Reggie Nadelson

This is a book I had to push through to finish, but judged to be worth the effort in the end. It's a narrative muddle — part memoir, part travelogue, part investigation, part biography, its tone shifting as if it can't decide which approach to take from day to day, chapter to chapter. Surely I would have appreciated a more straightforward biography/investigation into the mystery that was Dean Reed, the biggest American pop star almost no Westerner has heard of, while instead I often felt trapped in Reggie Nadelson's head as she struggled to understand. But this is what we have. In the last years of the Cold War, Nadelson talked to seemingly everyone who knew Dean Reed well, and a few who only knew him as a performer, and many of those people are gone now, or impossible to trace. Reed died in 1986, age 47. A few years later, the Berlin Wall fell, and retracing lives lived before that fall became a lot harder.

As I said, it's a mess, perhaps inescapably so, but the last two or three chapters pull it together, in a sad way, and make a coherent coda. In some ways, Reed's story is the story of many musicians who lived beyond their days of fame. What makes it remarkable is that it intersected, in a unique way because of Reed's status as a rather credulous Communist believer, with a particular era that seems increasingly distant. That makes this book a worthwhile reed not just for musicians and music fans, but for sociologists and historians and almost anyone left who's old enough to remember those prelapsarian times, before the wall fell and before we knew what happened next.… (mere)