The Red Elvis

Dean Reed’s is a truly astonishing, true story. Unknown in the US, he’s the all-American boy who became a Soviet superstar during the Cold War.

Dean defected from Nashville to East Berlin, going by way of Argentina and Chile. It was in ’60s South America that he had his first number one record and picked up his Marxist politics.

Dean soon discovered he could fill arenas with fans and give rousing speeches to farmers. It made him an enemy of Peron and Pinochet and earned him a blacklisting by the CIA.

No matter, he moved on to conquer the East Bloc, with number one records in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. He starred in movies made in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. He didn’t forget his country-rock roots and kept up a long-distance friendship with Phil Everly, who once travelled to East Berlin to perform with Dean. Crossing into the East was scary, recalls Phil.

Yet in America, it’s still Dean Who? Just for starters, he’s the only American ever to have won a Lenin Prize – for rock’n'roll, no less. Along with his native English, Dean could speak Spanish, German and Russian.

In East Berlin in the 1980s, Dean Reed had it all – a lakeside villa, an East German film starlet as a wife, an Estonian actress as mistress. He toyed with a plan to tour America. But on June 12, 1986 he inexplicably disappeared, his dead body found floating in the lake four days later.

More: American Rebel (DVD), Comrade Rockstar (Paperback)

Dean with Phil Everly in Karl Marx Stadt (now Chemnitz), 1984

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