Wallace asked, "Do you think Mr. Gorbachev is a more moral man, a more peace-loving man than Ronald Reagan?"
Dean nodded.
"Why was the Wall put up in the first place?" asked Mike Wallace.
"The Wall - the Berlin Wall - was put up to defend the population in the first place," said Dean.
Johnny just sat there and listened to Dean defend that Wall and it burned his butt so bad! He could feel himself wanting to be sick. Johnny was in a rage; he felt his knuckles go white as Dean denied that East Germany was a colony of the Soviet Union. Dean talked about maybe being a senator from Colorado... if Gary Hart was going on to the Presidency, why not?
Johnny was horrified. "I think it was the next day I called him to tell him it had been shown over here, and I said to him, 'It has done nothing for you here, Dean. The one thing you can't do is defend that Wall in this country.' And he sort of laughed and said, 'Well, I guess I'm going to have to come back and explain things.' And I fired back at him, 'Well, if you do that, you better wear a bullet-proof vest.'"
21
In November of 1988, I went to Leningrad to see Boris Grebenshikov play a rock concert. Grebenshikov was the first authentic homegrown Russian rock star, and his band was playing in the USSR in public with Western musicians. AQUARIUM AND FRIENDS '88, the show was called. Fifty rubles a ticket on the black market.
Jo Durden-Smith, who had been with Leslie Woodhead and me on our first trip to Moscow, was making a documentary about Grebenshikov. Leslie was hoping to film some of the concert himself to use as background for the Dean Reed drama-documentary. I was interested in the music because in some ways the increasing popularity of Russian rock written and performed by young Russians had eventually made Dean Reed irrelevant.
In that April of 1986 after 60 Minutes was broadcast, when Johnny sat in his shed in Loveland chewing his liver and trying to convey to Dean how angry he was, what was mostly worrying Dean was that he was feeling old.
He worried about his voice failing; he worried he was too old to be a pop star; he realized that the Soviets and even some of the Eastern European countries had their own fresh music, their own young stars, local kids. Even Dean's own stepson, Sasha, didn't like his music. He wrote to Dixie, "Sasha calls me 'old man'." He sent her a picture of himself and wrote a note saying hopefully that he thought he looked rather young. "Oh, it is nice to have a baby face," Dean wrote. He was forty-seven.
"Guess what?" Leslie said as our Aeroflot plane lurched through a winter storm.
"What?"
He looked around the interior of the plane, and at the window and smiled knowingly.
"Guess," he said again.
But I closed my eyes, then opened them, terrified as the plane fell through some hideous air pocket. Outside the window it was black.
Leslie smiled at the stewardess, who did not smile back, but delivered a tray with a cup containing what tasted like swimmingpool water and a single toffee in greasy waxed paper that passed for lunch. Several drunks, cans of beer in hand, roamed the aisle.
How dull travel in the Soviet Union would be one day without the terrors of Aeroflot and without the drunks, the horrible hotels, and the listening devices. Small talk would dwindle badly; dinner parties would grind to a halt.
The plane shuddered. I closed my eyes and thought of photographs of Dean Reed's early trips to Russia. He was always moving, in a plane with fur-hatted commissars, jumping out of a plane door after it landed, standing on top of a big Russian express train, riding backwards, and strumming his guitar and singing Woody Guthrie songs. "This train," Dean sang astride the moving cars.
Now, the Aeroflot plane bumped to a halt on the runway and we got out and trudged into the terminal, which resembled something from the 1950s. It was three in the morning. Jo Durden-Smith was waiting to meet us because he had arrived earlier, and in a blinding snowstorm we somehow got to the Pribaltiskaya, a modem hotel on the outskirts of town. It was very depressing, Soviet Modern, probably circa 1980. It had endless corridors with ugly patterned carpet. Every time you turned a corner, you tripped over a drunken Finn.
Helsinki's drinking laws had become so draconian - the politicians were trying to get the people to dry out a little - that on weekends a lot of men flew into Leningrad, hired some girls, got laid, got drunk, vomited, and passed out where they were, sometimes in the hotel corridors. They lay there until they sobered up enough to get up and go home. That night I didn't care. I wanted a bed. In my room, I fell asleep with half my clothes still on.
The next morning, I went looking for Art Troitsky, who had come from Moscow to Leningrad to meet us. I gave him a bottle of Advocaat liqueur I'd bought in the duty-free shop on the way out. We had coffee in the dining room, and Art said he had just been to London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, and Graceland, and that he had enjoyed the West. Still, he said, he wished he had escaped the USSR illicitly in the bad old days, wished he had done it in a balloon. Traveling business class on a 747 seemed pretty tame to Art and even though this was one of his conceits, the rock life was becoming a little dull for him.
Once rock and roll had been a dangerous game; Art's writings were banned; people were condemned for listening to what was called "Musical Aids." Now in 1988, even the apparatchiks were listening to the metallisti.
"Hmm, Metal," they would say, stroking their chins. "Very interesting."
"My Father is a Fascist" was currently the biggest hit in Leningrad.
After breakfast, we went over to the sports stadium where the concert would take place. Around the makeshift stage were half a dozen British musicians in leather pants, shades, and ear studs; they lolled among the lights, amplifiers, guitars, trunks, suitcases, backpacks, drums, and cases of Perrier that had been trucked in overland from Helsinki. Dozens of film people lurked, waiting for orders from Michael Apted, the director of the documentary. Apted wandered around, the local rock promoter in his wake. The rock guy introduced himself to everyone as Fat Lev. "All you need is Lev, eh?" he said to everyone he met.
Even Fat Lev couldn't supply black paint, though. There were tons of equipment, but no black paint for the stage, not a single can in Leningrad, an industrial city of four million people.
Leslie Woodhead had imported yet another crew to shoot the footage he wanted for the Dean Reed drama-documentary, and his production manager, Craig McNeill, wandered around the sports stadium, with a pair of cowboy boots under his arm, looking for a Dean Reed stand-in. Everyone was drinking coffee and complaining about the hotels and the black paint and the weather, and wondering if the Russian musicians would ever show up.
The Russians were late, except for the cellist, who sat on the stage, sawing at his instrument like a dentist trying to get at a difficult tooth.
Keeping order, more or less, was Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. A small hirsute man, Dave had produced Boris Grebenshikov's first Western album.
The percussionist was Ray Cooper. A big man in a fine suit with a shaved head, Ray kept his drumsticks in a silver champagne cooler. It was Ray's second trip to the USSR: he had been on tour with Elton John in 1979, the first Soviet tour by a Western rock superstar. From time to time, Ray went to the Kirov Ballet with his roadie.
Cooper started testing his cymbals. He made me think of the man in the title sequence of J. Arthur Rank movies. As if in response, Boris Grebenshikov appeared. He was four hours late.
Slim, pale, with big Slavic lips and long blond hair, Boris was thirty-five and he could look incredibly plain, or light himself up and be unspeakably handsome. While Dean was promiscuous with his smile, Boris saved his up, waited, watched, held back, letting it come very slowly. I introduced myself; we had almost met in New York. For a second more, he calculated the smile, then he gave it all away. He had really nice manners.