Drunks on stage – Echo24.cz
In the rock club in Brno, a nice waitress was handing out the chef’s specialty – niva balls. She had red hair and looked a bit like Giulietta Masina, Fellini’s muse, so I ordered a bunch of them to make her happy. The hot pepper with which the goodies were decorated definitely lifted me from the lethargy and feeling of hopelessness caused by the fact that after fifty years of work and years of concerts in Brno, about nine spectators came and all of them are known personally. I should probably also remember the sound engineer, although maybe once, when he was playing some of my concerts in Brno, he was less tangled in his long gray hair and beard. I also looked completely different then…
Fueled by hot peppers, I climbed onto the stage and began to play. After a few songs, a drunk came out of nowhere, started dancing and shouting his notes to my songs. He seemed to like me, but I didn’t like him. I have had the worst experiences with drunks in the hall, in many years of performing. I couldn’t concentrate on the lyrics, so I ended up walking off the stage and told him that I understand how difficult it is for him, but that I hope I can make it. And I called a break a little earlier than usual.
For the first time, a drunkard climbed onto my stage already at the Theater in Nerudovka, sometime in the late seventies. It was Vladimír Merta, he pretended to be a bar dancer, and it crushed me because I admired and loved him deeply at the time. When we once performed with Jiří Dědeček in the Ateliér theater, we played a cabaret drama, one of the main ideas of which was the fight against violence. Once a drunken guy started rampaging in the audience and didn’t let himself be told until an enraged member of the Czechoslovak Army forcibly threw him out into the street. It was then that I understood that fighting violence begets violence.
A few years later, I was attacked on stage in Bzenec, in front of about three hundred spectators, by a man devastated by alcohol and said: “I’ll finish it with you here!” I tried to see him off, but he wouldn’t let go. I started calling out to the audience, “Someone help me, this guy has no business being here!” Nothing. Finally, I carried him backstage by the flag and when he tried to come back, I kicked him. “He who throws a stone at you, you throw a pebble at him!” I remembered my mother’s saying. After the concert, I asked a friend who was sitting in the crowd: “Why on earth didn’t you at least help me?” “You looked so convincing that I thought it was part of your performance,” he replied. That’s probably why no one else came to my aid either, I told myself and promised myself that I wouldn’t be so persuasive in the future, even though I don’t know how I’ll do it.
I don’t like drunks. Even though I may find someone cute, I don’t like them. I myself never drink before or during a performance, even if the company is the most excited and doesn’t care what I sing.
Only once in the more than five thousand concerts did I cancel it. On Hluboká. We played outside and it was cold and freezing. The audience kept bringing me more and more grog to warm me up. And I had a drink and he was incredibly funny and funny afterwards. Well, except for the fact that I was the only one laughing at my own jokes.
Lately, probably not only the audience, but also the drunks have been dating someone else, so the collision with alcohol in the Brno club seemed a little surreal to me. After the break, the drunk didn’t show up again, and the waitress, as I was paying her for more and more balls of niva, said, “It was a nice evening today, Mr. Burian. Thank you.”
“Thank you too”, I thought. “And hello Mr. Chef. Those hot peppers, that was a hit!’