Customer Reviews

Comrade Rockstar: The Life and Mystery of Dean Reed, the All-American Boy Who Brought Rock 'n' Roll to the Soviet Union

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I really wanted to like this book, but as it stands it is more about the author's search for Dean Reed than it is about Dean Reed himself. The author could have given more real detail about Reed, but instead she writes about her travels and the folks she meets along the way. You can read pages, almost chapters, and learn nothing about Reed. The book is dated, copyrighted 1991, and I was there in 1991 in the former Soviet Union, but the author practices her prose more than writing a biography. If you really want a Dean Reed biography check out "Rock and Roll Radical" by Chuck Laszewski.

Sorry Ms. Nadelson, your book is a dog.

Dean Reed's life is fascinating -- racing a mule across Colorado, getting a record deal from a random hitchhiker's tip en route to California, a hit record in Uruguay, living in East Germany, making cowboy films with Czech actors -- and this book unravels a fair amount of what's known of the elusive, enigmatic star.

The problem, for some readers (including me), is it's more a story of the author -- including some tired images of frightening Cold War-era border guards and bad hotels. Many of the Dean Reed quotes listed in the book actually are directly lifted from the early '80s documentary 'The American Rebel.' Often these are told as if discovered by the author herself (Reggie's a woman), going through Soviet TV shows and press clippings and translating from Russian. A little lazy.

Another tragedy of the book -- and Dean's life is ultimately cast as quite sad -- is how the author neglects to discuss, investigate, mention very many of Dean's works, particularly his music. There's talk of a Wounded Knee film he had hoped to create at the time of his mysterious death, but otherwise she dismisses his fairly interesting '70s pop songs in one swipe. You wonder if she had heard any. Again, a bit lazy.

Glad to have read it, and some will be happy enough to follow Reggie through the old Eastern Bloc, but it's a little light. I hope to get something meatier at some point.

I read this book when it first appeared and wrote a damning letter to its author. It is little better than a smear job by someone who can not understand the sincere motivations which guided this talent and unfortunately led to his tragic end. Reed deserves much better!

The title got me the moment after I saw it. This book sketches out the life of Dean Reed, who went from being a potential star in LA of the 1950s and then moved to Chile to begin his rise to a superstar behind the Red Curtain in the 60s, 70s and into the 80s. Dean was a true believer in socialism and he fully supported the USSR and East Germany, and went so far as to defend the Berlin Wall and Communism during an interview with MIke Wallace for 60 Minutes. Finding that his career was sagging with Perestroika, he began to put together a movie about the Wounded Knee and had plans to return to the US. Then, in 1986 Dean died under very mysterious and strange circumstances, his death officially being ruled an accident.

Nadelson interviews all the main players in Dean's life and gives you a good taste of what it is. She also talks about what it was like to be in East Germany, USSR and the Czech Republic during the times she interviewed those people between 1988 and 1990. Weaving the threads of Dean's life between her travelogue, the book is very compelling and an interesting look into the fall of Communism and the rise and fall of Dean Reed. The book is well written and very easy to digest. I could hardly put it down since I wanted to know more about Dean. Some parts of Dean's life are skimmed over, especially his time in Latin America between 1960 and 1966, but the author admits she was more interested in Dean in the USSR and East Germany, where she was able to get more information and material for her book and where her main focus lies.

According to the book's last chapter, Tom Hanks has optioned it for a movie. So far, nothing has been done with it, although some of Dean's music is coming out in February 2007. If you want to read a look into a strange and fascinating life during some very interesting times, read this book.

As other reviewers have noted, this book is more about the author's travels while researching the life of Dean Reed, and the people she meets along the way, but that's not necessarily bad.

It appears that as she traveled the world and interviewed people who knew Reed -- and she did engage in thorough due diligence -- it was very difficult to get a complete, straight story about Dean Reed. People who knew Reed would give vastly differing accounts of the events of his life, in some cases even claiming others were lying. Sometimes on separate occasions, the same supposed eyewitness would give highly contradictory accounts of the very same event.

With the evident difficulty of getting the straight story about Reed, even from eyewitnesses, the reporter apparently decided to report the stories from the horses' mouths, contradictions and all.

The accounts of the reporter's travels are useful in giving the reader a feel for the environment Reed operated in. While they may provide mere nostalgia for those of us with experience in the communist East Bloc, they set the scene well for readers with no such background.

Plus, the author's approach provides the reader with interesting details of the historical period that are unlikely to be found anywhere else. These include the Russian practice in the 1960s of producing illegal rock & roll records on exposed X-ray film, which the street hustler could then flex and shove up his sleeve as he peddled them. This is just priceless stuff.

There's a reason why there are several offers at amazon for this title at $0.01 -- it's a not great book, quite narcissistic about the travails of the author as much as anything substantive about Dean Reed. The second half finally gets down to some actual interviews, when the author's voice and interpretation that diminishes the book improves. It's disappointing to think what a more astute writer and interviewer could have done, but these interviews are the worthwhile parts of the book. They're skewed, of course, seems like Nadelson is on a crusade to bash Dean Reed, but one can try one's best to ignore her fairly obvious slant.
The book "Rock 'n' Roll Radical" is not so great either, but at least covers Dean's formation, his 20s and his time in Latin America. Without that fundamental background one is left hanging, and open to weird conjectures which this book here suffers from. There are a few performances on YouTube, my favorite that shows his talent is a duo with one of the Everley Brothers in East Berlin.
And what a stupid comment by the reviewer in the official blurb, by one Joanne Wilkinson writing for the American Library Association: "an American whose politics were identical with those of a Kremlin bureaucrat." Guess that makes anyone radicalized by the horror of crushing poverty in Latin America easy to dismiss because a functionary in the competing empire is happy to point out the problem as well. Cold War mindlessness dies hard. After all, that's why the bumper sticker "Who's Dean Reed?" is still relevant.

I was immediately attracked by the premise of the book: how does American Dean Reed end up in the USSR and later East Germany, and become a huge "rock star" in the Communist zone during the 70s and early 80s? I am a pretty big rock music fan, and I had never heard of Dean Reed until I read this book.

In "Comrade Rockstar" (333 pages), author Reggie Nadelson brings the life story of Dean Reed, and also writes a travel book of what her experiences were traveling in those countries in the late 80s (before the Berlin Wall fell) while doing research for the book. It is the research part that I have some doubts about, as the suthor brushes over large parts of Reed's life. (Comparw this, for example, to the pain-staking reasearch done by Bob Spitz for his recent "The Beatles: The Biography" book...) That said, having visited the USSR myself in the mid-80s, I very much enjoyed the author's observations on how life was in the USSR and East Germany in the late 80s. My main criticism of the book is that it is never really clear to me how exactly Reed became such a big star in the communist block. Reed died in 1986 under mysterious circumstances: was it suicide? was it a KGB hit? some other sucpicious interference? The final conclusions on this from the author (which I won't spoil here) come across entirely reasonable and plausible.

Finally, it should be noted that this book was first published in England in 1991. Now 15 years later, it is released in the US as well. Why? Because none other than Tom Hanks has bought the movie rights to the book. We'll have to see if it ever does reach the silver screen, but in the meantime we now can at least enjoy the book for ourselves.

Not very well written, this book was apparently written and published about 15 years back, and now reissued with some minor updating by the author, based on Tom Hanks' interest in producing a movie version of Dean Reed's life. Author Nadelson, in an engaging foreward, thanks Oscar winner Hanks for making it all happen for her. But others will feel they are paying 2006 prices for a 1991 book, that feels like it was written under water by s wildly imaginative journalist who thinks her every musing worth capturing in stone.

She did an okay job in tracking down many who had known Dean Reed, even his mother, and legendary rock figures from the 1950s who had known like Phil Everly, and folks beyond the Iron Curtain. The truth is that Dean Reed was hardly well known in the USA when he defected, and the scandal might have been bigger if he had been a bona fide star but basically he was a nothing, a never was, and it took the combined talents of the Politburo and the Russian film studios to push Dean Reed into the big time. Nadelson cleverly observes that his astonishing resemblance to US actor Kurt Russell helped his career in Russia and East Germany. Reed made eight or nine movies, hard to come by in the USA. Not all of them were propaganda pictures, some of them mere "spaghetti Westerns," but all of them -- at least the ones I've seen -- have a certain charm, for Reed had the fragile screen presence of a Brandon de Wilde, you wanted to shield him from the troubles of this world.

In real life he was a serial cheater and a man with a priapic libido who made love to four women every day. Nadelson's biography would have been much better if she had seen fit to leave out the details of her "Wuest for Corvo" investigation, for her observations about her travels in Perestroika era Moscow reveal she's no Rebecca West; it's like watching someone's endless home movies about visiting a grim place.

'Comrade Rockstar' is a genuine page-turner. I literally couldn't put it down until I finished it. Ms. Nadelson paints a vivid picture of Eastern Europe & Russia during the Cold War. She likewise gives readers a glimpse of the world of Soviet rock and roll. Music fans and history fans alike should love this book.

On top of all this is the compelling figure of Dean Reed himself. A product of 1950s America, this cross between Frankie Avalon and John Denver ended up being the biggest rock star East of the Berlin wall. Through Nadelson's studied though accessible prose, I came to feel like I knew Dean Reed---warts and all. Was Reed a Communist turncoat or simply a politically naive sucker who ended up being Mother Russia's pet American? By the end of 'Comrade Rockstar', you'll have the answer to this question. And as hard as resisting the urge to read ahead was, the real-life "cliffhanger" ending was worth the wait.

Reggie Nadelson has written a fine, balanced biography of a musician more Americans should know. I recommend it highly.