Red Elvis: the strange tale of the Soviets' favorite rock 'n' roll star.

• Author: Moynihan, Michael C.
• Position: Book review

Comrade Rockstar: The Life and Mystery of Dean Reed, the All-American Boy Who Brought Rock 'n' Roll to the Soviet Union, by Reggie Nadelson, New York: Walker & Company, 352 pages, $14.95

SOFT MEMORIES of East Germany's lost "glories" are depressingly common in today's Germany, a country still cleaning up from the 2003 hurricane of ostalgie--a nostalgia for the travel restrictions, covertly transgendered Olympians, and free health care of the cruelly misnamed German Democratic Republic. The frenzy of socialist fetishization began with Wolfgang Becker's popular film Good Bye Lenin!, which in the slippery style of big-budget ostalgie manages both to condemn Erich Honecker's barbarous fiefdom and to subtly celebrate its insulation from Western consumerism. It reached its vulgar crescendo when the former East German figure skater--and former Stasi asset--Katarina Witt, clad in the powder blue uniform of the Young Pioneers, hosted The GDR Show, an airbrushed walk through the East's recent past.

It's possible this recent German trend toward "historical re-evaluation" helped prompt the American publication, 15 years after it first appeared in Britain, of Comrade Rockstar, Reggie Nadelson's travelogue cum biography of Dean Reed. Nadelson, a New York-based writer of detective fiction, has written the story of a failed American musician who became the "Red Elvis" of the East Bloc. In the late 1950s Reed--a moderately attractive, semi-talented guitar player and would-be actor from Colorado--set off for Hollywood with the distinctly un-Bolshevik goal of superstardom on the bubblegum pop circuit. There he met Paton Price, a Daily Worker--reading acting coach and party ideologue. Price schooled Reed in the socialist realism of Brechtian theater, left-wing politics, and, as Reed's sad filmic record suggests, little else.

After a short and largely unsuccessful stint with Capitol Records, Reed abandoned California for South America, where, inexplicably, his singles were outselling those of Elvis Presley. Possessed by his newfound ideology, he underwent a transformation among the bitterly impoverished natives: He shed his "false consciousness" and subsumed the artist's prerogatives beneath those of the Party. After a few years, Reed was expelled from Argentina for agitating against the government and moved to Italy, where he landed a string of minor film roles, including the lead in Karate Fists and Beans, billed as the world's first western/kung fu crossover...