ARTS: Berlin Revisits a Singer's Story By Clive Freeman BERLIN, Feb 16 (IPS) - Protest singer Dean Reed's concerts were
foot-stomping sell-outs from Santiago to Baghdad,
Warsaw to Helsinki in the 1960s and '70s. But in later years, with his
career in decline, his
marriage shaky and little prospect of work if he returned to the United
States, the despairing
Denver-born crooner, who had settled in communist East Berlin in the Cold
War years, drove
his car to a lake and drowned himself.
That was on Jun. 17 1986. Now, some 20 years later, a documentary film
about Reed gets
shown at the 57th International Film Festival in Berlin.
Titled The Red Elvis, the Dean Reed movie was premiered at the
International cinema on
the Karl Marx Strasse in Berlin. Directed by Leopold Gruen it tells the
story of the singer's
rise and fall and also focuses on his political engagement - he was
awarded the Soviet
Peace Prize Medal in 1978.
"Reed's life was a mosaic dominated by his longing for success and his
naive political
engagement at a time when the world was divided by two major ideologies,"
Gruen told IPS
after the screening.
Reed's dreams in the 1960s of becoming a crooner a-la-Sinatra-style in the
United States
never got off the ground, although he once recorded on the Capital label,
singing ballads
and country-style protest.
As a result, when his records began selling in Latin America, he switched
to making
extended tours of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil. "I was a pacifist
in those days but
soon I had developed into a Marxist in the revolutionary climate of South
America. There
was so much poverty, so much injustice and repression," Reed told this IPS
reporter when I
first interviewed him in East Berlin in 1975.
Reed was mobbed everywhere he went in Latin America, as the film
illustrates in colourful
detail. He became involved in anti-American protests in Chile and
Argentina, usually
against the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Reed campaigned for Chile's
ill-fated Marxist
president Salvador Allende, and in the movie is seen congratulating
Allende at his 1973
inauguration.
Years after Allende's brutal overthrow in Santiago, Reed made a film
called El Cantor in
Sofia in tribute to singer-poet Victor Jara who was killed during
internment in the
aftermath of General Pinochet's seizure of power in Chile. Reed hired
10,000 extras from
the Bulgarian Youth League Komosol to make the El Cantor film.
In the 1970s and early ‘80s, Reed made numerous concert tours of the
Soviet Union and
East Bloc countries. In Moscow, he is pictured on film surrounded by
jubilant fans in Red
Square, in defiance of a ban by the authorities.
By 1980, Reed was attending the Palestine Film Festival held in Baghdad. A
year later he
revisited the country again when he negotiated with the government the
subject of
producing a collection of songs, apparently connected to the people's
"struggle against
imperialism and Zionism."
Two songs, Oh Jerusalem and It Is My Country were dedicated to the
struggle of the
Palestinian fida'een with whom he spent a considerable period in their
camps, hideouts
and trenches.
Apart from family members, other contemporaries seen in the The Red Elvis
documentary
in Berlin are Egon Krenz, who briefly succeeded Erich Honecker as East
German head of
state in late 1989, German and Hollywood actor Armin Mueller-Stahl,
Salvador Allende's
writer daughter Isabel, director Celino Bleiweiss, Chilean radio DJ Chuco
Fernandez and
U.S. radio host Peter Boyles.
Krenz said after Reed's arrival in the German Democratic Republic in the
early 1970s that it
was suggested to him what was expected of him. Reed played along, making
visits to
schools, factories and clubs in former East Germany, singing his protest
songs and
spreading the gospel of Marxism to young and old alike.
In return he enjoyed a privileged life, living in a charming lakeside
bungalow in
Schmoeckwitz on the outskirts of Berlin, for which he paid a nominal rent
only.
"Dean Reed was incredibly handsome and charming, very much the
all-American hero for
us people living in cut-off East Berlin in the 1970s," a middle-aged woman
told IPS after
seeing the Festival's Panorama section movie. "Teenage girls in the GDR
idolised him in
the 1970s."
But by the 1980s, Reed's singing career was on the wane. East Europeans
were no longer
responding to Moscow's hardline brand of communism. Restive youngsters in
the East Bloc
tired of his voice, and his never questioning love of the Soviet Union.
On a visit to the U.S. in 1980, Reed angered Americans by still swearing
loyalty to Moscow,
and then hinting he might not be against returning home for good if the
folks were nice to
him. They weren't. After an appearance on CBS TV's 60 Minutes show with
famed
anchorman Mike Wallace, furious American viewers called and wrote to brand
him a
"Commie stooge".
There were other problems, as The Red Elvis film indicates. The singer's
love life was
tangled. He was wed three times, finally to talented East German movie
actress Renate
Blume. But their marriage was dogged by bitter argument.
In a taped message after the singer's suicide Renate Blume is heard saying
that on two
successive nights in June 1986 she and her husband had been arguing, and
that he had
tried slashing his wrists one night.
After their last clash, the singer left the house with some of his
documents and
belongings. That was, she said, the last she saw him. Several days later
his body was
recovered from a Berlin river, along with a suicide note.
Blume does not personally appear in the Reed documentary. Asked why not,
Gruen said
this was because the actress had sold the rights to the Reed story to
Hollywood Oscar-
winner Tom Hanks who plans a full-length feature about the singer's life.
(END/2007)
