Czechoslovakia
And you met with Czechoslovakian president Václav Havel. What did he say?
He said that he likes my records, especially the one that I did with Captain Beefheart.
Your records were never distributed in these countries.
No, they've always been illegal. Also, the people that purchased them, or acquired them, or even possessed transcripts of the lyrics were beaten by the secret police. On one of the occasions, when we were doing kind of a question-and-answer thing in a club in Prague, there were two guys who said that they had been grabbed by the secret police and before they were beaten, the guy said, "We are now going to beat the Zappa music out of you." And nobody in the audience seemed too surprised about it, because apparently it has happened to a lot of people.
And then there was another statement that was made in Czech by one of the guys in the audience at that same time and I had it translated. And what it said was that when the secret police would arrest you, they would question you and the two biggest enemies of the state at that time – which apparently was the '70s – were Jimmy Carter and Frank Zappa. And I'm going, "What the fuck am I hearing here?"'' (Quoted from Frank Zappa's Crusade – 25 Years And Counting)
Czechoslovakia was a country in Eastern Europe that was founded in 1918 and became Communist from 1945 until 1989. In 1989 the Velvet Revolution brought Democracy to the country. Former poet Václav Havel became President and as a long time fan of Zappa he made the musician Cultural Ambassador of his country.
In 1993 Czechoslovakia was split into two separate countries, The Czech Republic and Slovakia.
