Please Step Back by Ben Greenman
Publication: Melville House (April 21, 2009), 320 pages / ISBN 1933633700
Genre: Literary Fiction
Rating: 
Find @ Amazon or IndieBound
Challenges: 2009 Pub Challenge (#4)
First sentence: “What is that shit?”
In one sentence: A 1960′s rock-funk saga with a twist.
When @luxlotus was offering free copies of books on Twitter a few weeks ago I was on it like Sonic, baby. Please Step Back, one of the books offered (obviously), looked really awesome and interesting and it had a theme song! A really good theme song! And so I asked for it, and ye, I received it. Huzzah!
Summary from Amazon:
The rise and fall of a true American icon: A rock star, inspired by genre-busting musicians of the sixties like Sly Stone, Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye.
A swirling sixties saga of the rise and fall of a true American icon: A rock star. But not just any rock star: Rock Foxx is an outrageous showman whose unprecedented mixed-race, mixed-gender band made a new kind of socially conscious music that was infectious and tribal and scaled the heights of sixties rock stardom, all the way to Woodstock and beyond. But Foxx seemed to disappear at the height of his fame, his contagious, upbeat music darkening, then ending abruptly amidst rumors of drugs and violence, as the culture itself exploded into massive riots and assassinations.
I haven’t read many fictional accounts of fictional musicians– actually, wait. I don’t think I’ve read any. But I have seen movies, and so I think I can say with reasonable authority that Please Step Back is not like most other fictional musician biographies. I was expecting there to be a lot of drugs, sex, and descriptions of trippy rock n’ roll, and while there was all of those things the focus of the story wasn’t nearly on them as much as I expected. I liked that. I liked that the focus was more on Robert and his family than on the drug aspect of that lifestyle. And I liked that it also focused on the events of the time and how it affected music (Robert’s specifically).
And I really liked how Robert genuinely loved music, and how he takes inspiration for new songs from everywhere: what he says, what he sees, what he hears in others’ music. It quite an interesting experience to see him pick up all those little pieces and stick them together to form a song.
Robert himself I mostly liked, though he was a womanizer and a druggie and, by the end, quite pathetic. He started out on a good track, and even though I didn’t even particularly mind his drug use, by the time it got so that he couldn’t even make a new song without being high– saying that he needed the drugs to make good music– I was really annoyed with him. You didn’t need drugs to make music when you first started out, Robert! Sigh.
The physical book itself is quite nice, too; I like the unusual size (and the cover!). It’s a little bigger than standard trade paperback size, but not at all difficult to hold. It reminds me of a self-published chapbook, though of course it’s not. The only thing that really detracted from my enjoyment were some weird typos (missing letters, vowels replaced with consonants), but there weren’t enough to turn me off the book entirely.
Especially because this song is so good!
Other reviews: Bookslut | SFGate.com | Pop Matters
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