Back in the U.S.S.R.

Comrade Rockstar
by Reggie Nadelson
From the free table at work

This is a true story about an American named Dean Reed, who started out as a singer and actor in Hollywood and went on to be the biggest rock star in the Eastern Bloc. (For those of you who don't remember the Cold War, I have provided a link. May I also suggest, get yourself a copy of "The Cold War" by John Lewis Gaddis. You won't be sorry.)

The tragedy of his story is that the people of communist Europe loved him because he was American and sang rock 'n' roll (not that he had any real talent), and the Party loved him because he was a true believer. His ideology allowed the Party to present him at official entertainments (and, remember, there were only official entertainments and illegal entertainments). But the liberation that America and rock 'n' roll represented to the people of communist Europe also necessarily meant a rejection of all official things in their corrupt, oppressive regimes. If Dean Reed brought rock 'n' roll to the Eastern Bloc, he helped sow his own demise.

This is not a straight bio of the guy, though the details of his remarkable life would have made that fascinating. Someday, someone may make a big-budget biopic about him, and people will choke on their popcorn laughing at how improbable it is.

Instead, Nadelson puts herself into the story, letting us know that she was a New York "red diaper baby" (once again, for my young readers, that means her parents were communists) and letting us in on the interesting details of her international quest for information. This approach doesn't always suit the material: Reed's life was so unusual and packed with international travel and meetings with statesmen and celebrities that you sometimes wonder why so many pages are devoted to the more pedestrian details of the life of Reggie Nadelson. A lot of it is plainly filler, and there is a lot of repetition.

But by the end of the book, I started to feel that Nadelson's personal approach was the best way to tell the story. For starters, no one knows the real story of Reed's death (or, if they do know, they're not talking), so an omniscient approach would not work. But there's also the fact that to fully understand Reed's story, you must see how it fit into the fall of communism.
Reed died in 1986 and Nadelson did the bulk of her research in 1987-1989. There's one scene near the end, when she goes through the Berlin Wall's Checkpoint Charlie to visit Reed's widow, and Nadelson imagines that things will never change with this ugly wall and the East German guards' ugly attitude. Three months later, the people tore the wall down and within a couple of years, Germany was reunified. (Do yourself another favor and rent the movie "Goodbye Lenin!") As she travels through Eastern Europe during the era of Glasnost, Nadelson finds people completely disillusioned with communism -- and speaking freely about it.

Eventually, it becomes clear that Reed didn't belong in this world anymore, that he had devoted his adult life to a lie. And, by the end, I think he knew it.