Scott H. Biram
“I get a lot of people who are surprised about how normal I am after a show,” says Scott H. Biram.
Not that he’s a raging maniac onstage. He just sounds like one. One of the occupational hazards of a one-man band is that they tend to come off as insane, unbalanced, unable to work well with others. It brings to mind the romantic notion of the street busker mixed with the craze of luminaries like Hasil Adkins. You don’t take someone with a song called “Muleskinner Blues” lightly. Biram has been a one-man band for about six years, and his solo career was one of necessity.
“In college, I heard Bob Dylan’s first record, and I was really impressed by that,” he says. “When I was little we would go see Doc Watson at the Armadillo, my dad bought me a Bill Monroe CD, and then I got into Townes Van Zandt. And one day I realized it was easier to practice on my acoustic and just leave it lying around the house instead of plugging in my electric.”
Growing up just outside San Marcos, the 31-year-old got guitar lessons from his aunt. In fact, Biram’s upbringing played no small part in helping shape his songwriting. Generations of his family grew up in the same town, graduated from the same school. Everyone knew his great-grandmother as “Ma.” He had chickens.
“I really appreciated those days running along river bottoms, building rope swings, finding things to do,” he remembers. “I don’t like stuff that sounds really thought out, all flowery. The songs that come to me most frequently are the ones about heartbreak, rough characters, truck drivers, rednecks, and murder. And I like to have a Southern feel to all of that.”
And he’s all about Texas pride. While touring, he’s encountered people who find out where he’s from and proceed to talk shit.
“The place I get it the worst is Colorado,” he says. “I don’t know why they hate us. There was this one girl who told me she named her fish Texas because it was worthless. I was eating a piece of pizza at the time and threw it at her.”
Biram’s released three solo albums on his own label starting in 2000. While he was touring through Chicago with fellow one-man band Joe Buck, they stopped at the offices of Bloodshot Records. Biram handed them a CD and they released it.
The Dirty Old One Man Band came out in January 2005, a stompy, beer-soaked romp through chickens, murder, and hellfire confessionals run through effects to make his voice whiskey sour. His musical setup came from years of additions.
“Somewhere along the line I started stomping my foot on the base of my microphone stand. Then I started fooling around by making a stomp board that was more amplified, then I started distorting the guitar, then I switched to a hollow body to get that sound between acoustic and electric. I just figured out a way to make myself heard. I’ve always envisioned having a wall of old, beat-up speakers behind me. Well, they might not be old, but there’s a wall.”
In the spring of 2003, Biram was traveling on a stretch of highway near San Antonio and collided head-on with an 18-wheeler. He required multiple surgeries for broken legs, a shattered foot, and a broken arm. Nevertheless, he rolled into Austin’s Continental Club six weeks later and performed – attached to an IV. His shattered stomping foot started stomping on its own.
“With punk bands, I was writing two or three songs a week. With country bands, one or two a year. With country and blues there’s this expected formula as far as parts go, so I had a lot of trouble with that. After my wreck, I was laid up in the hospital, and I was on so much morphine and Demerol, I started writing more rocking songs, like I used to. So, those country and hillbilly songs were still there and those aspects flowed into my rock songs. It became a monster.”
Which brings us back to his first quote. Biram antagonizes his audiences during his show, but it’s all part of the vibe. A critic from a Rochester paper, describing Biram’s vitriolic show, wrote, “We all wanna be entertained, but nobody wants to get stabbed in the head with a screwdriver.”
Biram laughs at this comment, but you get the feeling that if he needed to, he would at least shank you with a broken beer bottle.
This article appears in December 16 • 2005.