Olympic – "Jen Bůh ví" (1968)

The one who falls asleep at night

Will he wake up?

Only God knows

(I didn’t worry about this kind of stuff when I was young.)

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Earlier this year, a y-u-g-e fan of 2 or 3 lines invited yours truly to see a true icon of Czech rock music perform at the Czech Embassy.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release announcing that event:

The Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences is organizing a benefit concert to support its activities in the Greater Washington DC area.  

The concert will feature legendary Czech rock musician, Petr Janda from the Czech rock group Olympic, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.  

Petr Janda

Janda, who is touring the East Coast, has graciously accepted our invitation to perform at the Czech Embassy.  

Beer will be offered at the event so mark your calendars.  

To paraphrase Renee Zellweiger in Jerry Maguire, you had me at “Beer will be offered at the event”!

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The good news is that the beer at the Petr Janda event came from a very good local craft brewery.  

The better news is that it was free!

The bad news is that the kegs must have been mishandled prior to the event because the beer that was coming out of those kegs was 99.9% foam.

(Just like me!)

I stood in line for what seemed like hours watching as the servers filled plastic cup after plastic cup with foam.  A cup of foam takes several minutes to settle down, and when it does, there’s only about one inch of beer in the cup.  So they would fill the cup with more foam and wait . . . and wait . . . and wait.  (Rinse and repeat – you get the picture.)

I hate to look a gift beer in the mouth, but you simply can’t promise free beer unless you’re sure you can deliver on that promise!

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A lesser man might have pouted in such a situation.  But 2 or 3 lines isn’t going to act like a whiny little b*tch in front of one of his biggest fans – especially when that fan is a stylish and beautiful Czech-born woman who could not say enough nice things about my wildly popular little blog.

So I swallowed my impatience and eventually was able to grab a couple of almost-foamless beers for myself and my companion, who passed theme while I was in the beer line chatting away happily with several expat friends she had run into.

Later I glimpsed a tear in my fan’s eye as she listened to one of Janda’s ballads.  I wondered if that song had brought to mind some bittersweet remembrance of her younger days in Prague.

But there are some things a gentleman doesn’t ask a lady.  So I sipped my beer and left my friend to her memories.

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Olympic was founded in Prague in 1962, and is still active today.  The most recent of the group’s two dozen albums was released in 2020.

Petr Janda is Olympic’s frontman and principal songwriter.  He celebrated his 81st birthday on May 2, but is still going strong – he’s sort of a Czech Mick Jagger.

“Jen Bůh ví” – usually translated as “Only God Knows” – was released in 1968 on Olympic’s debut album, Želva (or Turtle):

Click here to listen to “Jen Bůh ví.”

Click here to buy that record from Amazon.