Outside of the city center, Prague can resemble a ghost town on summer weekends, with everyone gone to the family chata. Even those belonging to the subculture fringe have chatas, or at least access to them. And festivals tend to be held in the seclusion of tree-lined fields, with audiences preferring to camp in the mud and cow pies rather than remain in the urban heat.

So why in the world would someone believe they can change the flow of the weekend exodus with a tiny little fest on the industrial outskirts of Prague at an outdoor venue where the landscape is a car cemetery? Simple. Bands with trouble-making reputations are something no anarcho-punk would want to miss.

Case in point: the Adicts, who were in the midst of a full-scale riot that broke out earlier this year at a British Invasion 2006 show in California. Incited by the presence of aggressive neo-Nazi skinheads mixing it up with punks chanting "No White Power," the melee drew the San Bernadino police, who descended like Darth Vader's stormtroopers, tear-gassing the venue inside and out. The fracas prompted The Adicts to issue a disclaimer of sorts: "We condemn the minority of people who came to this concert and incited trouble. ... We are a fun-time band, one that prides itself on happiness and family values."

It's an interesting statement coming from a band that dresses like the droogs in the Stanley Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange. The Adicts, who still have their original lineup from the late '70s, regard it more as a response to teenage angst than a message of implied violence, although at present they're far from being teenagers.

Whatever their intentions, The Adicts really are a fun-time band on stage, and purportedly off, as evidenced by a colleague's recollection of waking up after an Adicts concert on her floor, disheveled, drum stick in hand, her body riddled with electrical shocks voluntarily incurred the night before.

Sharing the Saturday program with The Adicts is Zona Á, a Slovak band formed in 1984 under the less-than-friendly communist regime. Regularly hounded by the secret police for its musical and lyrical content and forbidden to play outside the country, the band nonetheless managed to hold fast to its ideals. Even after being offered a state record deal by the sanctioned record company OPUS, members refused due to the state's requirement of lyrical censorship. As a result, they retained their popularity and still have a growing fan base.

Few bands are half as fun, familial and firm as MDC, a name that's been twisted into many permutations: Millions of Dead Children, Male-Dominated Culture, Marine Death Corps and of course everyone's favorite, Millions of Dead Cops. Sporting the original lineup from 25 years ago, MDC's Ex-Con Ron, Al Schvitz, Mikey Offender and in particular Dave Dictor have been a consistent reference point for contemporary punk, hardcore and Oi! bands. Well appreciated for its lyrical and varying musical style as much as the song titles (like their premiere single, "John Wayne was a Nazi"), MDC specifically influenced fest-mates Oi Polloi, a group that credits Dictor for turning listeners on to "the evils of capitalism, multinational corporations and meat-eating."

Oi Polloi also credits seminal crust-punk (the genre name closely resembling the physical description) bands Discharge and the collective-driven Crass for the band's bad attitude. Oi Polloi members sometimes sing in their native Celtic language, and are no strangers to the use of retaliatory force. In regard to neo-Nazi uprisings, Oi Polloi singer DEGZ confided to a fanzine, "You would have to be pretty stupid to think that you can stop [neo-Nazis] with pacifism. So I think we've a duty to promote physical self-defense in these contexts."