Czechoslovakia, 1985
It’s a Friday evening like any other. I am a typical 14-year-old kid happy to be done with school and my extracurricular activities of piano lessons and track and field. Mom is having her best friend over and they are chatting in the living room with the door closed. Dad is working the night shift at a local precinct.
My older brother calls me to the kitchen where he is sitting on a table meddling with the radio positioned on the top of a tall radiator. He is tuning into a frequency of a forbidden radio station called “Free Europe” that broadcasts only on Friday evenings. We listen when we can, ears glued to the speaker, keeping the volume as low as possible. I promiss that I will never ever tell mom and dad, or worse, anyone outside of our family. A voice comes in, “You are listening to Vetrnik.” The beautiful vocal of a Czech signer Jana Kratochvilova embroidered by picked strings of an acoustic guitar soars like a free bird on a mountain top. She is one of the artists that defected after the failed revolution in 1968 and who is now banned from all media. There is an occasional high pitched whistling sound. Brother tells me that it is the army interfering with the frequency attempting to block the broadcasting.
I am sitting breathless with eyes wide open staring into the forbidden zone. Listening to the stories about people, places, and current events, told from a different point of view completely contrary to those I heard through TV broadcast daily on the evening news. Most of it goes over my head but my body is feeling it all and absorbing the energy, processing the contrast. I am learning about political agenda. From this point I will never be able to blindly trust people on TV.
The song title translation is “In the shade of the ferns”
more from this era: 1989 Velvet Revolution
