Music

Dylan, the Fugs and rock'n'roll riots: the wild life of Larry 'Ratso' Sloman


Late on a Sunday morning in February, in the 2nd Avenue Deli in Manhattan, it is hard not to notice Larry “Ratso” Sloman. There’s the unkempt hair, the wild beard, the fact that, in his garishly patterned suit, he doesn’t blend in with the brunchers. And there is the fact that, in this crowded eating spot, he is not only being interviewed but also being filmed for a documentary. Not that the deli’s staff seem to mind: as well as our sandwiches, we also get a stream of complementaries, finishing with a huge piece of chocolate babka and chocolate egg creams for each of us.

Over the ensuing two hours – in a more or less unbroken monologue – Ratso will range over how he got his first writing assignment for Rolling Stone by being present when the crowd at the 1970 Summerfest in Milwaukee erupted when a drugged-out Sly Stone came on stage 90 minutes late and left after moments (“they started tearing down the fences, setting fire to things”); how to deal with Bob Dylan (“I’d kid with him: ‘Ah, you’re just a midwest Jew; you’re not like a New York Jew”); about going to Leonard Cohen’s house (“There’s Leonard, with four or five ladies. He’s singing, he’s playing Jew’s harp, there are 10 empty bottles of wine on the table”); about getting Mike Tyson to read Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (“He goes: ‘Why did you send me that book? Did you think I was a superman?’ And I said: ‘No, man, I thought you were just a guy that could get some solace from it’”).

But the monologue’s real subject is how Ratso – a journalist, author and ghostwriter for Howard Stern, Tyson, Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Peter Criss of Kiss – comes to be releasing his first album at the age of 68. Stubborn Heart is a distinctly Cohenesque collection of lugubrious love songs, with eight Sloman originals and a cover of Dylan’s epic Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. Nick Cave duets on Our Lady of Light, and it is testament to the album’s quality that it doesn’t feel as if he is slumming it.

So how did Ratso – the nickname Joan Baez gave him for his hustling attitude – get here? “It’s a long story,” he says. The short version is that he had been hanging out with the Brooklyn indie rock set, where he met Vin Cacchione of Caged Animals. He had some songs and Cacchione suggested going into the studio to demo them. “He said: ‘You have a unique voice.’ Unique? What does that mean? Unique like Florence Foster Jenkins?” Before he knew it, he had an album.

But it goes back before then. In the mid-80s, Ratso wrote lyrics for three songs recorded by his friend John Cale, including Dying on the Vine. Except it goes back before then, too – to the first lyric he wrote, when he was embedded on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. He had been sent to Boston ahead of the tour, to scope it out for the film crew making what became Dylan’s movie Renaldo and Clara.

“They said: ‘Ratso, check out the scene. We want strippers and hookers for a scene in a hotel room.’ So I went to every club, every hangout, and where all the strippers went for breakfast at four in the morning. And this area [the city’s red light district] was called the Combat Zone. I thought: ‘This would be a great title for a song.’ A week or so later, when we were on a train ride from Toronto to Montreal, I showed Dylan the lyrics, and he says: ‘Hey, these are good, man.’ Dylan said they’re good? I’ll keep doing it.”

Ratso was initially assigned by Rolling Stone to cover the tour; the commission was dropped, but Ratso remained, writing On the Road With Bob Dylan, one of the classic rock books. To get invited on the tour he had to have some means of impressing Dylan. He had been up at Columbia Records, where he had seen news of a new Dylan album – what became Blood on the Tracks – written on a board. A while later, walking down Fifth Avenue, he saw Dylan sitting in a parked car. “So I go over to him. ‘Hey Bob, Larry Sloman. I work with Rolling Stone. I hear you’re doing a new album, I’d love to do a preview of it.’ He goes: ‘How do you know that?’ I said: ‘By the way, my roommate’s Phil Ochs.’ He immediately asked: ‘How’s Phil doing?’ So many people have said Phil killed himself because Bob wouldn’t let him go on the Rolling Thunder tour. Which is such complete, utter bullshit. Of course there was friendly competition between the two of them, but they loved each other.” Dylan let Ratso write the preview, loved the piece, and the tour invitation was forthcoming.

Nick Cave with Ratso Sloman

Nick Cave with Sloman fooling around together. Photograph: Instagram/@larry_ratso_sloman

It goes back even further, to the late 60s, when the teenaged Sloman would hang around the anarchist activist Abbie Hoffman and see the Fugs perform at the Players theater in Greenwich Village. “Abbie was a Jewish role model for me. He was a Jewish warrior, a fearless guy. It was inspiring to be around someone who was fighting for social change. Embedded in my father was that notion of ‘Don’t deviate, don’t do anything wrong.’ The idea is that you never know when there’s going to be a knock on the door in the middle of the night. So he wanted to know: ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you involved with this anti-war stuff?’ To me, I’m not going to be that kind of Jew – I’m going to be a fearless Jew like Abbie.”

Really, Stubborn Heart goes all the way back to Ratso’s early childhood. “When I was kid, I used to imitate Elvis. My parents would call in the neighbours and I’d be in front of them with a broom, in front of the TV set, singing Love Me Tender. I always had that ham in me. I didn’t know how far this would go; I was happy just to get these songs out.”

He pauses for a moment, reflecting on what it might mean: releasing an album after 68 years of becoming the person who could write one. “One of the guys from the album was saying, ‘Ratso, we have to start performing.’ What? Am I gonna go on the road? Every day I wake up, it’s like Leonard sang: ‘I ache in the places where I used to play.’ That’s me, every day. What am I gonna do, have a rider that asks for prostate medicine?”

He laughs. It would take more than an elderly man’s prostate to stop Larry Sloman doing exactly what he wants.

Stubborn Heart is released on Lucky Number on 5 April



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