Comrade Rockstar

by Реджи Нейделсон

  The 60 Minutes crew shot a huge amount of footage over three days. They shot around the Alexanderplatz, near the Berlin Wall, in Schmockwitz. They shot film of Renate, Dean, and Sasha. Wallace generously let me look at the out-takes. It was compelling stuff.

  Towards the end of the three days, the Reeds and the 60 Minutes people were shooting in the Reed house in Schmockwitz. Renate spoke with great passion to Wallace about Dean and his causes.

  "You are just as eloquent and just as much an idealist as your husband," said Wallace.

  Then Dean talked about Germany. Dean insisted that travel was not a priority for most people. Wallace asked why he thought so many East Germans wanted to go to the West and Dean was silent. Wallace told him that ten to fifteen thousand East Germans emigrated every year and that a million more wanted exit visas and that the East Germans traded political prisoners with the West for hard currency every year, like cattle, at between $15,000 and $40,000 a head. Dean said he was unaware of such exchanges.

  Dean asserted that there was freedom to worship under Communism and he and Wallace talked about his career. Dean grew a little testy.

  "I don't like being called the Johnny Cash of Communism," he said. "I'm Dean Reed."

  "But you know what it means."

  "I know that it means they're trying to say that Dean is as famous there as Johnny Cash is here... They call me the Red Sinatra as well. It bothers me because I'm not the Red Sinatra... I'm Dean Reed and I'm a very very popular man."

  Dean told Wallace how much he missed America. He said he stayed in East Germany because he loved Renate.

  Wallace asked, "Why do you become the captive of the women with whom you have spent your time?"

  "Aren't we all captives of our women, Mike?"

  "The main motivation of your life is what?" Wallace asked.

  "Love," answered Dean.

  "We've heard your cowboy songs. We've heard various songs. Would you sing 'My Yiddishe Momma'?"

  "That is one of my favorite songs, Mike. I've sung it, for my mother, in every country of the world. My mother is not Jewish, but I think this song is one of the most beautiful songs of all time for a mother," said Dean.

  "I understand you had some difficulties with that song in the Soviet Union."

  Dean nodded. On Dean's second tour in the Soviet Union, a little man who said he was from the Ministry of Culture told Dean it was forbidden to sing "Yiddishe Momma." Dean told him that Lenin would rollover in his grave if he had heard him say that because no Marxist could be anti-Semitic and, though he, Dean, did not agree with Zionism, he loved the Jewish people. He had even said this to Yasser Arafat.

  He told him, "Yasser, I always include 'Yiddishe Momma'."

  "That's OK, Dean," Arafat said. "I have nothing against the Jewish people."

  So Dean told the little man from the Ministry of Culture that if he was forbidden to sing "Yiddishe Momma" he would leave the Soviet Union and never return. Mme. Furtseva, the Minister of Culture, who had once tried and almost succeeded in getting the Beatles a Soviet date, came to see him a few days later.

  "Dean, it was all a terrible mistake," she said. "Of course, you can sing anything you want to in our country." She added, "If anybody ever tells you to change something that you say or do, you come to me and I'll hit them over the head."

  "You sang it?" Mike Wallace said to Dean.

  "I sang it. And I continue singing it," Dean said, "I do it a cappella."

  "Oh, perfect. Do it a cappella," said Wallace.

  "Can I sing it 'Yiddishe Poppa' and sing it to you?"

  "You can," Wallace said.

  That night, when they talked, Dean told Dixie that he had sung for Mike Wallace and that Wallace had cried. "We did three days' shooting," Dean said. "Then he came into the house and we shot for four hours. "You know, Mr. Reed, I wasn't expecting a man as intelligent as you," Mike had said. "We're going to do the portrait of you now, twenty minutes from Dean."

  Dixie thought it was neat.

  In his office at CBS, Mike Wallace scanned a letter from Dean.

  "He concludes by saying, 'And maybe we can also solve the problem of the "Yiddishe Poppa,'" Wallace said.

  "What does that mean?" I said. I wanted to hear Wallace's version.

  "I'm a non-practicing, non-religious Jew. A bad Jew." Wallace smiled. "I was incredibly moved and I nearly burst into tears. After that, frankly, the piece was really a valentine to Dean. Sitting there in East Berlin with this cowboy from Colorado... there was this terrific yearning in him to come home."

  The 60 Minutes piece was scheduled to go out the following fall, so Dean put it at the back of his mind after Mike Wallace left Berlin. In the six weeks that followed Wallace's visit, Dean was increasingly busy, preparing his movie, recording music, on the road playing concert dates.

  There were more calls and letters between Schmockwitz and Colorado. In March, Dean wrote to Johnny, "Sorry if I don't write. There are TV shows and films. I'm damn tired and I feel old at times... Fifty will be coming along... Keep your fingers crossed for Mike [Wallace], ex-Mack the Knife." To Dixie, he wrote, "60 Minutes is not finished yet. Did I tell you? I spoke to Mike Wallace. They're gonna hold it until the fall, when they will have the biggest public," said Dean. It was early April.

  "Beautiful," said Dixie.

  As usual, Dixie and Dean bantered and giggled down the phone.

  "'You have a beautiful day," Dixie would say.

  "Have a nice week," said Dean.

  "Say, I love me," Dixie said, signing off.

  On April 20, 1986, 60 Minutes went on the air with the piece about Dean Reed. For one reason or another, maybe scheduling, it was not held over until the autumn but went out in April. That night, Dean was fast asleep in Moscow and had no idea that the piece was on the air.

  I was at home in New York, watching 60 Minutes that night. Johnny and Mona Rosenburg sat in their living room in Loveland, glued to the TV. The title of the piece on Dean came up. It was called "The Defector." Sweet Jesus, thought Johnny. Dear God.

  The resonant voice of Mike Wallace began the piece: "When we think about Americans who defect to the other side of the Iron Curtain, we usually think about traitors or spies. Dean Reed is neither. Colorado born, American bred, he now lives in East Berlin, just because he likes it better over there. An entertainer who's become the Soviet version of a superstar. He sings. He acts. And he speaks with what seems to be genuine conviction to the Soviet line. The Kremlin has even rewarded him with their Konsomol, Lenin Prize. There is just one thing missing for him. He yearns to duplicate his success behind the Iron Curtain with a similar success back home."

  There were shots of Dean's concerts. There were lovely shots of Dean and Renate in matching sheepskin jackets, walking hand in hand in the woods near their house and talking with Mike Wallace. When Dean sat down with Mike Wallace to talk, Wallace asked, "You equate Ronald Reagan with Joseph Stalin?"

  "I equate the possibilities of Ronald Reagan with Stalin. I say he has the possibilities to do the same injustices and much more, by incinerating this planet through an atomic war."

  Wallace asked, "Do you think Mr. Gorbachev is a more moral man, a more peace-loving man than Ronald Reagan?"

  Dean nodded.

  "Why was the Wall put up in the first place?" asked Mike Wallace.

  "The Wall - the Berlin Wall - was put up to defend the population in the first place," said Dean.

  Johnny just sat there and listened to Dean defend that Wall and it burned his butt so bad! He could feel himself wanting to be sick. Johnny was in a rage; he felt his knuckles go white as Dean denied that East Germany was a colony of the Soviet Union. Dean talked about maybe being a senator from Colorado... if Gary Hart was going on to the Presidency, why not?

  Johnny was horrified. "I think it was the next day I called him to tell him it had been shown over here, and I said to him, 'It has done nothing for you here, Dean. The one thing you can't do is defend that Wall in this country.' And he so
rt of laughed and said, 'Well, I guess I'm going to have to come back and explain things.' And I fired back at him, 'Well, if you do that, you better wear a bullet-proof vest.'"

  21

  In November of 1988, I went to Leningrad to see Boris Grebenshikov play a rock concert. Grebenshikov was the first authentic homegrown Russian rock star, and his band was playing in the USSR in public with Western musicians. AQUARIUM AND FRIENDS '88, the show was called. Fifty rubles a ticket on the black market.

  Jo Durden-Smith, who had been with Leslie Woodhead and me on our first trip to Moscow, was making a documentary about Grebenshikov. Leslie was hoping to film some of the concert himself to use as background for the Dean Reed drama-documentary. I was interested in the music because in some ways the increasing popularity of Russian rock written and performed by young Russians had eventually made Dean Reed irrelevant.

  In that April of 1986 after 60 Minutes was broadcast, when Johnny sat in his shed in Loveland chewing his liver and trying to convey to Dean how angry he was, what was mostly worrying Dean was that he was feeling old.

  He worried about his voice failing; he worried he was too old to be a pop star; he realized that the Soviets and even some of the Eastern European countries had their own fresh music, their own young stars, local kids. Even Dean's own stepson, Sasha, didn't like his music. He wrote to Dixie, "Sasha calls me 'old man'." He sent her a picture of himself and wrote a note saying hopefully that he thought he looked rather young. "Oh, it is nice to have a baby face," Dean wrote. He was forty-seven.

  "Guess what?" Leslie said as our Aeroflot plane lurched through a winter storm.

  "What?"

  He looked around the interior of the plane, and at the window and smiled knowingly.

  "Guess," he said again.

  But I closed my eyes, then opened them, terrified as the plane fell through some hideous air pocket. Outside the window it was black.

  Leslie smiled at the stewardess, who did not smile back, but delivered a tray with a cup containing what tasted like swimmingpool water and a single toffee in greasy waxed paper that passed for lunch. Several drunks, cans of beer in hand, roamed the aisle.

  How dull travel in the Soviet Union would be one day without the terrors of Aeroflot and without the drunks, the horrible hotels, and the listening devices. Small talk would dwindle badly; dinner parties would grind to a halt.

  The plane shuddered. I closed my eyes and thought of photographs of Dean Reed's early trips to Russia. He was always moving, in a plane with fur-hatted commissars, jumping out of a plane door after it landed, standing on top of a big Russian express train, riding backwards, and strumming his guitar and singing Woody Guthrie songs. "This train," Dean sang astride the moving cars.

  Now, the Aeroflot plane bumped to a halt on the runway and we got out and trudged into the terminal, which resembled something from the 1950s. It was three in the morning. Jo Durden-Smith was waiting to meet us because he had arrived earlier, and in a blinding snowstorm we somehow got to the Pribaltiskaya, a modem hotel on the outskirts of town. It was very depressing, Soviet Modern, probably circa 1980. It had endless corridors with ugly patterned carpet. Every time you turned a corner, you tripped over a drunken Finn.

  Helsinki's drinking laws had become so draconian - the politicians were trying to get the people to dry out a little - that on weekends a lot of men flew into Leningrad, hired some girls, got laid, got drunk, vomited, and passed out where they were, sometimes in the hotel corridors. They lay there until they sobered up enough to get up and go home. That night I didn't care. I wanted a bed. In my room, I fell asleep with half my clothes still on.

  The next morning, I went looking for Art Troitsky, who had come from Moscow to Leningrad to meet us. I gave him a bottle of Advocaat liqueur I'd bought in the duty-free shop on the way out. We had coffee in the dining room, and Art said he had just been to London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and Graceland, and that he had enjoyed the West. Still, he said, he wished he had escaped the USSR illicitly in the bad old days, wished he had done it in a balloon. Traveling business class on a 747 seemed pretty tame to Art and even though this was one of his conceits, the rock life was becoming a little dull for him.

  Once rock and roll had been a dangerous game; Art's writings were banned; people were condemned for listening to what was called "Musical Aids." Now in 1988, even the apparatchiks were listening to the metallisti.

  "Hmm, Metal," they would say, stroking their chins. "Very interesting."

  "My Father is a Fascist" was currently the biggest hit in Leningrad.

  After breakfast, we went over to the sports stadium where the concert would take place. Around the makeshift stage were half a dozen British musicians in leather pants, shades, and ear studs; they lolled among the lights, amplifiers, guitars, trunks, suitcases, backpacks, drums, and cases of Perrier that had been trucked in overland from Helsinki. Dozens of film people lurked, waiting for orders from Michael Apted, the director of the documentary. Apted wandered around, the local rock promoter in his wake. The rock guy introduced himself to everyone as Fat Lev. "All you need is Lev, eh?" he said to everyone he met.

  Even Fat Lev couldn't supply black paint, though. There were tons of equipment, but no black paint for the stage, not a single can in Leningrad, an industrial city of four million people.

  Leslie Woodhead had imported yet another crew to shoot the footage he wanted for the Dean Reed drama-documentary, and his production manager, Craig McNeill, wandered around the sports stadium, with a pair of cowboy boots under his arm, looking for a Dean Reed stand-in. Everyone was drinking coffee and complaining about the hotels and the black paint and the weather, and wondering if the Russian musicians would ever show up.

  The Russians were late, except for the cellist, who sat on the stage, sawing at his instrument like a dentist trying to get at a difficult tooth.

  Keeping order, more or less, was Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. A small hirsute man, Dave had produced Boris Grebenshikov's first Western album.

  The percussionist was Ray Cooper. A big man in a fine suit with a shaved head, Ray kept his drumsticks in a silver champagne cooler. It was Ray's second trip to the USSR: he had been on tour with Elton John in 1979, the first Soviet tour by a Western rock superstar. From time to time, Ray went to the Kirov Ballet with his roadie.

  Cooper started testing his cymbals. He made me think of the man in the title sequence of J. Arthur Rank movies. As if in response, Boris Grebenshikov appeared. He was four hours late.

  Slim, pale, with big Slavic lips and long blond hair, Boris was thirty-five and he could look incredibly plain, or light himself up and be unspeakably handsome. While Dean was promiscuous with his smile, Boris saved his up, waited, watched, held back, letting it come very slowly. I introduced myself; we had almost met in New York. For a second more, he calculated the smile, then he gave it all away. He had really nice manners.

  "Yes, I know your name quite well," he said politely when we were introduced, though I was pretty sure he didn't know who the hell I was at all.

  Meeting Boris made me really understand how out of date Dean Reed must have seemed, how much his star had faded. Dean became an official superstar in the Soviet Union because he was American and because of his looks, because he seemed forbidden. He was, in fact, official. He not only spouted the Party line, he was also a believer. But towards the end of his life his music seemed dated; he was yesterday's man. I saw a clip from a TV program Dean made in Moscow not long before his death. He wore a kind of silky waistcoat and a shirt with puffy sleeves, an outfit a disco guy of the 1970s might have worn. Oleg Smirnoff did the translating.

  "We are not too old," Dean said to the audience. "I know how old you are and I think we should be symbols to the young people." He smiled. Then he did a little dance routine to the tune from Ghostbusters and the audience, in a desultory way, joined in. It was one of the saddest things I ever saw.

  Boris Gribenshikov, the mathematics student who became the first authen
tic Russian rocker, was young and he was good. His earliest memories were of the distant sound of the Beatles, the illicit seductive crackle of great Western music broadcast by the Voice of America. Boris was a rebel because nothing else gave him peace. If Dean had become a star by joining the mainstream, Boris became a star by inhabiting the underground, the unofficial world. In the years when Dean was on officially approved tours across the USSR, Boris, like a character out of a Dostoevsky novel, wandered the Leningrad streets after dark, looking for trouble and finding it.

  In 1980, at a concert in Tblisi, he had famously lain down on the stage embracing his Fender Stratocaster. He got up a legend.

  "When Boris lay down on the stage holding his guitar on his stomach, the entire judging committee stood up and left the hall," Art Troitsky said. "The officials said, why did you bring those faggots here?"

  People who said they believed in the spiritual wrote to Boris to ask about his karma. Kids regularly crossed the Soviet Union, two, three, eight time zones, to see Boris. They climbed the stairs to his sixth-floor squat on Sofia Pereovskaya Street in Leningrad, where they wrote poetry on the walls and where Boris kept a picture of the Beatles in his place as a kind of shrine. He believed in the spiritual. He believed in the Beatles.

  Boris and his band, Aquarium, made great music, they could play any style. It was Boris's lyrics - religious, sentimental, satirical, and utterly Russian - that made him a hero; next to a good melody, which is why Russians fell so obsessively in love with the Beatles, they were crazy about good lyrics. It was a long way from Dean Reed's stuff, the early pap like "Twirly Twirly" and the platitudes of his political numbers.

  Boris Grebenshikov was the perfect hero for his generation, for whom the significance of rock and roll was intense, emotional, political in the widest sense, and practically religious. Break the rules, the rock mantra went. Keep the faith. As Art Troitsky put it, it gave a generation its identity.

  "It meant fight your parents," Art said. "It meant: you are free to do what you want, no matter what the seniors say. It was a form of fighting back, a reaction to oppression, a catalyst for change. It taught people how to be themselves and how to oppose the rules."