beer good
Well-Known Member
Someone once said that the cold war was won not because the US were the first to invent the H-bomb or the lunar lander, but because they invented the electric guitar.
Dean Reed was one of the biggest country/rock recording/movie stars of the 60s and 70s. If you've never heard of him, it's because he was only famous behind the Iron Curtain. In the US in the late 50s he was a third-rate Pat Boone, with one or two minor hits and TV roles; after he developed a political ideology leaning towards communism and "defected" to the East (though he kept his US passport and kept filing tax returns with the IRS), he became the ONLY American star to a hundreds of millions of people. He was young, he was sexy, he could wiggle his hips, he could spout socialist dogma - who cared if he could sing. He was THEIR American.
Ironically, though he loved the idea of glasnost and praised Gorbachev to the heavens, it killed him as an artist. Once Russians and East Germans had a taste of freedom, they didn't want a crooner who toed the party line; they wanted to do something of their own. His record sales plummeted, he wasn't welcome back in the US, and seeing the writing on the wall, as it were, he jumped in a lake three years before the wall came down.
That's the true story. Nadelson tries to piece it together by interviewing almost everyone who's come in contact with Reed, from childhood friends to party officials, and I can't help feeling that it's a waste of good material. In the hands of someone able to tie it all together, to make this a book BOTH about a man who may have been a smart opportunist or a "useful idiot" AND the role of culture and beliefs in the (decline of the) Eastern Bloc, this could have been a great book. As it is, Nadelson spends far too much time making trivial observations about Soviet hotel carpets and trying to create suspense by witholding information from the reader until the end.
But one thing is clear: even an electric guitar is fairly useless without an Elvis or a John Lennon or a Steve Jones to wield it. And Dean Reed was neither.
3/5.
Dean Reed was one of the biggest country/rock recording/movie stars of the 60s and 70s. If you've never heard of him, it's because he was only famous behind the Iron Curtain. In the US in the late 50s he was a third-rate Pat Boone, with one or two minor hits and TV roles; after he developed a political ideology leaning towards communism and "defected" to the East (though he kept his US passport and kept filing tax returns with the IRS), he became the ONLY American star to a hundreds of millions of people. He was young, he was sexy, he could wiggle his hips, he could spout socialist dogma - who cared if he could sing. He was THEIR American.
Ironically, though he loved the idea of glasnost and praised Gorbachev to the heavens, it killed him as an artist. Once Russians and East Germans had a taste of freedom, they didn't want a crooner who toed the party line; they wanted to do something of their own. His record sales plummeted, he wasn't welcome back in the US, and seeing the writing on the wall, as it were, he jumped in a lake three years before the wall came down.
That's the true story. Nadelson tries to piece it together by interviewing almost everyone who's come in contact with Reed, from childhood friends to party officials, and I can't help feeling that it's a waste of good material. In the hands of someone able to tie it all together, to make this a book BOTH about a man who may have been a smart opportunist or a "useful idiot" AND the role of culture and beliefs in the (decline of the) Eastern Bloc, this could have been a great book. As it is, Nadelson spends far too much time making trivial observations about Soviet hotel carpets and trying to create suspense by witholding information from the reader until the end.
But one thing is clear: even an electric guitar is fairly useless without an Elvis or a John Lennon or a Steve Jones to wield it. And Dean Reed was neither.
3/5.