The Steps, by Sylvester Stallone | Free Audiobook
The story behind the most famous staircase in film
Everybody knows the image before they know the story: a man in a grey tracksuit running up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Steps is Sylvester Stallone's own account of how he got there, and the answer is nothing like a straight line.
He starts at the beginning, and the beginning is rough: a difficult birth that left him with a paralysed face, a childhood that was hard in ways he describes without self-pity, and years at school being treated as a problem rather than a student. From there the book follows him to New York in 1969 with very little money and no plan B, and ends at the 1977 Academy Awards, which is as far as this arc needs to go: the years in between are the steps themselves, taken one at a time.
Two things make the audio edition its own object. Stallone reads it himself, which means the pauses and the emphasis come from the man who lived it, and the score is new music written for this recording by Bill Conti, the composer of Rocky. Listening to the story of the steps with that music underneath it is a different experience from reading it. It runs 9 hrs and 4 mins.
Memoirs read by the person who wrote them live or die on honesty, and this one has a specific advantage that no other edition can offer: the music underneath it was written for the book by Bill Conti, the composer behind the score of Rocky. That detail is not marketing, it is the reason to choose audio here.
The fifty years since that run up the museum steps have turned the staircase into a shorthand for persistence, and Stallone's book is an attempt to unpack what the shorthand hides. What he describes is not a smooth ascent. There is the difficult birth that left part of his face paralysed, a childhood he does not sentimentalise, and school years spent being misunderstood. The book is framed deliberately between two dates, his arrival in New York with almost nothing in 1969 and the moment Rocky won at the Academy Awards in 1977, which keeps it focused on the struggle rather than the victory lap.
What he is really writing about is the distance between where you are and where you want to be, and the price of closing it. Readers who expect a career-spanning chronicle of the later films will not find one here, and that is worth knowing before you start: this is the story of the years when nobody was watching, told by someone with a lot of hindsight and very little interest in flattering himself.
I have to be straight about one thing, because it is the honest way to review a book that came out today: there is no settled critical consensus yet. What exists is an early audience, and the early audience is enthusiastic. The Audible page sits at five stars from a small number of ratings, which is the sound of people who chose it on purpose. The one verifiable production detail that everybody keeps mentioning is the Conti score, which is confirmed by the publisher and appears in every edition listing I checked.
So treat this as a strong recommendation with an open question attached. If you have ever found the staircase image a bit cheap as motivation, the book is the argument for why it is not. And if you like a famous life told in the voice of the person who lived it, the site also has Dolly Parton's Songteller, which does something very similar with a very different career.
The Steps is Sylvester Stallone's memoir about the years before anyone knew his name, framed between his arrival in New York in 1969 and the night Rocky won at the Academy Awards in 1977. He reads it himself, and the recording comes with new music by Bill Conti, the composer of the original Rocky score.
It is not a career chronicle: it is the story of a difficult birth, a difficult childhood and a long stretch of nobody believing in him, and of what he did with the distance between where he was and where he wanted to be.
What makes the audio edition its own object is the combination: the man who lived the story reading it, over new music written for the book by the composer who scored the film it all leads to. That is a production only one title could justify, and nobody has ever been able to accuse Stallone of lacking ambition.
It runs 9 hrs and 4 mins, published by William Morrow. With the free trial, you can pick any title you want, this one included, cancel whenever you like, and the audiobook stays in your library after the trial ends.
Start your free trial, cancellable at any time
Some links on this page are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.
More Biographies & Memoirs Audiobooks
