Dean Reed looked like an all-American boy. Born and raised in the thin, clean air of Denver, Colorado, when he had a guitar in his hand he could have passed for a Beach Boy. But Dean Reed never made it big in the US. The USSR, on the other hand...
If you were a young person in an Eastern Bloc or South American country during the 1960s and '70s not only would you have known who Dean Reed was but the chances are you'd have seen most of films and owned several of his records. The first American-born artist to tour the Soviet Union, Reed was a sort of Second World Elvis, with a dash of James Dean thrown in for good measure. Yes, back in the day, he was the five year plan-liking, tractor-admiring, Politburo-approved answer to such examples of western decadence as the Beatles and the Stones.
Reed's gigantic jump to the left occurred when a single he recorded for Capitol Records - ‘Our Summer Romance’ - took off in Latin America in the late '50s. Sent south to cash in on this unexpected success, the 20-year-old was greeted by the sort of hysteria other parts of the world reserved for the Beatles.
As if this wasn't dizzying enough, Reed also became keenly aware of the suffering that many Latinos had to endure, much of it because of US-approved policies. Having arrived on the continent a fresh-faced teenybooper, Dean Reed soon became so passionate a supporter of the rights issues in Chile, Peru and Bolivia, he found himself kicked out of Argentina and forced to make a home for himself in Italy.
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