About Ratso
Artist Biography
Larry "Ratso" Sloman is an author, journalist, editor, song and screenwriter, actor, ghostwriter, and recording artist. More than all of these, however, is his role as a chronicler and witness to New York's cultural scene since the 1970s. Sloman's illustrious nickname was given to him by Joni Mitchell on a bleary morning in 1975, when he was a scribe covering Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Tour for Rolling Stone. Invited by Dylan himself, Sloman crawled out of his car one morning looking particularly disheveled; when Mitchell saw him, she exclaimed: "Look everybody, it's Ratso." (for Ratzo Rizzo, Dustin Hoffman's character in Midnight Cowboy). The name stuck, and in Sloman's case, it changed the tour for him and, ultimately, his life. Before the incident, he was regarded as an "outsider," but afterward, he got on the tour's per diem payroll, became the gossip columnist for the tour, assisted in scripting and filming the infamous four-hour Dylan cinematic document of the tour, Renaldo and Clara, and penned what Dylan dubbed "the War and Peace of rock and roll," On the Road with Bob Dylan. It was Sloman's first book, and it put him on the map. He has since co-written best-selling memoirs with Howard Stern (Miss America and Private Parts), Anthony Kiedis, David Blaine, Mike Tyson, and Abbie Hoffman; penned Reefer Madness: The History of Marijuana in America, and Thin Ice: A Season in Hell with the New York Rangers. His collaborative tome The Secret Life of Harry Houdini is a biography with magic historian and theorist William Kalush that became a major motion picture for which he wrote the screenplay. Sloman has also penned songs --including "Dying on the Vine" with John Cale, Rick Derringer, and co-directed the award-winning music video for Dylan's "Jokerman" with famed art director George Lois. He is also, for the curious, the inspiration behind the Ratso character in old friend and compadre Kinky Friedman's detective novels. (Sloman's search for his birth mother is the subject of the author/songwriter's novel God Bless John Wayne. At age 70, Sloman became a recording artist, cutting the album Stubborn Heart for London's Lucky Number label.
Sloman was born in Queens, New York in 1950 to American-born Ashkenazic Jews, his father was a salesman in the garment district and his mother was a bookkeeper. Sloman attended Queens College, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in Sociology. After a year in VISTA in lieu of military service in Vietnam, he accepted a National Institute for Mental Health fellowship at University of Wisconsin at Madison where he earned a master’s degree in Deviance and Criminology, disciplines that have informed his work ever since. In high school and college, Sloman was an excellent student who readily indulged his growing fascination with the counterculture. He hung around Ed Sanders' (Fugs) Peace Eye Bookstore and the offices of the East Village Other, an underground newspaper. One of his first pieces for the paper was documenting Abbie Hoffman's and the Yippies' historic Wall St. incident where he and a slew of friends tossed dollar bills to the scrambling traders below.
Sloman and Friedman became lifelong friends when he went to see Kinky Friedman & the Texas Jewboys perform at Max's Kansas City at the suggestion of the great blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield. Sloman had also known Dylan from N.Y.C.'s folk scene. The songwriter had been contacted by Rolling Stone to document the 1975 Rolling Thunder Tour, which resulted in On the Road with Bob Dylan. The book, published in 1978, is regarded as a classic of gonzo rock journalism and has been in print steadily since it appeared. His Reefer Madness: The History of Marijuana in America came about because Tuli Kupferberg (Fugs) who had been approached by Bobbs-Merrill to pen it, didn't want to, and suggested Sloman. The journalist also penned Thin Ice: A Season in Hell with the New York Rangers in 1982. He served as an editor at both High Times and National Lampoon, and wrote songs with Cale and Rick Derringer. In the late '80s he and Hoffman collaborated on the history of the N.Y.C. counterculture and Yippie movement called Steal This Dream. Sloman came by the two Stern memoirs almost by accident. He was working in an office in the same building as Stern's studio and listened to the show each day. One day, he heard the DJ say he wanted to write a book and Sloman jumped at the opportunity. His and Stern's agents connected and two number one best-sellers -- Private Parts and Miss America -- resulted, and Sloman penned an early draft of the screenplay for Private Parts. He was chosen for the job as Tyson's collaborator for Unfinished Life out of 15 writers because he'd sent the boxer a copy of Frederick Nietzsche's Ecce Homo while he was in prison. During the job interview he reminded Tyson he had sent the book. When he was about to leave, Tyson asked if he'd sent the book because he thought the boxer was Superman. Sloman replied that he sent the book because he thought Tyson got screwed by the justice system and thought the book would lift his spirits.
In 2006, Sloman and William Kalush penned one of the definitive Houdini tomes in The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero. Leonard Cohen, for whom Sloman penned the preface to the tourbook On Tour with Leonard Cohen, told him not to say anything bad about the great magician. Ratso has also acted in films as diverse as the award-winning short The Black Balloon and the horror film Satan’s Little Helper, and he undertook a large role in Martin Scorsese's Netflix documentary Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story.
In the '80s Sloman, while deeply involved in writing songs with Cale, filed away many of his own songs and went back to writing books. In 2013 he started co-hosting an Internet radio show with New York magazine editor/writer Mark Jacobson. One night they had a guest who had written a book about Gram Parsons, and a few musician friends came with him to play some of Parsons' songs. They were Mendoza Line's Tim Bracy and Elizabeth Nelson. The trio started hanging out and eventually wrote songs together. A year later Sloman met Vin Cacchione (Soft Black, Caged Animals). Sloman had been revisiting his old songs and lyrics and was determined to finally do something with them. His idea was to emulate Friedman's notion of getting famous friends to sing his songs and put out a tribute album to himself (he's made two). Sloman approached Cacchione and asked if he could come into his Duct Tape Studios and cut a demo. They did a version of "Dying on the Vine" and when they played it back, the producer asked Sloman just to sing on the album because he loved his voice. Although Sloman still didn't have the confidence to commit to singing on a whole album, he brought "Dying on the Vine" to friend and producer Hal Willner. His reply to Sloman's question about singing on a whole album was "What are you waiting for?"
Cacchione and Sloman went to work. They cut one old unrecorded song, "Our Lady of Light," and asked pal Nick Cave to duet on it (he appears in the video as well). The producer assembled a band of Brooklyn musicians, as well as Warren Ellis and Cohen's longtime collaborator Sharon Robinson. Entitled Stubborn Heart, the album consists of songs penned with Cale, Bracy, and Cacchione, as well as including a provocative cover of Dylan's 11-minute, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands." Completed in 2014, it was released in 2019 by Lucky Number. ~ Thom Jurek
Genre
Dance
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