Milan Hlavsa, Rock Star of a Revolution, Dies at 49

Milan Hlavsa, the founder, composer and bassist of the Plastic People of the Universe, an underground Czech rock band that galvanized a movement for human rights and democracy, died Friday at his home in Prague. He was 49.

The cause was cancer, the group's management said.

While countless rock bands tout themselves as revolutionary, the Plastic People are among the handful who can claim they changed history. The group persisted for two decades in the face of harassment and imprisonment while its members were treated as dissidents by the Communist government of Czechoslovakia during the 1970's and 80's.

When the Plastic People were arrested along with other underground Czech rockers in 1976, a coalition of students, artists and intellectuals arose to defend the band. That coalition turned into the human rights movement that brought democracy to Czechoslovakia in 1989. Yet the Plastic People, Mr. Hlavsa said in a 1988 interview, were not political. ''We were dissidents against our will,'' he said.

Mr. Hlavsa began playing rock 'n' roll as a teenager in the mid-1960's. His first band was called the New Electric Potatoes, and he also played in the Blue Monsters, the Vagabonds and the Undertakers. He started the Plastic People of the Universe in September 1968, shortly after Russian tanks rolled into Prague to install a new regime and suppress the liberalization known as Prague Spring.

The Plastic People had been listening to American bands including the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, the Mothers of Invention, the Velvet Underground, Captain Beefheart and the Fugs, and at first they played versions of their American favorites. In 1969, two members of another band, the Primitives Group, joined the Plastic People: Josef Janicek, on keyboards, and Ivan Jirous, who became the group's artistic director. Mr. Jirous wrote manifestos about a ''second culture,'' an artistic underground that would ignore the official state culture, and the Plastic People spearheaded the movement.

From 1968 to 1970, the Plastic People were recognized as professionals by the government, which provided equipment, rehearsal space and official bookings. But the group's license was revoked in 1970. So the band scrounged instruments and Mr. Janicek built homemade amplifiers using speakers from transistor radios. Members took day jobs, and the band performed free at parties and high school dances. The group's sporadic shows were hippie-style happenings. Members wore quasi-tribal costumes and warpaint or white satin gowns and had a large flying saucer and a sign proclaiming ''Jim Morrison Is Our Father'' onstage.

The Plastic People's lyrics, like the band's name, were in English at first because the band associated English with the sound of rock 'n' roll. A Canadian graduate student, Paul Wilson, joined the band from 1970 to 1972 as vocalist, guitarist and Czech-to-English translator for lyrics until, in the early 1970's, the band began singing in Czech.

In 1972 the saxophonist Vratislav Brabenec, who was a generation older than the other band members and steeped in modern jazz, joined the Plastic People on the condition that they perform their own material exclusively. Mr. Hlavsa came up with music that merged Slavic dissonances with his own adamant bass lines and a psychedelic drone; Mr. Brabenec's saxophone pushed toward free jazz, while Jiri Kabes added caustic viola lines.

Their first album, ''Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned,'' was released by Czech emigres in France; the lyrics were by Egon Bondy, a poet who had been banned since the Russian invasion. Later, Mr. Brabenec wrote most of the lyrics. The Plastic People's songs were generally surreal and black-humored -- only one, ''Hundred Points,'' was openly political -- but any deviation from the optimism of official culture was risky. In 1973, Mr. Hlavsa started a side project: DG307, an avant-gardist collaboration with the poet Pavel Zajicek.

The Plastic People's professional status was reinstated in 1973, only to be rescinded two weeks later. The Prague booking agency ruled that the band's music was morbid and would have a ''negative social impact'' on Czech youth.

The group was allowed to perform only at private events. Since Czech law allowed couples to book their own wedding entertainment, many of the Plastic People's friends got married.

''We felt more like a guerrilla group than a rock 'n' roll band,'' Mr. Hlavsa said in 1989. ''We didn't play this role intentionally -- it was forced upon us from outside.''

As early as 1971, the police had interrogated band members, and in 1973 Mr. Jirous served a 10-month prison sentence for calling an old man a ''baldheaded Bolshevik.'' In 1974, the police stopped a scheduled Plastic People concert in South Bohemia before it began. They rounded up fans, beat many, expelled dozens from school and imprisoned six.

In 1976, after rockers presented what they called a festival of the second culture, the police cracked down further. In a sweep of the rock underground, there were 27 arrests. The Plastic People's equipment was seized, along with many people's photos, tapes and books; more than 100 people were interrogated. Seven received prison terms for ''organized disturbance of the peace,'' including Mr. Zajicek, Mr. Brabenec and Mr. Jirous.

Intellectuals, including the playwright Vaclav Havel, publicly supported the musicians. The intellectuals' response became a formal human rights movement named Charter 77. ''Before the trial, the circles of the writers and the poets and the artists were separate,'' Mr. Brabenec said in 1989. ''Afterward, they worked together.''

The Plastic People continued to perform and record despite increasing police pressure. Mr. Jirous was arrested repeatedly and spent much of the 1980's in jail for such offenses as reading a protest poem in public. The band's music became bleaker, more gnarled and more elaborate.

''When you only play twice a year, there is plenty of time to work on the music,'' Mr. Hlavsa said in 1989. The Plastic People recorded the albums ''Passion Play'' and ''Leading Horses'' on Mr. Havel's farm, which the secret police then burned down. Mr. Brabenec emigrated to Canada in 1982 after repeated arrests, interrogations and threats.

Yet the Plastic People continued to perform when they could through the 1980's. They made one more album, ''Midnight Mouse,'' in December 1987; it was released by a company in the Netherlands. There were hints from the government in 1987 that the band would be allowed to perform, either as the Plastic People or under another name, and possibly to tour abroad. But in 1988 the group fragmented.

Mr. Hlavsa formed a new group, Pulnoc (Czech for midnight), which included Mr. Janicek and Mr. Kabes, and in the spring of 1989 it toured the United States. It was the eve of what Czechs called the Velvet Revolution, which forced the hard-line Communist government from power in November 1989. Mr. Havel became president of Czechoslovakia.

Pulnoc recorded an album, ''City of Hysteria,'' in New York City in 1991. The Plastic People reunited in 1997 to mark the 20th anniversary of Charter 77 and recorded a live album. In 1999, the group toured the United States and performed with Lou Reed from the Velvet Underground at the White House before Presidents Clinton and Havel.

Mr. Hlavsa had surgery for lung cancer in May 2000. He was rehearsing new music with the Plastic People when he became ill again and doctors discovered that the cancer had spread to his brain. He is survived by his wife, Jana Nemcova; a son, Stepan; a daughter, Magdalena; a brother, Vaclav; and his mother.

''Rock 'n' roll is the medium to express the situation of man in this world and the world to come,'' Mr. Hlavsa said in 1989. ''We don't do the music just for the sake of music. You must be the author of your own life.''