“Everyone, including the grandchildren, has musical talent and plays something, but no one forces them to do anything,” says Ivan Hlas.
The musician, who was brought to prominence by the music for the film Years of the Jackal, experienced enormous fame, but also poverty. And also the dramatic moments when he fell ill with cancer of the vocal cords. It was a lot back then. He was in danger of losing his voice. Fortunately, the doctor chose the right treatment, partially removed the diseased vocal cord, and since other tissues were not affected, Hlas avoided radiation and is still singing today.
The director Alena Činčerová tried to capture the crucial moments of the life of Ivan Hlas on the occasion of his upcoming rounds. And right at the beginning there was a misunderstanding. “I originally thought that I would shoot a documentary about the 1970s for Czech Television. Only then did I understand that a film should be made about me,” says Ivan Hlas.
It was filmed in places where he had performed concerts in the past, but also in a bookstore where he worked for some time. He changed more than twenty professions during his life. “I don’t use the quote that I was happy with everything I was. Because it’s not true. A lot of those jobs were out of necessity. As Péťa Kalandra used to say, when the music didn’t quite work and the children fell out of their cots hungry, it was time to go to work. And they took what was at hand,” he revealed.
He had the most fun in the bookstore. He still loves books and if there is something to read, he will read three titles in a week. “It’s just that I haven’t discovered a nice new book in a long time. So I’m going back to my favorites. This is wonderfully written stuff, beautifully translated. For example East of Paradise by Steinbeck. I can’t read the originals because I don’t speak English properly, so I have to trust the translators,” said the musician.
Language deficiency does not prevent him from admiring Bob Dylan. “I’ll translate it so I know roughly what he’s singing about. But Dylan himself has now declared that there’s no need to dissect the lyrics, that singing is actually another instrument and that’s how I’ve been with him since I was young. I don’t have to understand it and yet I can admire it,” he says.
He went through rough times before he became popular. “In the mid-1980s, I was in such a situation that I had the last twenty crowns and went shopping for the family for the weekend. I was wondering what I was going to do. In the pub, the guys played cards non-stop, and I sometimes played the guitar for them in the evening. So we stopped there and the Valcharians were just playing a sheet. I tossed a coin to the king of Čahoun, winked at the boy with whom I had agreed, and he let me win two hundred crowns. I packed them up and left. I’ve never played it before,” admitted Ivan Hlas.
However, when he subsequently became famous, it was no honey either. “That was around the Jackal years. If I had been very young then, I probably wouldn’t have been able to handle the fame. But I had the advantage of being quite old. And I didn’t enjoy it. Because all of a sudden I had to be in some kind of running all the time and with people I didn’t even really know. And my friends told me: I’ll open the can, you’ll jump out. I’ll open the fridge, you’ll jump out too. It just wasn’t the same anymore. What and how I want to play. So I returned to the minority genre and it suits me,” he declared.
Among his biggest hits are Malagelo, Na kolena, Aranka can hula hop… But he doesn’t prefer any of his songs to others. He spent most of them at the cottage, where his dog Jarousek was the approver of new things. “The wife was also the main critic, but only for a certain period of time. Then she stopped enjoying it, it was probably too much for her. So now he doesn’t criticize, he just listens carefully,” says Hlas. And he adds that many of the songs were created as apologies, when he returned home after a three-day shift and was sulking. Those were also the times when his wife would have liked to kill him.
After the Velvet Revolution, Ivan Hlas signed himself up for anti-alcohol treatment. “I went there with the naive idea that we all have to change. The whole society. People laughed at me, and rightly so,” he recalls.
“Today, I have such a thing with alcohol that I like it. It relaxes me. But I know when to stop. I have a clear measure. When it is exceeded, especially in our industry, it is wrong. There is a saying: Donated shots, musician’s death. So I don’t drink you, I don’t like hard alcohol anyway. You have to know yourself how it is. Then it’s good,” describes Ivan Hlas.
And how does the director Alena Činčerová see the exceptional musician, who called her documentary A Sprinkling of Time, as was also the title of one of Ivan Hlas’s albums? “We may have met somewhere in the past, but we weren’t friends. Then when he came to me for the first time, he brought me a rose and that touched me. Not only is he a brilliant musician, lyricist and also a kind, kind person, but he is also gentle,” added the director.
