INTRODUCING DEAN REED

Handsome, robust, former track star Dean Reed… a certain teenager’s delight, measures six foot tall, with hazel-cast eyes, possesses a natural tan and wholesome smile.

An athletic enthusiast, Reed proved to be a winner in gymnastics during his Wheatridge High School days in Denver. Excelling in flying rings, he trained for the Olympics, which was interrupted, however, by his affinity for music.

He has an older brother, 23, a scientist who is in the South Pole, and a 15-year-old brother. Reed’s mother teaches dancing, his father is a math instructor.

“In the spotlight.” - Capitol Records
press release, 1958

BENJAMIN RASMUSSEN

COLD WAR COWBOY

THE STRANGE LIFE AND DEATH OF DEAN REED

DEAR JERRY: In the early 1960s, most of my girl friends were crazy about Ricky, Frankie, and Fabian. But the teen idol I adored most was Dean Reed. He resembled a young Robert Redford. Dean didn’t have nearly as many hits in America as the others, but he did appear on several Bandstand-type TV shows. Then he just vanished, and I’ve never heard a thing about him since. Plus, we never hear any of his songs on the radio, especially “The Search,” “Our Summer Romance,” and “I Wonder.” Any idea what happened to Dean Reed?

Clarice Hoover,

Racine, Wisconsine

“Ask Mr. Music” - Jerry Osborne, 04/11/2011

You can keep the Beatles and forget Frank Sinatra, The Led Zeppelin are nowhere in the Kremlin, man. In the Communist Party, The Who are merely, the who? Mick Jagger, the Pink Floyd and Elvis Presley are forbidden practitioners of bourgeois culture.

But Dean Reed, the famous American pop star and heartthrob of the Soviet masses, is something else again.

Dean who?

“He’s 2nd Most Famous American In Soviet After President Ford.” -
UPI, 07/01/1976

American folk singer Dean Reed is a freedom fighter in the eyes of Soviet youth, a guitar-strumming balladeer whose songs are silenced by U.S. political repression.

Dean who?

“Protest singer hero to Soviets.” -
AP, 05/11/1978