(Melville House)

www.mhpbooks.com

BY JAKE CLINE

It should be so easy to live the life of a rock star: You get invited to all the best parties, women on every continent want to sleep with you, money is regularly dumped into your bank account by the ton and you can dress like a colorblind space alien and still look cool. Why then, do so many otherwise gifted people continue to screw up what has to be the best job in the world?

By now, the answers to that question - drug addiction; sexual mischief; misspent riches; unstable, titanic egos - have become as clichéd as most rock stars themselves. And no matter how many books or movies attempt to dramatize these tales of rock 'n' roll excess, the story rarely changes: A musician rises. A musician falls. And if he doesn't die young and leave a good-looking corpse, the musician grows old and rises again.

The familiarity of this story both works for and against Ben Greenman in his new novel, Please Step Back, which charts the ascent and decline of a 1960s soul-rock icon who calls himself Rock Foxx. Born Robert Franklin in Boston, Foxx is a gifted musician and songwriter who breathes in the electric, anxious air of the decade and breathes out music of universal appeal and wild ambition. "For me, a group of people is a problem, not a solution," Foxx explains to a bandmate after hearing Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready" at a party. "The only thing that works to fix it is music. I know that it's what will unbar the doors."

As an African-American fronting a multiracial band at the height of the Civil Rights Era, Foxx is determined to unbar stereotypes and prejudices with an uncompromising vision and a wicked, daring irreverence. He wants to call his first album A Place in the Sun and feature on its cover "the white band members standing in the shade, the black ones in the sunlight." The obvious and presumably intentional Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone parallels don't hinder Greenman's presentation of Foxx as a cultural fire-starter; the author deftly weaves Foxx's story in with that of his '60s peers, many of whom he views as competition for artistic dominance. (In one clever passage, Foxx turns down an invitation to play Woodstock because he "was so far ahead, so high above, so great beyond.")

Greenman, an editor at The New Yorker and the author of four previous books, is also wise not to let his novel turn into a soul version of Forrest Gump.  The pivotal moments of the 1960s - the King and Kennedy assassinations, the escalation of the war in Vietnam - all make cameos in Please Step Back, but Greenman doesn't attempt to mine these events for new insights or profundities. There's little ore left in that ground, anyway. Instead, the injustices of the decade only fuel Foxx's anger, which in turn sparks his music and feeds his success. That success, of course, leads to Foxx's eventual unraveling, as the songs stop coming and the drugs grow more powerful.

The central problem with Please Step Back, however, is not the predictable arc of the plot or the well-excavated terrain, but with the characterization of Foxx himself. Prone to talking in riddles and puns - "I'm the voice of a regeneration," "No time for games, Skip James" - Foxx often comes across as a cartoon version of a rock star, a species that needs no animated embellishment.  Even though Greenman takes pains to reveal Foxx's inner life - "you're goddamn right I'm confused. That's what helps me see so clearly," Foxx says - the character doesn't engender much sympathy.  Foxx is an easy person to like, but caring about him is another matter.

Greenman is more successful in his portrait of Foxx's wife, a levelheaded, Chicago-born beauty named Betty Cobham. If Foxx is a meteor, Betty is the Earth, and when her husband crashes into her, he leaves not a crater but a dent, so strong is her resolve and her desire to live a real life with a man for whom reality is only a memory. Betty becomes the true soul of Please Step Back, and when Greenman lets you feel what she's feeling, hurt when she's hurting, a standard story becomes a refreshingly original one.