Melville House Books

The one and only

As our intrepid author Ben Greenman begins his book tour for Please Step Back, Time Out New York chimes in with a profile noting that the novel started as something altogether different: “as a biography of the soul-funk legend Sly Stone,” with Greenman “logging countless hours poring over microfilm and old TV interview clips at public libraries in order to capture the life of this enigmatic musician who spoke in riddles and lived the quintessential flame-in, flame-out life of sex, drugs and rock & roll superstardom.”

It didn’t work, though. “I didn’t like the restrictions of the biography format,” Greenman says. He says it curtailed him from being able to examine what really interested him about certain musicians of the era: “a lot of the people this is loosely based on peaked, then vanished in odd ways, falling prey to addiction or to ego or to money problems or to bad management. I was thinking about how that happens — how someone can make great work for quite a long time and then the light switch just gets snapped off.”

In the end, “while history informs Please, and many real-life figures (Allen Ginsberg, Mick Jagger) pop up in the narrative, Greenman decided to take a fictional route, making frontman and protagonist Rock Foxx a composite character: Sly Stone with a pinch of Curtis Mayfield,” says the report. In fact, the piece includes an mp3 playlist of pop songs from the era that feature in the book so you could see what serious musicians of the time were up against. In the Year 2525, anyone?

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.