June 30, 2005
Hit the Road…Back: Scott H. Biram survived a tour with Hank III. Oh, and there was that slight matter of being crushed by an 18-wheeler doing seventy-five miles an hour. Josh Jabcuga speaks with Biram about cheating death, the underground one-man band movement, his Phil Spector bizarro wall-of-sound, and releasing Josh’s favorite album of ’05 so far, The Dirty Old One Man Band.
Josh Jabcuga: The first time I saw you play was at this same spot (The Mohawk Place, Buffalo, NY) when you were opening for Hank III (Hank Williams III). When was that, January of last year?
Scott H. Biram: That was Valentine’s Day last year.
Josh Jabcuga: Yeah, yeah. I was standing over there (points to the bar), and everybody’s drinking, bullshitting, doing there own thing and whatnot, when we see you up on stage and everybody just kind of stops and looks over like, “What the fuck is that all about?” You won that Buffalo crowd over, man. After the Hank III tour you were doing club shows with Joe Buck (former guitarist for The Legendary Shack*Shakers). How was that for you?
Scott H. Biram: That was a month and a half, six weeks, something like that. That was fun. It wasn’t as crazy as the Hank tour, man, I mean, just because the Hank tour was the whole U.S. The shows were like, you know, it was the whole U.S., and it was like a whirlwind tour so there was a lot of driving and I was driving separately.
Josh Jabcuga: And Hank III had that massive tour bus, too.
Scott H. Biram: They had a bus driver, you know, who slept all day, and could do all that shit. We went, you know, one time, from Seattle to Salt Lake City overnight. That’s a long drive. We went through a blizzard and I couldn’t see anything. It was just white and some taillights. If the car in front of me went off the road, I would have too, I was just following him. That was pretty wild. We slid off the road in Iowa and had to get towed back on the road at 5:30 in the morning.
Josh Jabcuga: When I first started writing for the website a few years back I interviewed Hank III, and he mentioned to me that he had to sell off some vintage Cadillac of his.
Scott H. Biram: Yeah, he won that.
Josh Jabcuga: He won that?
Scott H. Biram: He bought it. He plays these videogames and he won some competition on the Internet, some motocross videogame-thing and won a Toyota pickup and he sold it and he bought a Cadillac.
Josh Jabcuga: Hank’s pretty upset with music because of the fact that you turn on a country station, for example, and you don’t hear country. You hear--
Scott H. Biram: Somebody that sounds like Bon Jovi with an “R” stuck in their throat. (both laugh)
Josh Jabcuga: Yeah, and they toss in a fiddle player for good measure.
Scott H. Biram: Yeah, it’s the same with bluegrass, though, too. I don’t tell anybody I play bluegrass music. I say I play hillbilly music. I don’t say bluegrass, I say hillbilly, because I don’t want people to think I sound like Allison Kraus or Gillian Welch or something like that. All that stuff, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t really bluegrass, man. Just because they’ve got a banjo or a fiddle or something like that doesn’t make it bluegrass music.
Josh Jabcuga: Ideally, though, is that how you’d define your music, as bluegrass?
Scott H. Biram: Hell no. I don’t know exactly. I just say hillbilly-blues-metal. I’m like the hybrid—I mean, I like the old blues, I like the old mountain music and country music and stuff like that. I just play stuff that I listen to. But I’ve found, you know, I was weened on punk rock and metal, you know, and it’s easier for me to write rock songs and put blues stuff in there and hillbilly stuff in there because it’s a more free style of writing. Blues and country seems like you gotta kinda have a formula, a little bit, and follow these rules. For years I had one or two songs a year that I actually used that I wrote and the rest were all rock covers, but now I’ve kinda leaned into the rock part of it and I’m writing a lot more songs and touching on some of that stuff I used to touch on in high school and college, and it just comes to me more freely. I add those old blues chords in there, those country chords in there, and it works, I think.
Josh Jabcuga: What was the impetus behind you picking up a guitar in the first place? You mention punk…
Scott H. Biram: Yeah, I was in a punk band all through high school and college. Same punk-metal-psychedelic band and when I turned about twenty, I got turned onto a CD of Doc Watson, who I used to listen to when I was a little kid. It used to be one of my favorite tapes when I was a little kid, and I got all turned onto it again. Next thing you know I had a banjo and I was practicing on a banjo. And then before my punk band broke up, I put together a bluegrass band and we were all starting out just kinda trying to play that music, so it was like a crazy bluegrass band. And I kept doing my little solo thing underneath, every once in a while doing a show by myself, and that band broke up, and I started playing in another bluegrass band and that band went for a while, and that’s where I got my touring wings, and we traveled all over the country for two or three years and that band broke up and I just said, you know, I can either put my efforts into coming to this kitchen every day and cooking hamburgers for people and hating this job and being worn out and not making any money, or I can quit this job and start putting all this energy into booking myself and taking the initiative and I did that, and I kept playing and it kept going further, and then I started stomping my foot on the ground while I was playing and then I started stomping my foot on the base of the microphone stand, which made a thumpin’ sound, and then I started making boards that I could stomp my foot on that went through amplifiers and I always had this vision of this wall of blown speakers behind me and so I started working on that. I don’t have old amplifiers so much anymore, or old blown up things, blown speakers behind me, but I do have that wall of sound.
Josh Jabcuga: Sort of like this Phil Spector bizarro wall of sound.
Scott H. Biram: And I get shit for it from people, other one-man bands and stuff for having so many amps, but every amplifier I have actually has a purpose. I run my distorted vocals through an amplifier. I run my guitar through an amplifier. I run my footstomp board through a bass amp, which I realized after awhile I had to have a big speaker to make that little thump, because the monitors on the stage didn’t give that big thump. I had to get another speaker, which I just did on this tour, I got a double cabinet for my bass amp so now I can really hear that thumping sound on the stage.
Josh Jabcuga: So you’re like the loudest one-man band alive.
Scott H. Biram: (laughs) I don’t know. I’m sure there’s some heavy metal one-man bands out there. There’s something going on, man, that people don’t know about so much. Ever since I started this one-man band, I’ve been getting introduced to these other one-man bands and there’s a lot of them around. We’re taking over the world secretly.
Josh Jabcuga: Last time you played Buffalo I bought a bunch of your albums, but tell me about this release from Bloodshot Records, The Dirty Old One Man Band.
Scott H. Biram: Well I put that out (myself) in July, and that’s what Bloodshot is putting out, but revamped, We remastered it, we took some songs off of it, we put some of the more popular songs from my other CDs on it. It’s kind of like my debut CD for real distribution, because I didn’t have distribution before.
Josh Jabcuga: Right, because you basically built your cult following over the ‘Net, right?
Scott H. Biram: I sold stuff myself, at my shows, over the Internet, and at the local stores in Austin.
Josh Jabcuga: You’re from Austin, right?
Scott H. Biram: I’m from San Marcos, which is south of Austin, but I live in Austin.
Josh Jabcuga: Artistically, it’s pretty divergent, isn’t it? You’ve got everything out there.
Scott H. Biram: There’s a lot of different cultures there, it’s a good place to be. There’s probably 100-150 bands playing every night all over town. So there’s a lot of good music to see, and we have a lot of festivals. North and South Austin are kind of separated. I mean, we mingle in Central Austin, but South Austin is separated from the rest of Austin. I can make a living by playing when I’m at home, but you know, I play in Central, or North Austin one night in the week, and then play down south at another point in the week and there’s a different crowd, ‘cause they don’t really cross the river or something. I don’t know what the deal is. A lot of people are proud to be from South Austin. I can’t remember what the zip code is, but they’ve all got bumper stickers with the zip code.
Josh Jabcuga: What do you listen to in the car on your long trips from show to show?
Scott H. Biram: I’ve got satellite radio.
Josh Jabcuga: XM or Sirius?
Scott H. Biram: XM and I’m pissed that they took off the death metal station. I’ve been getting back into death metal and speed metal but I don’t know enough about it anymore, the new stuff, so I was kinda liking listening to that and hearing the different bands.
Josh Jabcuga: Well Hank III plays on the side with Phil Anselmo (lead singer of Pantera) in Superjoint Ritual, a speed metal group.
Scott H. Biram: Yeah, Jimmy (Bower), the guitar player in the group (Superjoint Ritual), and the drummer from Corrosion of Conformity, sat in with me in Detroit in November and that was a lot of fun. I just remember when I was in high school the fuckers with their Corrosion of Conformity jackets on. I never would have thought I would have the drummer be my drummer. I never really listened to them. I guess they used to be more “skate rock” years ago and now they’re more “stoner rock.”
Josh Jabcuga: At one point you were in a near fatal accident, right? You got hit by a tractor-trailer?
Scott H. Biram: Yeah, in 2003. I got hit head-on at seventy-five miles an hour by an 18-wheeler. He just wasn’t paying attention, talking on his cell phone, and a car stopped in front of him and he drove into oncoming traffic and he just crushed the dash up against me and down on me, separating my colon from my small intestine, broke my knee in like eight pieces, my left knee, folded my right foot in half, broke my right femur, which was sticking out of my leg and broke my right arm, which was sticking outta my arm. (He laughs)
Josh Jabcuga; Shit, so it’s a miracle, man, that you’re even here.
Scott H. Biram: Some people say that. (He laughs) I feel like I had something else I needed to finish up on this world before I left it. There’s footage of me trapped in the truck, and you can really see in that footage how bad it was, man. The truck was crushed down to about three feet tall. I was just encapsulated in a little bitty place. I was really lucky. I was probably the only place in the truck where I wouldn’t have died.
Josh Jabcuga: How long was the recovery?
Scott H. Biram: I was in a wheel chair, laid up in bed for four months and then I had twelve surgeries, eight of which were in the first week. I was on a cane for a month after that. I went back in the hospital during Christmas of 2003. I spent my birthday and Christmas of 2003 in the hospital at different parts of the year. It was a shitty year, but it was a good year in a lot of ways. A lot of good things happened.
Josh Jabcuga: Are you ever going to be one hundred percent again?
Scott H. Biram: I’ll never be one hundred percent again. It’s weird for me to run. I’ll never be able to ski, or skateboard again or anything like that. I’m kinda weird when I squat down to do something. I have to sit down to change the tire on my truck or something like that. I can’t like, I can’t rest completely on my knees. I’ve got a metal rod through the center of the bone on my right leg, I’ve got ten screws in my left knee, I’ve got a metal plate in my right arm with ten screws in it, I’ve got a foot of my intestine they cut out and sewed back in. I went through some shit.
Josh Jabcuga: When you were on tour with Joe Buck, you stopped at the Bloodshot Records office and dropped off your demo, and here you are now, a Bloodshot Recording artist.
Scott H. Biram: I’ve been working really hard. I actually made the decision that I wasn’t gonna sign to a record label but then Bloodshot called me up and said my CD was becoming a favorite around the office, and they were really excited about it. I thought if they were that excited about it, they might help. I do my own booking, my own artwork, my own recording, my own T-shirt designs, my CD covers. I play everything myself obviously and so, I don’t have time to do anything anymore. I’m exhausting myself. I have too many things to take care of and there’s too much of this business shit instead of the music stuff. So I figured, well, it’d be a good thing to allocate some chores to Bloodshot. They’ve been helping me out with a whole bunch of stuff like promotion and just taking care of things. I’ll have more time to write and record and play and take a fucking vacation, because I haven’t taken a vacation in like four years unless you count the hospital. It doesn’t have anything to do with my talent, it has to do with my working really fucking hard. And that’s apparent if you look at all these crappy-ass country bands that are playing these days. I have to respect some of them and the rock bands because I have no doubt in my mind, even if they’re playing really crappy music, they’re working really hard. I’m sure Britney Spears and Christina Aquilera, man, they fucking work really hard. And then I’ve also thought, well, shit, those fuckers, they do their shows up there and they’re fucking dancing all over the fucking place for however many hours that they do that shit and rehearsing for that shit, I think hard work pays off man. There’s a lot of those bands that I really hate, and they suck really bad, but I have to say they probably do work really hard and they probably do deserve at least the money that they’re making.
Josh Jabcuga: What do you think of this so-called Music Mafia thing going on with country acts like Big & Rich and Gretchen Wilson, and a couple other people I’m leaving out? Their whole deal being that Nashville is too glossy to create any real art, so they had to go do it for themselves. And basically the suits are trying to sell this as a package, as an outlaw package, but it’s all very safe and neat and tidy. Now, me personally, if I were to think of an authentic, contemporary music mafia, one that would most closely resemble artists like the Waylons and Willies and guys like Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, the ones who broke down the barriers the first time around, I’d think of guys like you and Hank III and Colonel JD Wilkes from The Legendary Shack*Shakers. You guys are the real stuff, not Big & Rich or even Toby Keith.
Scott H. Biram: The new outlaws.
Josh Jabcuga: The new outlaws, exactly. Does it piss you off when you know the only real outlet for you guys, the new outlaws, is satellite radio and word-of-mouth?
Scott H. Biram: I feel pity for the people that can’t get past the shit that’s on the radio and can’t think for themselves. And I look at those people that are listening to all that shit and they’re the same people that were popular in my high school that didn’t have a fucking clue and they still don’t have a fucking clue. That’s why this world needs a good plague.
Josh Jabcuga: Speaking of good plagues, is Buffalo the most depressing place you’ve ever played?
Scott H. Biram: (both laugh) Most depressing?
Josh Jabcuga: Yeah.
Scott H. Biram: Uh…I’m trying to think of somewhere…uh….
End.
Help this resilient fucker fund his musical plague over at www.BloodshotRecords.com.
(Pimp')In-house notes: Go over to www.PennyBlood.com. Two of my interviews are featured in Issue #3, available for purchase now. I've got a copy of it, and it looks real purty.
The Hit Squad vs. The Shit List (for the week of Monday, June 27, 2005):
Hit Squad: You jonesing for more zombies after catching Romero's LAND OF THE DEAD? PoopShoot's own Chance Shirley will finally see his baby, HIDE AND CREEP, unleashed onto the world on July 19! Preorders are available over at Amazon.com. Congrats Chance!
Mmm...brains! Still got that hunger? Never mind the bollocks. Check out IDW Publishing's comic book adaptation of SHAUN OF THE DEAD (available now), written by none other than PoopShoot head honcho (and IDW E-I-C) Chris Ryall. I've read it, and Ryall, along with artist Zach Howard, knocked this baby outta the park.
Shit List: For the second consecutive week, Tom Cruise: Earth to Tom: You're not a doctor, bro, quit acting like one.
Praise for the writing of Josh Jabcuga, who pens Squib Central with ink made from his own blood, published every Thursday, exclusively at www.moviepoopshoot.com:
"You’re a bad influence on them, I’ll tell you right now." -Max Cavalera, lead singer of Soulfly, former lead singer of Brazilian death metal icons Sepultura.
I read your article and you my dear are a true
ASSHOLE!!! Wonder how you landed your job, desperation???"-Angie (last name unknown; article mentioned...unknown).
“Josh Jabcuga can take the 26 measly letters of our crude alphabet and capture the bi-polar soul of all that is classically yet disturbingly American. Then, when his typewriter is left to cool, he can turn right around…completely ready to trounce any drunk punk that’s got me backed into a corner.” –The Colonel J.D. Wilkes of The Legendary Shack*Shakers.
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