime I have finally found a slightly better copy in Prague.) And if you search my shop for "pilarova" you will also find lots of her singles for sale; sometimes it happens that I buy a single without realizing that I already own it, other times I'm not sure and then I think "better to have two of them than none" and sometimes I find an album with the same tracks that I already have on singles. Hence, at least when it comes to Czech records, usually the reason for selling them is that I actually have those tracks already. Searching my WebShop for "czech" should list all Czech items, by the way.

More from Eva Pilarová is coming later this year, also some of her really funky stuff. Stay tuned!

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This boy

Crystal - Tenhle kluk (Just One Look) [sample]
from SP Supraphon 013464, 1966


a Supraphon mid 1960s generic SP sleeve*

Well... 'nuff of the seventies prog-rock for a while. What we're gonna do right here is go back. Way back. Back into time. When one of the most popular Czech vocal girl groups were... the Krystalky!

Krystal or Crystal began to sparkle on the Prague music scene in 1962 as a young rock'n'roll combo founded by guitarist Jaroslav Nevrkla. One year later the group already gigged with a stable line-up that would last for the next few years of their existence: Nevrkla, the singer Jaroslav Jarosil (could it be the same guy who recently played cello with Ian Gillan?!), the lead guitarist Jiří Řádek, Lubor Drahota on bass and Vladimír Brodský on drums. And of course there were also the "Crystalettes" or Krystalky: Jiřina Menšlová, Irena Kubátová and Eva Fatková.**

Crystal recorded over a dozen of songs for radio and TV in the mid sixties. Tenhle kluk (This Boy), a cover version of Doris Troy's soul hit Just One Look with original Czech lyrics by Jiřina Menšlová, became their first single side in late 1966 and their biggest success. Nevrkla stated in 1967 that Crystal actually never were much into R&B or soul. Quite obviously they were covering the popular Hollies' version of the song. Still, thanks to the ladies the song preserves some of the original soul spirit for us "despite" its mersey-beat rework, including a slight and most likely unintended touch of ska on the rhythm guitar.

Tenhle kluk was one of the earlier pure beat sides on a Supraphon single played by an independent beat group; by "independent" I mean bands aside from the "usual suspects" and rock'n'roll veterans like Olympic, Mefisto or the Miroslav Kefurt and Karel Duba combos who all used to back many pop singers for Supraphon. In 1966 the "bigbít" explosion on records was yet to come. Apropos, just for the record (pun intended), on the flip side there's a ballad from the pop'n'swing softie Milan Chladil with the TOČR, but it's not worth to spend any more bytes on it or whatever.

Crystal (without the girls) recorded yet another single and an EP with popular beat and R&B cover versions in 1967 before they gave up. Menšlová on the other hand founded the female vocal duo Eminent who recorded a couple of Supraphon 45s in 1969 and 1970.

Notes:
* Coincidentally it's containing the today's track, but as far as I remember it wasn't the original sleeve when I bought the single a couple of years ago. But it could have easily been: Supraphon wasn't very picky about packaging, they just used to take what they had in stock. That applied even to numerous LP reissues until the early 1990s. (I plan to write an interlude later this year in order to shed more light onto the Supraphon record sleeves inferno.)

** The 7" label lists the names as Menšlová, Kubáková and Fatková whereas J. K. Sýkora's paperback book Czechoslovak Beat Music 67 (Panton 1968) spells them as Menčlová, Kubátová and Fadková. Since the almost 40 years old article supposedly was a transcript of a telephone interview with Nevrkla, Sýkora might have had misspelled some of the names. On the other hand, the Supraphon "empire" didn't care about correct name spelling in way too many other cases either, so who knows...? The unofficial Czech rock discographers M. Balák and J. Kytnar (Československý rock na gramofonových deskách, Indies 1998) are even pointing out that the text on the very first pressing had been spelled even more absurdely (thus turning it possibly into an interesting collector item).

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Half Czech-in, part 2: Zulu Stomp

Steve Grossman - Zulu Stomp [sample]
from album "Some Shapes To Come", 1974, P.M. Records PMR-002
produced by Gene Perla


original LP sleeve

The second entry in my Half Czech-In sub-series introduces the first solo album by the U.S. saxophonist Steve Grossman (1951) who was at this young age already an ex-Miles Davis soloist. The Czech part belongs to his pianist Jan Hammer jr. (1948), probably the commercially most successful Czech musician of the late 20th century worldwide. Two words: Miami Vice. (I can't add much more to that topic anyway. I disliked the series 20 years ago and I'm pretty sure they didn't become any better over the years. Let alone the horrible soundtrack. Now pardon me while I'm off to the bathroom...)

Hammer jr. was already considered a huge talent in the 1960s Czechoslovakia. His father Jan Hammer sr. was a well known jazz musicians and his mother Vlasta Průchová was an even better known singer, in fact she was the grande dame of Czechoslovak jazz. Junior's first record appearance was on a 1964 Supraphon jazz compilation, a live recording from 1962 (!) with the Junior Trio, his bandmates were then the teenage brothers Miroslav and Alan Vitouš on double bass and drums respectively. In 1967 he composed the soundtrack for the "pop fairy-tale" Šíleně smutná princezna (The Princess Sad Like Crazy) with singers Helena Vondráčková and Václav Neckář in the main roles. In 1968 Hammer jr. emigrated to West Germany, released his first solo album Maliny Maliny on MPS and soon thereafter he headed over to the U.S. where he studied on the Berklee College of Music. In the early seventies he began to work as a sideman, for example for drummer Elvin Jones where he met Grossman, Gene Perla and Don Alias. In 1971 he joined the famous Mahavishnu Orchestra led by John McLaughlin, later he played on Billy Cobham's classic Spectrum, he also recorded with Jeff Beck, Stanley Clarke, Carlos Santana and many others. The ex-Jones rhythm section continued to work together through the seventies as well, they played e.g. with the flutist Jeremy Steig on Energy (a.k.a. Fusion). To make a long story short, Hammer jr. became a busy guy.

Some Shapes To Come is a fine little fusion album on the edge between funk, jazz-rock and free-jazz. The recordings were made on three days in September 1973, their spirit is pretty raw and dirty. Zulu Stomp, the third track of the album, kicks off with a nasty and funky drum groove. No wonder, the tune was composed by the drummer and percussionist Don Alias. In comes Hammer's Moog and Perla's bass playing a catchy unisono riff, followed by a straight and simple saxophon theme. Hammer then takes off with a spaced out Moog solo. Yeah, that's the classic modal funk jazz mood of the early seventies. Gettin' down with the Zulu stomp... baby!

Some Shapes To Come is for sale in my record store right now; for my personal taste there's just a little too much free-jazz on the album. I'm also selling other Jan Hammer albums: one from 1979 called simply Hammer which is a straight pop-rock record (audio samples); once someone gave it to me and unlike the Grossman LP you can have it really cheap. Then there are also Lenny White and Joni Mitchell LPs with Hammer's participation. Czech them out, just search for "hammer" (you may ignore Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer popping up along).

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What's preventing me...

Bohemia - Co mi brání [sample]
from 7 inch SP "Co mi brání", 1977, Panton 440625 (Disco Serie); also on the compilation album "Gong 4", 1977, Panton 110701
produced by Vladimír Mertlík


original SP sleeve & the compilation LP sleeve

After the "off-topic" entry from last week let's continue with the regular schedule. You see, usually I write my articles a couple of weeks in advance. That comes in handy at the moment because as you can easily guess from the last post, I definitely wasn't in the mood for any new funky czech-ins yet...

So... two weeks ago I have mentioned Bohemia as one of the Flamengo follow-up groups. Bohemia was founded in 1975 by saxophonist Jan Kubík and bass player Vladimír Kulhánek, along with the singer and keyboarder Lešek Semelka who came from Radim Hladík's Blue Effect (a.k.a. Modrý Efekt). These "old cats" were later joined by the jazz-rock youngsters Michal Pavlíček on guitar, Pavel Trnavský on drums as well as the omnipresent conga master Jiří Tomek as a special guest. In 1977 Semelka has been replaced by Jan Hála though. The group sound oscillated somewhere between highbrow jazz-rock and art-rock pathos with slight traces of disco and slavic folk. Most of the material was penned by Kubík, the lyrics on the vocal tracks usually came from Pavel Vrba.

The single Co mi brání (What's Preventing Me) appeared in the Disco Serie of the Panton label. That was a logical choice as it's probably the Bohemia track with the highest "statistical danceability" (as Frank Zappa would have said). Both sides were composed by Semelka who, unlike Kubík, tended more towards pop music. The b-side contains nothing worth mentioning on this blog though. Interestingly, at that time the whole group was also involved in the Svoboda brothers' studio project Discobolos, who already had a cameo appearance on Funky Czech-In as the backing band for a Jiří Schelinger song; Discobolos used to be gettin' down pretty funky and I'll bring them back very soon.

The inclusion of Co mi brání on the Panton Gong 4 compilation probably shouldn't be judged as a high honor for Bohemia, however. On the album there's another slightly danceable track by fellow jazz-rockers Abraxas, a nice folk-rock song by Hana & Petr Ulrych, a neat drum break in a silly bubble-gum tune from ex-Flamingo co-singer Petr Němec, as well as a full-blown Czech version of Boney M's Daddy Cool sung by Josef Laufer. But the rest of the LP will be highly irrelevant to you if you share my musical taste, and some songs are even so stupid that it's almost offending. I wonder if another 1977 Bohemia 7 inch, Pavlíček's King Gong from the Panton Mini Jazz Klub series, sort of reflected or even parodied this rather unpleasant fact. Unfortunately I don't own it so I can't tell you, thus it's just a guess from the track name... (Just for the record, the Panton Gong series ran from the mid 70s until the late 80s. Like most Czechoslovak pop compilations from that era, they are not really worth getting unless you're a real hardcore collector or if you are looking for one of the very few rock or disco tracks on it. I can only "recommend" Gong 2, 3, 4 and 6, but mostly only for the Czech versions of a couple of 1970s international disco hits which might be hard to find elsewhere. I might post some of them in the future.)

Bohemia released their debut art-jazz-rock album Zrnko písku (Grain Of Sand) in 1978 and disbanded shortly thereafter. Semelka successfully re-joined Blue Effect (then known as M Efekt) and became a pop singer. The rest of the group continued to work as session musicians. The latest record with Kubík's participation that I own is the ex-C&K Vocal singer Luboš Pospíšil's debut solo album from 1982; Kubík eventually emigrated and I couldn't find out yet what he's been doing ever since. Trnavský played with Jazz Q as well as with Jana Kratochvílová before both emigrated to the UK. Pavlíček worked with Kratochvílová, too, also with Mahagon, Jan Spálený, Eva Olmerová or Jana Koubková. In 1980 he (and initially also Tomek) joined the new wave edition of Michael Kocáb's legendary Pražský Výběr with whom he "co-wrote" the Czechoslovak popular music history and became one of the most original and influential Czech rock guitarists until these days. (I mean, in the mid 80s he surely influenced me a lot!)

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