Sloman was born into a middle-class
Jewish family from
Queens. In 1969, he graduated from
Queens College, City University of New York, Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with a B.A. in Sociology. He then earned a master's degree in Deviance and Criminology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His nickname Ratso came from
Joan Baez who said Sloman looked like
Dustin Hoffman's character Ratso Rizzo in
Midnight Cowboy (1969). He wrote for
Rolling Stone,
Crawdaddy, and
Creem in the 1970s. In 1984, he co-wrote two songs with Welsh
rock musician
John Cale for his ninth solo studio album
Caribbean Sunset, and that same year he co-wrote the studio track "Ooh La La" with Cale on his otherwise live album
John Cale Comes Alive, which was also released as a single. The following year, he co-wrote the entirety of Cale's studio album
Artificial Intelligence. He collaborated with
Howard Stern on the radio personality's two best-selling books,
Private Parts (1993) and
Miss America (1995). He also appears in all of
Kinky Friedman's mystery novels as the Dr. Watson to Kinky's Sherlock. Sloman wrote an account of
Bob Dylan's 1975
Rolling Thunder Revue tour,
On the Road with Bob Dylan. He also penned
Reefer Madness (1979), a history of
marijuana use in the
United States;
Thin Ice: A Season in Hell with the New York Rangers, a 1982 on- and off-ice account of the
1979–80 New York Rangers season; and
Steal This Dream, an oral biography of political and social activist
Abbie Hoffman. His book
The Secret Life of Houdini, written with magic historian William Kalush, presented research that attempted to prove that early 20th-century American magician
Harry Houdini was a spy. The authors also raised the possibility that Houdini had been murdered by a cabal of
Spiritualists, prompting Houdini's great-nephew to call for an exhumation of the magician's body to test for poisoning. Sloman's other collaborations include
Mysterious Stranger (2002), with the magician
David Blaine;
Scar Tissue (2004), the autobiography of the
Red Hot Chili Peppers lead vocalist
Anthony Kiedis, and Undisputed Truth: My autobiography (1013) and
Iron Ambition (2017), both with the legendary American boxer
Mike Tyson. Starting in 1985, for a few years Sloman served as executive editor of
National Lampoon magazine. He was also editor-in-chief of
High Times. On 5 April 2019, he released a studio album,
Stubborn Heart, that includes a duet with
Nick Cave, among others. Sloman and
George Lois directed the
music video for Bob Dylan's song "
Jokerman." In the 2025 film
Marty Supreme, Sloman plays Murray Mauser, a shoe shop owner and uncle of
Timothée Chalamet's fictional character Marty Mauser. ==Works==