With our publication of Peter Case’s As Far As You Can Get Without a Passport out now, Chad Radford talks about the memoir with the acclaimed singer, guitarist and founding member of the influential West Coast bands the Nerves and the Plimsouls.

How do you approach telling your story as a memoir differently from writing about personal experiences and characters in your songs?


As a songwriter, I’ve rarely invented tales. I usually sing about things I know are real, and though it’s not always my story, in a way it’s the same process as writing this memoir. The events related in the book are stories I’ve had in my head for years. Before they were stories, I talked about them in songs, and previous to that, they were retained images in my memory; things I couldn’t get out of my head. The stories tune me in, and I try to see the picture as clearly as I can, and go with it.

The same events can inspire different approaches, though; in the past songs came the most naturally to me. Songs just popped out when I was playing guitar, and I wrote’ em down, word-by-word. The ones I enjoyed writing the most were the ones that surprised me as much as the listener.

With the book, I did the same thing, I just let it roll out, when the time was right. It surprised me in the way that it all poured out, over a couple of weeks. In a way, it was very similar to experiences I’ve had writing songs.

The tales I tell in the book are the most vivid pictures, the ones that never left me alone, that kept coming back. To write it, all I had to do, it seemed, was sit in front of a computer late at night and focus on any one of the pictures in my head.

This book is presented as the first part of your full-length memoir - one of three distinctive strands to the story. What is the work that you envision as a whole?

How Not To Make It tells the story of a series of business meetings that go terribly awry, as the Plimsouls rise and fall in the ‘80s. One Of Three Stooges is about the solo thing, and is centered around an intimate diary of a particularly hairy solo tour throughout the US and Canada starting on Election Day, 2002.

After writing this first book, I feel like I could keep writing in this vein for another 200 pages or so, before I even get to Plimsouls. The story of those street singing years, when I was unraveling some basic mysteries of music and life, the complete lostness and tenor of that time, could be a whole book, something that people coming up today could relate too.

I envision the whole thing as the tale of one person’s journey through the music, and the culture, my story, just trying to capture life as vividly as I can.

Most of your writing since the days of the Plimsouls has shown a lot of empathy toward people who are down-and-out. As Far As You Can Get... is a portrait of you at a time when you were down-and-out. How much of this period of your life informs your direction as an artist?

A lot of my view point was influenced by having lived on the street, being homeless, or whatever you want to call it but it didn’t just start in SF. I felt that way as a kid, and for various reasons, though I was middle class, things didn’t work out right, and I became very vulnerable and exposed at a pretty young age. That’s when I became aware of hobos and street people; outsiders in general. There was a huge county fair in Buffalo every year and I was fascinated by the people that came with it to work: they would pull up on a train and all march through town. I loved hearing traveling blues singers and ramblin’ folksingers, and stories of strange and difficult journeys, hitch hikers and sailors.... My sister went out with a struggling professional bowler for a while, I don’t know, maybe that was a part of it. I idealized the garbage men, enthralled by the drama on the day the truck broke down in the middle of the street out front of where we lived. I remember thinking ‘when I grow up I want to be a bum.’ Maybe it started as delusions of squalor. I was drawn to the drama of life on the street, and I still am. I resonate with the people who are struggling, to live, in this land made for the winners.

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