Book description
Dean Reed was an American and the biggest rock star in the history of
the Soviet Union. He was so famous his icons were sold alongside those
of Josef Stalin. Reggie Nadelson first saw him in 1986 on a TV chat
show. Few people in the West had ever heard of him. Six weeks later
Reed was found dead in a lake in East Berlin. Was he murdered by the
CIA? The KGB? A jealous husband? Nobody knew. Commissioned to write a
film about him, she chased the mystery of his life and death across
America and Eastern Europe, her own journey mirroring his.
For a quarter of a century, from 1961 to 1986, Dean Reed, his guitar
on his back, took the music with him. He played 32 countries: his
albums went gold from Bulgaria to Berlin. The Russians gave him a
Lenin Prize. He was their American. Comrade Rockstar is not just the
story of Dean Reed's progress from Hollywood starlet to Cold War
Cowboy, but an account of the search that took Reggie Nadelson from
Denver to Berlin, and from Hawaii to Moscow. As she travelled, the
Berlin Wall was breached and Dean Reed became an increasingly alluring
figure, his life an unrepeatable tale from the Cold War. Encountering
the characters who peopled Dean Reed's world, she was caught in the
seedy, sometimes moving, often hilarious subculture, of sex, politics
and rock 'n' roll.
Reggie Nadelson is a New Yorker who also lives in London. She is the
author of six novels featuring the detective Artie Cohen. Comrade
Rockstar is to be made into a film starring Tom Hanks.
