Georgy Arbatov told me that he was convinced the KGB had not killed Dean Reed.
"I know that the KGB had already decided a long time before Dean's death not to interfere in this way, not to practice any terrorist activities," he said. An accident, Arbatov suggested, perhaps Dean's death had been an accident.
What he was saying hit me only after I'd left Arbatov's office, a kind of delayed shock. I wasn't exactly tuned into the activities of the world of covert activity, so only when I was walking through the snow in Moscow did I realize that "terrorist activities" meant state assassination. No longer practiced at this time, Arbatov had said, meaning, of course, it had been practiced and perhaps not so long ago; Arbatov could refer to it casually in the middle of a conversation about Dean Reed and the Beatles and rock and roll. I shivered. My feet were wet. It was freezing out.
No one in Russia had cared who was in charge of Dean, of course, not when he arrived. The lust for Western culture was huge but undiscriminating, and nobody cared if Dean Reed was run, as someone said, by the Communist Party or the Soviet cosmonauts, or a monkey.
Dean's arrival in the Soviet Union had the verve, the heroics, the aspirations of his conquest of South America all over again. Although he would continue to live with Patty in Argentina for a while, then move on to Madrid and to Rome, he went back to the USSR again and again, tempted by the adoration the Russians gave him, seduced by the feeling that he mattered so much.
On his first tour of the Soviet Union, Dean played twenty-eight cities and he sang "Yiddishe Momma" to a little old lady with a round face. Again and again, he went to Russia to record, for concerts, as a peace delegate. He made rock videos, after a fashion: Dean riding his motorbike; Dean clowning in parks, on riverboats, singing "Yesterday" and "Heartbreak Hotel." Everyone I ever met in the Soviet Union remembered Dean. He was as big as Frank Sinatra, people said.
On Go for It, Boys, a televised competition in which young men vied in several categories for the title of "Most Macho Male," Dean appeared as the celebrity host.
And Dean Reed was impressed with what he saw in the Soviet Union. He spoke with the comrades on long plane trips across the country - pictures show his face wreathed in smiles under the big fur hat. He studied Marxism, Leninism. A little boy gave Dean his Pioneer's badge.
There were people everywhere who had met Dean and kept his autograph or his pictures. One of them was named Sasha Gurman. He was from Tblisi and I met him about a year after I went to Moscow, met him in Beverly Hills of all places, on a balmy winter night. He had thick wavy hair and impish eyes, and he was sexy, like a magician, which in a way he was. He was an interpreter, the sort who gets not just the words, but the subtle magic of language. Glasnost had come to Hollywood in the form of Elem Kilmov, the Soviet film director, and Roland Joffe' was giving a dinner for him. Sasha had come to translate.
The sky was a rich tuxedo blue that night, the stars were out, and Beverly Hills was sleek and lush. Drinking it all in, Sasha inspected the crowd on the patio at Roland Joffe's house, where he, a kind of vigorous human sputnik spun off by Glasnost, had put down for the evening.
Ah, Glasnost! It was the fashion in the late 1980s, even in Hollywood. Elem Klimov gave me a button with Gorbachev's face on it. Roland raised his glass.
"We may not share our politics, but we have to share our planet," Roland Joffe' said. (A Russian taxi driver in Los Angeles was more skeptical and when I asked what he thought about Gorby, he shrugged and said, "Same studio, different head.")
Anyway, I cornered Sasha Gurman and said, as I did to every Soviet I met, "Did you hear of Dean Reed?"
"Ah, Dean Reed," Sasha said, and he told me a story.
When he was seven, Sasha's mother asked what he wanted for his birthday. I want to see Dean Reed, he said, and his mother took him to a concert in Tblisi.
The American singing star, was particularly big in Georgia, where his picture was sold alongside that of Joseph Stalin. At the concert, Sasha was taken up on the stage to meet Dean; the singer shook hands with the little boy and then he did one of his stunts: the big, handsome blue-eyed American flipped the child head over heels. He laughed. Then he kissed Sasha and gave him an autographed picture.
For years, Sasha kept the picture of Dean Reed in his school notebook next to a picture of Lenin. By the time Sasha was a teenager, the notebook had come apart but he kept it, the photograph.
In the late 1970s, his mother took him to East Berlin for a holiday. They climbed the television tower at the Alexanderplatz. Sasha looked out. He craned his neck so that he could see over the Wall into West Berlin, where he noted there was enough electricity to fuel a small African nation, enough neon lights to power up his dreams.
He imagined a world populated by tall, blue-eyed American cowboys like Dean Reed who gave little kids a hug and sang them rock and roll.
"That's for me," Sasha said.
8
Back at the National Hotel, after my meetings with Pastoukhov and Arbatov, I looked out the window of my room at a drainpipe. I then went downstairs to the front desk, where a woman who wore two cardigans and spoke soft, old-fashioned English did not smile at me. I asked her for a different room. She told me that, as I was not a head of delegation, I was not entitled to a Class A room. Leslie Woodhead had somehow been anointed as head of our delegation and he had a suite with a view and cranberry-colored velvet drapes.
"But, you see, this is my first trip to your country," I said. "I really want a room with a view of RED SQUARE!"
All around me in the lobby of Moscow's best hotel, tourists shuffled across an expanse of turd-colored linoleum, looking for something to buy. There was nothing in the souvenir shop except wooden dollies, vodka, and crappy fur hats. At the front door, men who resembled Leonid Brezhnev barred the way to Soviet citizens, admitting only foreigners who showed the slab of cardboard that served for a passport to the National.
"Here you may want," said the woman in the two cardigans, "but here you may not necessarily get."
"They have a plan for you," said Art Troitsky, who turned up to meet us at the hotel with his wife Svetlana. Art was chic in the casual black clothing he purchased in Tallinn's street markets, where you could get Western goods. Svetlana was over six feet tall and wore elegant Italian boots. They were so stylish, so foreign-looking that the doorman at the National simply let them in most of the time. Once, though, they had to wait for me to come and get them and they hated it.
Svetlana Kunetsina was twenty-eight and you could just still see where the tall, gawky teenager had evolved into this butterfly. She had beautiful manners, she was a passionate feminist, itself a rebellion in a country so brutal towards its women it was enough just to survive; and she was systemically incapable of being on the take, which amounted to a kind of dysfunction in Moscow.
This made her different from everyone else. To some it made her seem haughty. Westerners loved her. Every Westerner who met Svetlana fell for her, perhaps because she was so un-Russian. Or maybe it was just her legs.
In the hotel, she removed her coat and gave it to the woman in the cloakroom. Svetlana was wearing a shocking pink Gianfranco Ferre suit with a miniskirt and the thigh-high boots. Because she was a fashion journalist, she knew how to get designer clothes in various markets, or how to have them copied; sometimes she found vintage couture clothes and remade them.
We went to the ground-floor restaurant, where most of the things on the menu were unavailable; Svetlana, who knew her way around these problems, suggested borscht and baked sturgeon. She was pleased that there was white bread available because she liked it better than the usual coarse black stuff.
"You may want, but you may not get," I had been told and I quickly learned that it was a lifetime of not getting, in a country where almost nobody got. This big, rich country that stretched across eleven time zones was reduced for most people to a tiny plan, to twenty square meters in a shoddy apartment block, to a school where everyone wore the same clothing and a job w
here everyone did the same chores.
"We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us," the saying went.
We ordered another bottle of red wine - young people like Art and Svetlana drank wine much more often than vodka if they could get it and they did it because they liked the wine but also as a statement. It said we are different, more sophisticated, more European. But everything different, unconventional, rebellious was always a statement in the Soviet Union, nothing more so than rock and roll.
No one understood rock in the USSR better than Troitsky; he had just published a terrific book on it called, naturally enough, Back in the USSR. From Art and from his book, I learned about pop culture and its roots in the USSR, and what made the country so ripe for Dean Reed when he arrived, when he seemed to fill a void. The longing for rock and roll and the West were a kind of mute rebellion among young people. This was Art's territory: he had invented it, and he talked about it fluently.
"In the Soviet Union, even the rednecks, I mean, you know, the peasants, were obsessed with America. Because of that, Dean Reed was no ordinary foreign musical visitor to their country. He was American. He had this image of being a rock and roll singer. He had moderately long hair, flared jeans, and all those things. So it's quite natural that the unsophisticated part of the young audience really fell for Dean Reed." Art finished his glass of wine and added, "No living Western performer of rock and roll ever came to the Soviet Union. Dean Reed was young. He played guitar. He was American. We believed."
In the 1950s, the Soviet Union's passion for America began with the movies and the records that the Red Army had captured in Berlin after the War. Johnny Weissmuller, the first and the best Tarzan, and the ice-skating star Sonja Henie captured the hearts of postwar Moscow. Among the films the army brought home was Sun Valley Serenade, a kitsch caper that featured Sonja in an ermine cap doing sit-spins on an ice-rink in the Idaho resort. But it was because the picture had a soundtrack by Glenn Miller - Miller debuted "Chattanooga Choo Choo" in it - that the stilyagi adored it.
The stilyagi - the style hunters - ruled Moscow's street corners in those days and they only cared for clothes and for dancing. In platform shoes, zoot suits, and fat ties painted with Hawaiian palms, they wore their hair in duck's asses, slicked back with loads of grease. Officials who caught them, shoved them up against the wall and cut their hair off, but the stilyagi persevered and they held cocktail hours and listened to jazz. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were heroes, but, above all, they adored Glenn Miller. "Chattanooga Choo Choo" was their anthem.
The stilyagi were Art's nostalgia heroes. For his mother, who had been at Moscow University in the 1950s, they had had no charm at all. She despised them because they had no spiritual values. They were empty, stupid, and superficial. They only wanted to dance the bugiwugi.
Interestingly, this was exactly how American folkies, usually left-wing kids, had felt about the blue-collar rockers like Elvis and at almost exactly the same time. How the old folkies had despised rock and roll!
"I've heard rumors that the KGB house-band's favorite tune these days is 'In the Mood'," said Art suddenly at the National Hotel, where we were finishing lunch.
For Art, the 1950s in the USSR and its nascent youth subculture had the charm of kitsch. The taste for kitsch went deep with Art. On that trip in February, 1988, I realised that kitsch was a rebellion. If you couldn't get anything good - and there wasn't much that was good to get - you settled for what was lousy and made it into a style. Kitsch was a put-on, a parody, a form of survival. "Up yours," it said to conventional taste and the clothes and furniture of officialdom. Moscow humor was tough, urban, and seditious. The more freedom there was in Moscow in the late 1980s, the more inclined its rock bands were to dress up in old KGB uniforms.
Pouring himself another drink, Art talked some more about the 1950s, in America, in the USSR, about the music and cars, the big pastel Harley Earl cars with acres of chrome and tail fins poised for flight.
Many Muscovites remembered those cars from the brochures they took home from the American exhibition in 1959.
At the exhibition, where Nixon and Khrushchev faced off in an American model kitchen among the Frigidaires and the Mix-o-Matics, Coca Cola was served in plastic glasses by pretty girls who smiled at you.
Lining up to sample the drink, many people said it tasted like shoe polish, then, still sneering, lined up for another glass. And the plastic glasses! And the smiling girls! Who had ever heard of or imagined such a wonderful thing? And the cars, of course. Lovely cars, in many pretty colors, with musical names. Cars that went with rock and roll music. Carrying away the brochures with the pictures of those cars, people studied them in secret, for years, as if they were art.
With these glimpses of the magical West, the taste for rock and roll grew. Paul Anka and Pat Boone were hot in Moscow, so was "Love Potion Number Nine." Electric guitars came in through Czechoslovakia and a group called the Revengers played Little Richard covers. It was all unofficial, of course. Kids strung telephone wires across a table and called it a guitar; they made themselves into bands through sheer willpower, ripping off telephones for the wires whenever they could, so that, in one period, not a single public telephone in Moscow worked.
The production of records required similar ingenuity, which was how Records on Ribs were invented. You stole X-ray plates, which were made of a thick plastic material, rounded out the edges with a pair of scissors, cut a hole in the middle, and recorded on top of them. In the underground, rock music was produced on pictures of somebody's lungs. I saw them, these incredible artifacts, and you could actually see the ribs while the needle went around and around. Young hustlers who sold them on the street secreted the records in their coat sleeves because the X-ray material was pliable and you could fold it over.
Tolya Shevshenko, a translator I got to know in Moscow, remembered how as a kid he got hold of some Records on Ribs.
"I remember it quite vividly," said Tolya. "It was a winter's day. I was wearing a heavy coat and looked like a young old man. I went to the GUM store to buy myself something. And, in front of this store, a man, maybe twenty years old, approached me and asked what I was looking for. I said that I was looking for some rock records. These are not available in the official state store. And he said, 'Well, I've got some.' I asked him what was on the records, and he said, 'Rock and roll. Chubby Checker.' I said, 'OK, I'll take one.' It was really Chubby Checker, very badly recorded with a lot of noise. But anyway it was Chubby Checker. It was rock and roll!"
For a few years in the early 1960s things changed, Art said; decadence and disaffection went out of style. Soviet youth was full of enthusiasm over Yuri Gagarin, the Cuban Revolution, and the 22nd Party Congress.
"For the Russians, these were the gung-ho years of the hero astronaut, and Soviet culture could even withstand the Twist," Art added. The bureaucrats said, "Of course, it is all nonsense, this 'tweest', the music is for idiots, but let them fool around, it is nothing terrible."
By the late 1960s, though, the years of stagnation had ground into play. For almost twenty years under Brezhnev, nothing much had seemed to happen. Gray times. Only the distant sounds of the Beatles singing through the crackle of static on illicit radios sounded like life to Art's generation.
Beatlemania swept Russia. Beatles bands were formed. Singing "They say it's your birthday," at birthday parties was a ritual. People learned English to understand the Beatles. Kids took terrible risks to get a look at a poster, and at least one man claimed he had been the first Russian to identify the individual members of the Fab Four from a torn newspaper cutting. Here is John, he said, and George, and Paul, and Ringo.
A Beatles album was an almost undreamed-of treasure, but for half a ruble you could rent a Beatles poster for a day. Fans wore jackets without lapels called bitlovka.
"Elvis was nice," Art mused now. "But the Beatles had melodies. The Beatles were wonderful. The Beatles came knocking at our hearts."
Still, the Beat
les were not official and had never been to the Soviet Union, unless you counted the legendary stopover at the Moscow airport their plane once made en route home from Japan. That stopover became the subject of endless conjecture.
Had they really been in Russia? Had they actually disembarked from the plane, and did they play a secret concert, or had it all been one of Moscow's great urban myths?
"Rock and roll meant something extremely exotic," Art said. "It was the most exotic of all Western forbidden fruits, you know, like Salvador Dali, or striptease, or something. I mean, you know, it was always totally obscene because the articles in the local press said that rock and roll performers make pornographic movements while they sing. And that they make the cries of agony or ecstasy into the microphone before the public. So, yes, it was like, like a very, very attractive, but at the same time, a very distant thing."
I sipped some wine, so did Art, and then he said, "Rock was a concentration of all the good things in life."
"Rock and roll meant a lot to absolutely every Soviet kid, even if they lived in a village. Because this was the music that made them feel free, that made them feel slightly different from their parents, you know, who, of course, didn't understand this music." Art paused. "And, for us, more than that, it also meant, you know, it was like a door into another culture, a door into another way of life, which we all fancied, of course.
"We really hated what was going on around us," Art said. "We didn't care about politics. We didn't care about Communist ideology. But we did care about how badly people were dressed in this country, about what an awful thing is official Soviet pop music. What was going on at this official level of culture was absolutely disgusting," Art added, referring to folk music and men in fake Cossack shirts and women in nylon frocks with trilling voices, and choirs of Young Pioneers with reverent faces and zealous eyes singing patriotic songs. "Not exactly for political reasons," Art mused. "But for the reason that this was ugly, unstylish, unlike the West."
Comrade Rockstar Page 7
