His hair draped over his ears, he stared into the mirror, reciting his mantra. The room was choking sweet with pot. It smelled like 1968, I thought, and then I left and went backstage, where I had a good view of the band and the audience. The hall was packed.
"Sing it in Russian!" the crowd yelled, and Boris Grebenshikov, dressed entirely in black and in command of the stage with his band around him, sang in Russian.
Twelve thousand people clapped and wept, and some of them pushed up almost to the edge of the stage and linked arms and lit candles. A pale young girl, turning her face up to him, held up a picture of Boris, an icon in a plastic sleeve.
"Sing it in Russian!"
Boris finished the number. He introduced Dave Stewart and Ray Cooper. These were his friends from the West, he said, and they were going to sing some songs in English.
"Sing it in Russian!"
Film crews in sneakers raced silently around the stage and recorded everything. News crews were there, too. Foreigners loved rock and roll in Russia. It was th e sexiest image of the decade. The revolution had come and it sounded good. It sounded great. It was noisy. It was vivid. It looked like us, and you didn't go to war with your own, so we felt safe for the first time in our lives. We Cold War babies knew for sure now that they weren't going to nuke us. The music seemed to literally tear up the terrors of seventy years and toss them over its shoulder with wonderful abandon.
Boys punched the air. Tall girls with fabulous cheekbones and pale big lips, the Slav beauties who had suddenly appeared everywhere in the USSR, waved and sang along. In the best seats, officials clapped politely and tried not to wish they were listening to Tchaikovsky. People threw flowers. People unfurled Soviet flags and the hammer and sickle waved to the sound of Ray Cooper's chimes. A boy in a yellow satin jacket turned his back so everyone could see the slogan on it. It read: GLASNOST '88, as if Glasnost were this year's Woodstock.
In the middle of the swaying sea of bodies, a young Russian soldier in uniform got on to his girlfriend's shoulders and loosened his tie. He made a V-sign. Seeing us standing at the side of the stage, he gestured wildly. He wanted Leslie to take his picture. Then the boy whispered to his friend, who got on his girl's shoulders and the two of them made V-signs and laughed like crazy and yelled and yelled, probably calling out, "Take our picture."
Boris sang his anthem: "Rock and roll is dead, but I'm not yet."
Dave Stewart called out, "I'm from Sunderland, Boris is from Leningrad. We meet. It's just a tiny thing. But it's better than killing each other."
"All you need is love!"
We all sang along and believed for a while that it was really true. All you need is love. How Dean would have adored it all.
Or would he? Would he have been thrilled by the noise and good will? Was it what he had wanted? Or would he have felt old, a has-been, a man from a different time, a guy out of step with these tall girls in miniskirts and boys in ponytails? I wasn't sure he would have understood their rock and roll that was such a Russian mix of sex and poetry and religion. Maybe GLASNOST '88 would have left Dean on the sidelines, an old man. But, of course, by November, 1988, Dean had already been dead for almost two and a half years.
"Sing it in Russian!"
22
In the spring of 1986, Dean was working like crazy on Bloody Heart. June 24, the start date for the movie he'd been working on for five years, was coming at him like a train down a track. As he said, there was no stopping it, no changing the date, and if the deals weren't done and the production not ready, it would be over for him.
From Leningrad I went on to Moscow to try to find out what had happened to the movie, because the deal had been negotiated in Moscow, and I knew that something had gone horribly wrong, something I was now convinced led to his death in the lake near his house in East Germany.
Bloody Heart was going to change Dean's life. It was the crossover picture that would make him a real contender as a director in the East. Having been to America, he was obsessed with making a real movie with good production values instead of what he called "a piece of garbage where you could punch your fists through the sets." Sing Cowboy Sing had been an enormous hit, but Dean was fed up with playing an idiotic cowpoke, as he put it. A new career as a director would also release him from life as a fading pop star.
On May 30, 1986, Artemy Troitsky organized a concert in Moscow to benefit the victims of Chernobyl - the nuclear power plant had blown up on April 25-26 - and it was the first event of its kind. Everyone signed on, all the biggest bands and singers. There was a rumor that Dean Reed showed up and stood backstage at the concert and nobody asked him to play. Nobody cared.
For the whole of the spring, Dean led an increasingly frenzied life - the film, concerts, albums, television shows. He was always on the road - Potsdam, Prague, Moscow, Berlin. He sat up late in Schmockwitz, reworking the script for Bloody Heart. It was never out of his mind.
Renate would star with him in Bloody Heart. They would be together all summer long. They would have a chance to patch things up and get past the quarrels they'd been having which were nagging at Dean like his ulcer.
He was also desperately involved in the complications of pre-production; making a realistic movie about America in East Germany and the USSR meant he had to attend to a million details and he did it obsessively. Dean cast his "Indians" in Alma Alta in Uzbekistan, and from a collective farm that was populated entirely by North Koreans. American police cars and jeeps, as well as period sedans, were hired from vintage car clubs that flourished in the Baltic cities of Riga and Tallinn. Already that spring, a credible version of an American church was under construction in Yalta in the Crimea, which was to be the principal location for Bloody Heart, but the wood had to be shipped in from Riga because wood was scarce in the Crimea.
He was determined. When Bloody Heart was finished, Dean would show his movie in America and he was convinced that it would be his ticket home.
"It was really a dream world in some ways," Victor Grossman said. "But Dean had high hopes and met someone in America who was willing to manage him, a woman who talked about fan clubs and making pencils and all kinds of things with 'Dean Reed' on it." He meant Dixie, of course.
In Potsdam, Dean struggled with the changes at the DEFA Film Studios, which was his professional base. The great Berlin movie studios, where films like the Blue Angel had been made before World War Two, had been taken over by the Communists in the 1950s as part of the socialist network of movie facilities.
By the 1980s the studios were a mess. On DEFA's vast back lot, broken Roman columns lay on the ground. Inside the studio, the sound stages were shabby and so were the sets, except for one improbably imperial bedroom and bathroom constructed of fake marble.
DEFA was in trouble. Erich Honecker still ruled East Germany, but hard currency was increasingly what mattered, and the producers at DEFA dreamed of deals with the West. Maybe Dean thought that Bloody Heart was the perfect vehicle for his return to America, but the smart money at DEFA knew the West wasn't interested in a movie where the FBI were the bad guys.
Bloody Heart was cut back. In the Soviet system, everything on a movie was painstakingly planned because everything was so expensive, even the lousy film stock. You had to calculate the number of shots - there were two and a half meters of film per shot - and submit your plan. At almost seven hundred shots, Bloody Heart was two hundred more than the norm. Dean was planning a movie that would run over two hours.