When the closing credits roll on Marty Supreme, the first name to appear is, of course, Timothée Chalamet. He’s the star of the film, one of the most famous actors alive today, and his performance as an early Fifties table-tennis champ is quite possibly going to win him an Academy Award. But the second name listed — the actor who plays the uncle of Chalamet’s character — is someone the general public is much less likely to recognize: Larry Sloman.
To a very specific fanbases, however, he’s a legend. The Bob Dylan fan community knows him as “Ratso,” the Rolling Stone journalist who accompanied Bob Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue and penned one of the greatest Dylan books every published, On the Road with Bob Dylan. (Joan Baez gave him the nickname because he reminded her of Dustin Hoffman’s character in Midnight Cowboy.)
Howard Stern fanatics know him as the co-writer of Private Parts and Miss America, two of the most successful books of the Nineties. If you’re fascinated by Seventies drug culture, you’ve likely read his book Reefer Madness: The History of Marijuana in America. He also co-wrote the Anthony Keidis book Scar Tissue, David Blaine’s Mysterious Stranger: A Book of Magic, Mike Tyson’s Undisputed Truth, and Steal This Dream: Abbie Hoffman and the Countercultural Revolution in America.
If all of this weren’t enough, Sloman also edited The National Lampoon for a number of years, wrote songs with John Cale in the 1980s, and released the album Stubborn Heart in 2019 where he duets with Nick Cave and others.
Many articles over the years have compared him to Woody Allen’s character Zelig, but that almost understates just how many famous people he’s worked with and befriended over the past half-century. Somehow or another, he seems to know everyone.
“I don’t know how that happened,” Sloman says. “I mean, sometimes I think about it to myself. ‘Wait a minute, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, these are all the people I admired growing up. Am I blessed?’ I don’t know. I was just in the right place at the right time.”
We hopped on a Zoom with the man known as Ratso to hear the backstory of eight of his more memorable encounters, and even these only represent a tiny fraction of the crazy stories he’s amassed over the course of his life.
‘Marty Supreme’ & the Safdie Brothers
I’ve known the Safdie Brothers for years. I first met them when my friend Rick Meyerowitz, who was a great illustrator for The Lampoon, did a coffee-table book, and they had a big thing at the public library [in 2010] where they brought in all the ex-editors. I was the last one before the Lampoon was sold, so I spoke last. One of the things I was most proud of at the Lampoon was I brought in comics like Richard Belzer and Gilbert Gottfried. And so just in the spirit of that, what we did, I wanted to recite Gilbert Gottfried’s favorite dirty jokes.
The audience that day was half old women with blue hair who come to everything. They were like, “Oh my.” The other half are young people, and they’re loving it. So, about a week later I’m walking in Soho and I see this kid come up to me. It’s Josh Safdie. And he says, “Ratso, we saw you at the thing on the Lampoon at the public library. Oh man, you were so funny. Would you want to be in our next movie?”
I didn’t know who he was. I said, “Send me one of your films.” I couldn’t believe the first feature film they did was at Cannes Film Festival. So, I called back and I said, “Yeah, I’ll be in it.” It was The Black Balloon. I played a shock jock like Howard Stern. It was so much fun.
And then whenever they would do a movie afterwards, they would have me make a cameo. Uncut Gems thing was funny because I have one scene with Adam Sandler. We’re in the Diamond Center and I’m walking towards him. I’m supposed to say, “Good Pesach.” And he says, “Thanks, Larry.” So after about four or five takes, I say, “Good Pesach.” And he goes, “Oh, you’re a Jew again, Larry.” And it was great ad lib and everybody loved it. About a month or so later, I get a call from Josh. He said, “You’re not going to believe this. We sent out the film to get the trailer made. It comes back and the first scene in the trailer is you and Adam.”
For Marty Supreme I get a call maybe six months ago. Josh goes, “Ratso, I have a great role for you. This is not a cameo. This is going to be a real role. You’re going to play Timothée Chalamet’s uncle and it’s an important scene, but there’s one big ask I have. It’s set in the 1950s, so you have to cut your hair.”
Now, I hadn’t cut my hair in God knows how long, just out of inertia. But by that time, I was so fed up with it I just said, “I’ll do it.” And not only did I do it, and my wife was so thrilled with this, but I had my hair cut by a woman who had won three Oscars for haircutting.
I shot all my scenes in two days. I was often just sitting there with Timothée. All he wanted to do was talk about Dylan. On the second day, I gave him a copy of my Dylan book. He says, “Oh my God, this is incredible.”
The first scene was in my office upstairs at the shoe store. And so I’m sitting at the desk and I have my script in front of me because nobody would see it. We do three, four takes, and then Josh comes in and he goes, “Ratso, give me the script for a second.” And I give him the script and he rips it up. He says, “Fuck the script. This is what I want to concentrate on. Just hit these two points.” And it was liberating. I was able to then just get into this Jewish character, which is not a stretch for me.
The ‘Rolling Stone’ Years
In 1973, I was taking a three-year PhD program in Madison. I went to the office of the Daily Cardinal, which is a school newspaper, and I said, “I’ll be here for the next three years. Do you guys have a music editor?” And they said, “No. You want to be one?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” Next day, I sent letters to all the record companies telling them I’m the new music editor of The Daily Cardinal. I start getting album after album after album for free.
Summerfest takes place in Milwaukee that summer. I drive down because Sly and the Family Stone were supposed to be the headliners. And the kids in Milwaukee, much more than the kids in Madison, were crazy. I went to a couple of anti-war demonstrations in Milwaukee, and I remember walking by the big administration buildings on campus, all glass buildings. And I hear one of the leaders of the march blow a whistle. He goes, “Okay, now!” And everybody takes out rocks and they break the windows. I said, “Holy shit, we never did this in New York. These people are crazy.”
I’m there to see Sly. And of course, Sly is in the throes of his crack days, and he’s two hours late, and he plays two songs, and then he walks off. So what do they do? They start burning the stage down. It was like insane. I go back to Madison and I call up Rolling Stone. I said, “I’m the editor of the Daily Cardinal in Madison. I was at the event, and I wondered if you’d like an article about it.” And they said, “Sure, do it on spec.”
I meet with the PR person for Summerfest with this big Sony handheld tape recorder. I had it on record, but she’s not telling me anything. I said, “All right, well, thanks so much.” I unplug it, but I didn’t turn it off. The battery is running. So then she says, “Oh, well, now I’ll tell you…” That’s how I got that piece. And then they gave me another assignment.
And I did a preview of Lou Reed’s Berlin for Rolling Stone. That album just blew me away. I thought that was brilliant. At the time, every other rock critic was saying it was shit. But they actually made a poster that they put in all the subways that quoted me. It said, “Berlin will be the Sgt. Pepper of the ’70s.” They took that out of context, because I was saying it was the album that would capture the zeitgeist in the Seventies. So Sgt. Pepper was peace, love, and this is a bisexual couple killing each other.
Lou Reed didn’t talk to me for six years after that, until I started working with John Cale as a lyricist. And then, all of a sudden, I got some respect back from Lou.
Meeting George Harrison
George Harrison was touring and Ben Fong-Torres covered the first gig on the West Coast. And I guess they had a bug up their ass about Harrison since he wasn’t playing many Beatles songs. That was a big criticism. So I come on and I pick up the tour on the East Coast, and I’m a pariah. I mean, it’s like, “Oh, for Rolling Stone, fuck those guys…” That’s because the piece had come out already. So thank God, Bill Graham was the greatest. I became very close friends with him. Graham says, “Look, go with us to Long Island and then we’ll come back to the city and I’ll get you an interview with Harrison. Don’t worry about it, kid.”
I come to the show at the Garden. Bill comes over and he goes, “Come on, I’m going to take you to talk to Harrison now.” So, we go down to one of the dressing rooms in the basement, and I walk in and it’s got all these incense and all these rugs, and all this Hindu shit. And he looked at me so warily. And I said, “Hey, George.” And I figured, “How am I going to break the ice?” I said, “Have you heard the new Dylan album?” And he goes, “Yeah.” I said, “How great is ‘Tangled Up In Blue?’” And we start singing the song together. We had a great time.
I do the piece, and they fuck with the content and leave my name. But I had my original draft. I sent it to him in the U.K. Years later, I bumped into George at the Bottom Line. He says, “Thank God, you sent me the original article because I thought you were a real schmuck.”
Bob Dylan and ‘Blood on the Tracks’
I was in New York in 1974. I was coming to visit the Rolling Stone office on 5th Avenue. I pass Elizabeth Arden, which is a great place for women to get all the hair blown out and whatever. I look to my left and there’s a guy parked right outside of Elizabeth Arden. It’s Bob Dylan.
A week earlier, I visited Sony Records. I said to them, “Is there anything new coming? Anything I should write an article about?” They say, “Let us think about it.” But I look at the chalkboard and I see, “Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks.” I knew he was in town.
So, when I see him, I walk over and say, “My name’s Larry Sloman. I write for Rolling Stone magazine. I’d love to do a piece on the making of Blood on the Tracks.” And he goes, “How do you know what I’m playing? How do you know I’m recording?”
I figured I had to do something, like I did with Harrison. I had to change the subject. I said, “Oh, by the way, Phil Ochs is my roommate.” And he was. I inherited an apartment in Soho from Phil and Jerry Rubin. Jerry Rubin decided he was moving to California and Phil had nowhere to go. I said, “Phil, just stay here as long as you want.” So when I said to Bob, “Phil’s my roommate,” he melts immediately. He goes, “Oh man, how’s Phil doing? Say hello from me.”
I got word to Bob to call me. I was at the Rolling Stone office. It was just me and the publisher. It was like 6 o’clock at night. Everybody had gone home, and the phone rings. And I answered it and heard, “We have a person-to-person call for Larry Sloman from Bob Dylan. Will you accept the charges?” And I said, “Yeah.” And so, that [Blood on the Tracks] piece came out, and he liked it a lot.
A year or so later, Bob was in New York working with Jacques Levy on Desire. And Roger McGuinn comes into town and he says to me, “I’m just sitting in Gerde’s Folk City. Come to me, and then afterwards we can go out for dinner.” So, we see him at Folk City, and he’s got this incredible suitcase that was the first mobile phones. He’s a high-tech, crazy guy.
We went to Chinatown for dinner, him and his road manager. And I said, “Hey, Roger, why don’t we stop by the Other End because I hear Bob’s there with your friend, Jacques Levy.” We walk to the back and we look over and there’s a big table and Dylan and Louie Kemp, who would become my nemesis on that tour. Bob goes to McGuinn, “Roger, we’ve been waiting for you all night.” Roger says, “And you know Larry Sloman. He did the piece on you.” Bob goes, “Oh man, I love that piece. You’ve got to come with us on this tour. You’ve got to document this tour.” That’s how it happened.
Howard Stern’s ‘Private Parts’
Howard is just an absolute workaholic. We spent two years working together on Private Parts. I would come up after the radio show was over. Ronnie was still his limo driver, and we would drive out because he was still living out in Long Island. We would go to the basement, we would sit down, and we’d start working. We would work through for four or five hours straight. And finally I said, “Howard, I’m hungry.” He was on this crazy diet. So, he says, “You want some walnuts?”
We had an incredible time working on this thing. We wanted to call it Mein Kampf, but the publisher wouldn’t let us. And then comes the day the book is going to be released. We get in the car at the radio studio, Ronnie’s driving, he’s going up 50-something street right before we hit 5th Avenue, because that’s where the book signing is at the Barnes & Noble. It’s so crowded and crazy. The traffic is stuck. And Ronnie says, “Why don’t you guys just walk the other half?” And so we get out, we start walking, and we hit 5th Avenue, and we see thousands of people in line.
And he was such a trouper. He would sit there for hours and hours and hours and sign books and take pictures. He really has a deep, deep affinity for his fans, and his super fans.
In recent years, I would hear him talk about [how he has mixed feelings about the book now due to its salacious content] on the air. I e-mailed him about it. He goes, “Ratso, this is not a rap on you. I think we did a great job. It was some of the greatest experience of my life, but I just changed a lot. Don’t take it as I’m dissing you at all.”
The Voices of Anthony Kiedis and Mike Tyson
I actually learned a lot when I was going to do that book [Scar Tissue] in terms of celebrity books. I had to come out to L.A. and I rented a place. Anthony said, “Ratso, I’ve got to postpone it a day because we’re doing a Best Of, and they want two new Chili Peppers songs.”
The next day he calls me, he says, “We’re still working on these songs,” and this goes on for a week. I’m sitting in this place and I said, “What could I do? I’m just wasting my time.” So I said to him, “Anthony, take your time. What about if I just start interviewing all your close friends, all your lovers, all your this and that?” And he goes, “Well, that’s a good idea.” And that’s what I did.
So I had a template. I learned this also from working with Mike Tyson. When somebody is a factotum to a person like Tyson, they will remember everything, every last detail, because this is the greatest point in their life. So one time I was sitting with Mike in his house in Vegas, and there’s a knock on the door, and it’s one of his factotums from back in the day, and he goes, “Hey, this is Ratso. He’s writing the book. Tell him everything about me and you when we were together, blah, blah, blah.”
And then the guy goes, “Okay, did you tell Ratso about the time that you kicked Don King in the afro so hard that dust came out?” And Mike goes, “Oh, I forgot about that.” Once you have all these other perspectives, it makes it much easier when you actually sit down and do the interviewing.
People always ask, “How were you able to get Howard Stern’s voice? How were you able to get Anthony Kiedis’ voice?” It’s not their voices. I just do so many hours of interviews that I just basically constructed it from them. And Anthony was such a great guy too.
Ratso in the Studio
I was first inspired to write songs on the Rolling Thunder Revue. One of the reasons they kept me on that tour was because I had brought a lot of good people to be interviewed for what would become [the Dylan film] Renaldo and Clara, the six-hour…whatever you want to call it. I mean, I loved it, but so many people hated it. They hated it with a vengeance.
They wanted to do a scene with prostitutes. And they sent me out into what I called “the combat zone” to round a bunch of them up. They canceled the scene, but I still had the material. So I decided, “Hey, this is going to be a good song called ‘The Combat Song.’” So I wrote the song.
On the train from Toronto to Montreal, I went up to Bob and I said, “Hey, man, I wrote a song.” Bob read the lyrics. He goes, “Man, this is good. This reminds me of ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.’”
So, now I have this validation. When I came off the tour, I was talking to my friend, Liz Derringer, who was married at the time to Rick Derringer. And she says, “Rick always is looking for good lyrics. Maybe you and he should work together.” We started writing. We wrote a bunch of songs together and it was really a lot of fun.
I was at the Lone Star Cafe one night and I met John Cale who came to see the Kinky Friedman show. And Cale says the same thing, “Let’s work together.” And so we started doing work on that.
Years later, I met these musicians at the KGB bar. They were like, “We grew up on your Dylan book. You’ve got to hang out with us in Brooklyn. There’s a whole cool scene there.” So, I did that and I started going to these crazy clubs, all illegal clubs, and you’d go upstairs and then they’d look at me like, “What’s this old guy doing?” They figure one of my daughters or sons are playing. And I’m on the guest list.
At one of them, I met Shilpa Ray. She’s from Jersey, a strict Hindu family. A friend of mine was doing a tribute to Sly and the Family Stone, and the third person on was her. This tiny little girl starts belting out “Everyday People,” and it just blew my mind. I went backstage afterwards and I said, “Who’s this girl?” He says, “I don’t know. Somebody told me she was good, so I put her on.”
She introduced me to Vin Cacchione, who has this great group, Caged Animals. I said to Vin I was thinking about maybe getting back to music, because once Cale left New York and went out to L.A., that was the end of me being involved in creating music. I said to him, “Let’s do one song. Let’s do a demo.” I thought we could use Kinky Friedman’s playbook, which would be get all your famous people to sing your songs to do a tribute album to yourself. Vin says to me, “Why are you having other people sing the songs? You got a very unique voice. You should sing the songs.”
Kinky Friedman, left, with Sloman in 1982.
John Kisch Archive/Getty Images
I said, “Okay, I’m going to see my friend Hal Wilner. He’s an incredibly well-respected producer. He’ll give it to me straight.” So we go up to Hal’s studio and I said, “Hal, I want you to hear this,” and he sits back, closes his eyes, this is the way he always would listen to music. He finally opens his eyes and he goes, “What are you waiting for?” I took that as a yes.
We started doing the album with Vin. We recorded it all at his home studio in Bushwick. And then we got an album deal with Lucky Number in the U.K. And what’s crazy is that, with no real promotion at all, it’s had over two million hits, which I made 15 cents, but it was incredible that is still to this day, still racking up millions.
I’m still in contact with Bob Dylan through his manager Jeff. When I was working on this album, I was in Vegas doing a second book with Mike Tyson. I got a call from Jeff, “Bob wants you to come to the show.” He was playing at some casino in Vegas. I get there and the road manager says, “Do you want to say hi to Bob now or when the show’s over?” And I said, “Nah, wait for the show is done. I don’t want to bother him before the show.”
They set me up by the soundboard. The road manager says, “When you hear ‘It Ain’t Me,’ Babe, start coming back and then I’ll set you up.” That means you’re going to be standing somewhere and Bob’s going to come up to you when he’s leaving. He leaves while people are still applauding. He doesn’t stay around.
So I hear the correct song. Everything’s dark. I see a little searchlight, and the searchlight is bringing Bob to me. Now, Bob is terribly nearsighted and he never wears his glasses on stage. So it takes him a little while to see me. Now, I’m known for my outfits, because my wife is from New Orleans. We often go to this place Soul Train Fashions, and get 10 suits, zoot suits, all real crazy suits. And so I’m wearing one of those suits and Bob comes up to me, he looks at me, he goes, “Oh man, you should be dressing me.”
I start telling him about my album. I have a duet with Nick Cave. And I had a duet with Yasmine Hamdan, who’s a great Arabic singer. I’m telling him all this stuff, and I see him tensing up because he thinks the next question is, “Will you sing one of my songs?”
I said, “And I want you to…write the liner notes.” And he looks relieved. He goes, “I don’t know if I could fuckin’ write good liner notes.” I said, “World Gone Wrong?” He goes, “Oh yeah, you’re right.” So that was it. But he never wrote the liner notes.
