Dean Reed, Remembered



Friday's Guardian features an excerpt from Reggie Nadeldon's "Comrade Rockstar", a biography of the Cold War pop idol Dean Reed, an American rocker of modest talents who fashioned a career of sorts behind the Iron Curtain.

In the mid-1960s, Soviet officials were on the lookout for acceptable entertainers to keep the kids in line. Nikolai Pastoukhov, a Moscow journalist, wasn't expecting much in the way of young blood at the World Peace Conference in Helsinki in 1965. The conference was a mess, Russians and Chinese not speaking, delegates yelling, a fistfight in the offing.

Suddenly a young man jumped on to the podium and started playing his guitar and singing. He made everyone hold hands and sing We Shall Overcome. His name was Dean Reed.

Here was this handsome American who espoused socialism but sang peace songs. Pastoukhov thought Bingo! (Or the Soviet equivalent.) And he helped set Reed's first trip to the USSR in motion.




Reed was 28 in 1966 when he played Moscow's Variety Theatre. He sang folk songs and show tunes like Maria, a big favourite in the Soviet Union. He could do the Twist; he moved like a rock'n'roller.

It was electric. For an encore he sang Ghost Riders in the Sky; it became his signature tune. Eventually, when he started playing countries in what one Soviet journalist called the "socialist camp", Reed sang it for Yasser Arafat, who could be seen on film tapping his fingers.

In reporting Reed's performances, Pravda noted that "Dean Reed left his own country as a sign of protest against the unjust US war in Vietnam." Soon he had a recording contract with Melodiya, the state recording company that had never before issued a rock'n'roll record.




On his first tour of the Soviet Union, Reed played 28 cities. People mobbed him. Still based in Latin America, he went back to the USSR repeatedly, for concerts, as a peace delegate. Everyone I ever met in the Soviet Union remembered Reed; even now, ask any Russian older than 40 and they say, "Ah, yes, Dean-rid. I remember!"

"Dean couldn't go out of the house without being mobbed," said Everly, who had once visited him in east Berlin, where they played a concert together. "Man, he was bigger than Elvis."

Was he talented? He had a pleasant voice, and he could whack away at the guitar; he could act a bit. But it didn't matter. Nobody understood the meaning of Dean Reed, his rise and fall, better than Artemy Troitsky, the Soviet Union's first and best rock critic, author of Back in the USSR.

"No living western performer of rock'n' roll ever came to the Soviet Union," Troitsky said. "Dean Reed was young. He played guitar. He was American. Rock 'n' roll meant a lot to absolutely every Soviet kid. It made them feel free and different from their parents. It was also like a door into another way of life, into the west. We didn't care about politics, but we did care about what an awful thing is official Soviet pop music," Troitsky said. "The west was something good. And Dean Reed wore cowboy boots and he came from the land of the free and the home of the brave and Chuck Berry."

For the next six years, Reed commuted between South America, Europe and the Soviet Union. He made spaghetti westerns, including one with Yul Brynner, was briefly a Maoist in Rome, and recorded in Prague where the best rock musicians in the east worked. Still, he remained largely unknown in the west, hidden behind the Berlin wall. (He kept his US passport; he filed his tax forms with the IRS annually, he wasn't really a defector at all.) If he'd had more real talent as a singer or an actor, maybe it would have been different, maybe he would have been more visible. But his talent was in who he was, an American over there ; his talent was in the curious combination of music and politics, sex, drive, sheer presence.

Posted: Fri - October 29, 2004 at 01:26 AM      

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