Denver Post, July 16, 2006

Reed bio draws an ouch

By Bill Husted
Denver Post Staff Columnist

"Comrade Rockstar" is the biography of Dean Reed, the Colorado folk singer from Wheat Ridge who became a singing commie in the '60s, and went on to become the "Red-Elvis."

The book, written by Reggie Nadelson, was published in England 15 years ago, but this is the first American edition. A review last Sunday in The NY Times contained a sentence you never want to see about your book: "She sometimes has trouble remembering what she's written a page or even a paragraph ago, and the book is full with breathtaking errors." Ouch.

She writes that Reed longed to return to America and Colorado, "even if a radio interview back in Colorado and a profile segment on '60 Minutes' were both disasters." The radio interview was with Peter Boyles in 1985, who remembers that Reed showed up in a white stretch limo. The interview almost came to fisticuffs with Reed running out of the joint. "He was a chicken," says Boyles. Dale Evans, queen of the West, was Boyles' next guest. Those were the days.

Reed died in 1986 in East Germany, discovered in a lake near the house he shared with his third wife. The circumstances of his death always have been cloudy. His ashes finally made their way to Green Mountain Cemetery in Boulder. The NY Times reviewer of "Comrade Rockstar" says a plaster cast of Reed's teeth is "locked away" at the Colorado Historical Society - a fact the society was not able to readily confirm. Maybe it's one of those "breathtaking errors." But the choppers were reportedly big pearly ones - and Tom Hanks could use them. The actor and the DreamWorks studio own the rights to Reed's life story.

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