A man in a hat walked along the street, staring at us. The man disappeared, and all I could see was the rococo outline of the opera house against a purplish sky. In the distance, beyond the Berlin Wall, lay West Berlin, the neon dream city. It made the sky glow the way Las Vegas does when you come to it, all of a sudden, out of the desert.
Leslie started walking.
"Where are you going?" I was nervous.
Looking around once more at the empty, dark, wet Berlin street, he took all of the shitty, crumpled, greasy money out of his pockets and shoved it in a garbage can on top of all the other garbage. Then we got back in the car and fled to the West. I could hear Leslie heave a sigh of relief.
I said, "What's the matter?"
"I had a minute of panic," he said. "I thought I might be trapped on the other side of the Wall."
14
In Prague, Vaclav Nectar [3] had been Dean Reed's best friend. He was himself an improbable rock star. A tiny, cherubic man who had trained as an opera singer, he had the direct, dimpled gaze of a five-year-old, the face of an elderly baby. Un vieux garcon, the French would have called him. His friends called him Vashek.
In the driveway of Vashek's little villa in the exquisitely bourgeois suburbs of Prague lay a mirrored ball from a dance hall that had closed. It seemed such a perfect metaphor for Prague: heartbreakingly lovely, sad, the gaiety and music shut down by an oppressive regime.
"I can't think of anywhere to throw it away," said Vashek.
On the other side of the drive was an ancient tree. "My wife's father planted it when she was born," he added, gazing up at the sky on a day so exquisite it seemed ironic all by itself, but almost everything was in Prague.
Inside the house Mrs. Nectar fussed with coffee cups and cakes. She had been a ballerina and she was thin and looked fragile and safety pins dangled from her apron. She also had a cold and she smiled wearily and left us in the living room with its carefully matched furniture to watch a video of Vashek's band, the Bacilli. All of the Bacilli wore masks and their biggest hit was called "The Clown."
There followed a little tour of Dean Reed memorabilia, carefully hoarded, placed in positions of honor around the house: wind-chimes from Colorado, a big tin samovar from the Soviet Union, a chromium clock from somewhere socialist, and a little brass lamp from India.
"Dean had a tremendous capacity for warming up the public," Vashek said. "He could win their trust immediately, then state his political convictions. People would take it from him. He spoke in English. He was a master at communicating. I learned from him: the public must be yours the moment you've sung your third song.
"He did the international hits. He did the Everly Brothers, 'Ode to Joy', and even 'My Yiddishe Momma', which was tremendously popular here."
In the basement of Vashek's house was a secret rock and roll museum. On a row of shelves, back jssues of the New Musical Express were stacked tidily alongside newspaper cuttings and record albums. There was an old stereo. The walls were completely papered with posters of rock stars such as Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Elvis Presley, and Dean Reed. Cliff Richard, however, had, in a sense, made Vaclav Nectar a star.
In 1968, Vashek tuned into a radio broadcast from the Albert Hall in London and he heard Cliff Richard sing "Congratulations."
"I was much taken with it," Vashek said in his formal way. Three days later, adding his own Czech lyrics, Vashek recorded a cover version of "Congratulations." It became the anthem for the euphoric Prague Spring when the country seemed to have been liberated from its oppressive regime. In Czech its lyrics concerned spring, green trees, a girl in a nylon blouse, and young love over a Martini Dry. Vaclav Nectar longed to meet Cliff Richard, but when he finally saw him backstage at a concert, he was too shy to say hello.
Prague was a city addicted to music: Paul Anka had played Prague once, so had Manfred Mann. So pervasive was rock and roll in the Sixties, that when the writing team of Sucy and Slitr - their hits included "Mr. Rock and Mr. Roll" and "Vain Cousin" - opened the Semafor Theater in Prague, over five years a million people came, which was equal to the entire population of the city.
In the 1960s there was a surge of Western culture; the Beatles flourished. In his book about rock and roll in the East, Timothy Ryback describes a delicious moment when, in 1965, Allen Ginsberg was made student king in Prague. Ginsberg announced that rock and roll "had shaken loose the oppressive shackles of Stalinism."
What a howl it must have been when they made Ginsberg king and carried him like a hero-god around town. He was thrown out of the country for subversion, perversion, and wearing flowers in his hair.
When the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, everything went dead. People said it was as if you could hear the noise in the streets, the excitement, news, chatter, music, the buzz that during Alexander Dubcek's short reign had risen to a delirious hum, simply stopped. Banners and flags that crowded the city's sight lines, extolling socialism and Lenin and Brezhnev, flapped to a tuneless breeze. In Wenceslas Square, for twenty years afterwards, it was as if the soundtrack was shut off. That's what everyone noticed as the city crept back into silent submission.
The Soviet invasion destroyed the hope and the gaiety; the country was gradually strangled by dread. But it took time before all the music died. In 1969, the Beach Boys came to Prague. (In Czech, the Beach Boys were known as the Boys from the Seashore, a name in this landlocked country that seemed sweet and loony and reminded me of Shakespeare's "Seacoast of Bohemia.")
"Help me Rhonda, help help me, Rhonda ...," the Lucerna Hall rocked all night, and Mike Love of the Boys from the Seashore said how happy he was to be in Prague. He wanted to dedicate a song to Alexander Dubcek, who was in the audience. It was called "Breaking Away."
Prague was the most beautiful city in Europe, but in those years melancholy floated like dust through the stucco-colored air and there was a slow, drifting accretion of inertia. In every window in the shabby arcades around the square, in every car, taxi, and shop, were pictures of Lenin. Slogans pasted on ravishing baroque buildings testified to the joys of socialism. Groups of children with sullen faces were herded, silently, through the Klement Gottwald Museum of Socialism.
As the hard-liners had tightened their grip after 1968 all of the rock clubs shut up and Prague's top band, the Plastic People of the Universe, went to jail. Into this lovely town stunned into weary acquiescence, Dean Reed arrived and it was like Christmas.
That day at his house, Vaclav Nectar confessed suddenly that he was not altogether sure how great Dean's singing talent was. But his fans loved him and that was his true talent, and so when you walked with Dean in Wenceslas Square, it took an hour to go half a mile.
Everything east of the Berlin Wall was relative. For many in Prague the 1970s were dead years musically, but compared to East Berlin, for Dean it was bliss at least professionally. There was a tradition for pop and rock which barely existed in East Germany, and even when East German officialdom recognized its inevitability, it did so by establishing an organization with the chilling title Sektion Rockmusik. As often as not, in East Betlin, a backing band meant a hundred singing strings because, under German socialism, no musician could be unemployed.
With its recent democratic history and its bohemian passions, its love for jazz and pop and rock, Prague's musicians remembered how to do it. Dean got himself a deal with Supraphon, the state recording label, which lasted the rest of his life. In a good year, what with exports throughout the Soviet Bloc, Supraphon sold a couple of hundred thousand Dean Reed albums.