After a two-record stint with Amiga, the Renft Combo was abruptly disbanded by the state's music licensing board, upon the instruction of the Stasi, for its perfidious lyrics and lewd performances. And when two of its members were presented with offers of conciliation-a promise of anointed status in exchange for total subservience to the state-they heroically refused and were sentenced to prison. In typical totalitarian fashion, Renft's records were expunged from the state record label's catalog; the band was curtly informed that it "no longer existed."
Reed was comfortably housed in a suburban Berlin villa; the Renft band was caged in the notoriously brutal Stasi-operated prison Hohenschönhausen. Reed, the Russian music critic Art Troitsky rightly notes, was a traitor to the very ideals of rock 'n' roll.
Reed apparently never noticed the rather obvious disconnect between the Soviet notion of communism as the creator and liberator of art and the GDR's aggressive attempts to portray him as an authentic purveyor of a capitalist art form. When rock music was establishing its anti-authority credentials in America, Reed was attempting to adapt it to authoritarianism. With characteristic understatement, the socialist folk singer Pete Seeger observed that Reed "allowed the Soviets to boost him to ‘stardom' and found out too late what a trap that can be."
While cruising through a Soviet Union in its death throes, Nadelson confesses that she too is gripped by a sort of ostalgie. "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," she writes. The rock underground-once the counterrevolutionary vanguard, the contra-Dean Reed-was suddenly devoid of meaning. "As a political act, as the music that let you declare your otherness, when the state withdrew its opposition, rock and roll lost its heart," Nadelson writes, suggesting that oppression alone is the motor of great art and, in one sentence, nullifying her sympathy for Reed.
In a new afterword, Nadelson lets the reader in on a little secret: Tom Hanks has purchased the film rights to Comrade Rockstar. Dean Reed, the proletarian "rock star," may finally get the American star treatment he so craved, courtesy of the Hollywood system he so despised.
Michael C. Moynihan (michaelm@timbro.se) is a fellow at Timbro, a free market think tank in Sweden.
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