Abstract
Karel Gott reached the status of a pop star in 1960s and maintained it till the present day. He was very popular not only in Czechoslovakia, but also in the whole Eastern bloc and German-speaking countries. In Czechoslovakia he served as a unique element of the official communist culture while enjoying popularity in Western Europe. Bílek explains Gott’s stardom status as a case of structured polysemy. Communist propaganda appropriated certain symbolic features of his image and performance while his mainstream audience focused on his professionalism, entertaining qualities and uniqueness of being a ‘Sinatra from the East’. Bílek analyses the chronological development of Gott’s career, discussing the interplay between his public image, music production and cultural and political contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
Though written in Czech, the novel was only published in Czech by the exiled publishing house Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto in 1981. There had been no official Czech edition to this date. Having appeared originally in French, the novel had been quickly translated into dozens of other languages and reached bestseller status mainly after the success of Kundera’s subsequent novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1983).
- 2.
Earlier in the book, Gustav Husak is introduced as the president of Czechoslovakia following the Soviet occupation of 1968 and as the embodiment of a steep decline in hope for the narrator and his generation.
- 3.
Gott reappears once more in a later passage where the autobiographical narrator recalls an event where president Husak addressed children as the future of the country and, after his speech was delivered, Karel Gott stepped up to the podium and sang while he watched Husak, who was moved so much that the president’s tears streamed down his cheeks. In contrast to the previous episode of Husak’s letter which is narrated as a fact, here the narrator admits that this event is based on hearsay evidence, since he deliberately closed the apartment window as the event began.
Karel Gott appeared in French editions, Le livre du rire et de l’oubli, between 1979 and 1985 (and their later reprints) and in English editions, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, between 1980 and 1996. Then Kundera changed his translation policy and had even his Czech novels newly translated from the French editions. Thus in the new translation by Aaron Asher the name of Karel Gott has been changed to Karel Klos. All the other items, including the proper name of the president Husak and the label of the Idiot of Music, remained the same. One can only speculate about the motivation for such a substitution; instead of a name that refers to the actual world, there is a fictional name, and the original one remains only in the memory of those who read the previous editions.
- 4.
Such a number is offered by Pauer (2014). In 1992, Gott’s Czech publisher Supraphon rewarded him for selling more than 13 million copies. Internationally, however, his records have been produced and distributed by Polydor since the late 1960s; the company never released any official information concerning Gott’s sales.
- 5.
He sang on a regular basis in the Vltava and Reduta cafés in Prague starting in 1958. Singing with orchestras or bands of freelance musicians probably gave birth to his key defining feature—that of a serious professional who never threatens the norms and standards raised by those who have paid for the performance.
- 6.
The pop standard song based on a blues pattern from 1941 had been recorded by Louis Armstrong, Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald in the late 1950s.
- 7.
An early 20th century traditional recorded many times in jazz, blues, pop or country form. Elvis Presley recorded it in 1954, Shirley Bassey in 1957 and Ray Charles in 1962.Gott’s renditions of both songs appeared on an EP produced for export in 1963.
- 8.
The only channel that allowed gaining insight into fresh, recent productions had been the broadcasting of Radio Luxembourg. Playing the role of the earliest pirate radio station, its transmitter (the medium wave frequency of 208 metres) delivered the signal into Czech and Slovak households under the slogan ‘208—Your station for the stars’. Just a small number of Czech listeners would have understood more than a few words of English, but they could have understood the music.
- 9.
In 1961, the amount of people with a licence to watch TV reached more than one million in Czechoslovakia. In 1969, it reached more than three million (Bednařík 2011: 300).
- 10.
Quite exemplary is perhaps the 1965 music video for the song Trezor (A Vault).
- 11.
In the mid-1960s, the LP format still held a rather peripheral position in the Czech context. The vast majority of recordings had been released in SP or EP formats. With regard to the popularity of a song, its airtime on the radio and/or the TV coverage of it were much more important than its sales success.
- 12.
The song Lara’s Theme (developed eventually into a vocal recording as Somewhere, My Love in the English version) was written by Maurice Jarre for the film Doctor Zhivago (GB—USA, 1965, directed by David Lean). Gott sang the song, the lyrics in German. The success of the film among a German audience in 1966 probably helped promote the song. The fact that his first success in the Western world was due to a film based on a novel of the same title by Boris Pasternak which had been banned in the entire Communist bloc can be seen as the first instance of the ideological split typical of Gott’s later career.
- 13.
Pošli to dál (Send It Along) is the title of the Czech version. Gott sang the song at the First International Festival of Dance Music in Bratislava in 1966 and received the jury award for it. The Polydor representatives saw him perform there for the first time. For the Polydor SP, they provided the lyrics in German.
- 14.
Gott eventually also sang it in Czech as Vítám vítr v údolí (Greeting the Wind in the Valley).
- 15.
The book was probably ghostwritten by Gott’s most productive author of lyrics in the 1960s, Jiří Štaidl. There is, however, no copyright notice anywhere in the book.
- 16.
In interviews after 1989, he often talked about three ‘provisional’ or ‘tested’ emigrations during these years.
- 17.
The LP ‘In mir klingt ein Lied’ (‘The Song Sounds Insideʼ, 1969) for instance. The music content was identical, but the Supraphon version has its own cover and a different sleeve note text, though published in German like the Polydor original.
- 18.
Symbolically, the title arrived just months after Gott participated actively in the regime campaign against the dissidents who signed the ‘Charter 77’ manifesto in January 1977.
- 19.
Three months before the collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia, he was awarded the Order of Friendship of Peoples by the Supreme Council of the Soviet Union. Due to the political turmoil in both countries, Gott received the medal in 1997 from the hands of the Russian ambassador in the Czech Republic.
- 20.
Some of the new titles offer, however, just updated versions of previously published books.
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Bílek, P.A. (2016). Karel Gott: The Ultimate Star of Czechoslovak Pop Music. In: Mazierska, E. (eds) Popular Music in Eastern Europe. Pop Music, Culture and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59273-6_11
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