In the first of our series of interviews covering the new emergence of the One Man Blues Band we sit down with Scott H Biram, a self proclaimed Dirty Old One Man Blues Band. He walks in looking stricken and hunched, agitated and uncomfortable…
SHB: Sorry, I’m just gearing up for this thing tonight…
BCR: That’s alright, I’ve heard how you “store up lots of shit to throw up in your shows…” What’s that on your leg? [Scott has a large wound scored across his leg]
SHB: Er… Well, that’s from gearing up and gearing down in Norwich. I was tryin’ to load a box down the stairs and it kinda wanted to go a little faster than I did, and it kinda yanked me down the stairs. It hurts. That’s just a scratch but it’s the bruising round here.
BCR: And what happened there? [Scott has a huge scar around his leg also… ]
SHB: Oh, that’s where I got hit by an 18 wheeler. He was talkin’ on his cell phone and a car stopped in front of him to turn and I was comin’ the other direction and he turned into on-comin’ traffic so… But I took his axle off and I know he got fired from his job, so that’s ok. I’d have liked to cut his nuts off too…
BCR: He didn’t get your nuts, did he?
SHB: Haha no, no he didn’t get my nuts.
BCR: He may not have got your testicles but it looks like he got everything else…
SHB: Everything on my body except for this one [SHB points at his testicles] and my neck...
BCR: I heard that you got back to work really quickly after the accident – I’m not sure if it’s true, it sounds like the making of a legendary story but…
SHB: Well, the wreck was March 25th and I was on stage in May…
BCR: You went on stage with an IV?
SHB: Yeah…
BCR: And your stomping foot was still all broken
SHB: Yeah, my left foot is my stompin’ foot, but it was my knee. My knee has thirteen screws in it, it broke in three places. They had to sort out my nerves as well. You can’t really see that though [shows me gigantic scar that you can see all too well] so it’s not that bad…
BCR: Nothing stops you… You’ve done five albums so far …
SHB: I’ve just self released an EP and I’m now working on the seventh one…
BCR: So how long have you been playing music for? Because some places say 14 years, some say 16…
SHB: I’ve been playin’ guitar for 20 years now and been in three, four bands…
BCR: You’d be surprised how little there is on the net about you…
SHB: There’s like 96 pages…
BCR: You’ve googled yourself?
SHB: Er... yeah... late at night in the bathroom… haha
BCR: Who are the other one man blues bands you like now?
SHB: You should look at my friend Possessed By Paul James. I’m not really into new folky music. Peter Paul and Mary shit. But this guy comes across as the real folk music but his lyrics are contemporary.
BCR: So where do you draw that line? You’ve got people like Holly Golightly and Hank III who are doing contemporary but old-timey music…
SHB: He covered one of my songs but we don’t get along anymore.
BCR: How come?
SHB: Somebody prank called him and he thought it was me.
BCR: Why do you think there’s all this interest in one man blues bands now?
SHB: Because of all the crap people do and put on the radio. There’s a lot of people who just eat what they’re fed instead of finding something to eat themselves. We’ve gone through all this production, this technical stuff getting better and better all the time. We’ve gone all the way up through death metal, electronica and techno and all that stuff. I think people like to go back sometimes.
BCR: Do you think it comes to a head when everything is just trying to be so new…
SHB: Well, we were doing a sound check and it sounded too… clear, you could hear everything … perfect. But not perfect in my book… I think there’s a lot of room to experiment in making low quality recordings. That’s one of the things I’m trying to do now – to overproduce a lo-fi sound.
BCR: You have to explain that. Do you mean in the mixing?
SHB: Well, like Pink Floyd recorded their records where there’s so much layering. Not where they take a plain sound and add all this shit to it but I’m trying to… Ok, I’m running everything through all these expensive microphones, preamps and stuff but I’m making the sound really old and rough. I’m trying to make an old, rough sound radio friendly. I mean radio is not my goal but it pays the bills. I’ll sell out, I don’t give a shit… No, there’s a part of my soul that won’t allow me to do certain shit.
BCR: So you’re from Texas and I was wondering if, like so many artists from that part of the world, if you were influenced by the religious world there?
SHB: Well, my Grandpa's a Deacon so… I remember being kept home on Valentines Day and my Grandfather would sing “Taaake me down to the river…”
BCR: Is that why your lyrics are predominantly traditionalist? Like that song “Tie a Knot in the Devils Tail”…
SHB: There was a time in my life where I was reading a lot of biographies and such and I’d be turned on to different artists who influenced them. I grew up on Leadbelly and Lightning Hopkins and I wanted to know who these people were and where they were coming from because I was… what’s the word?... Inknowledgable? Unknowledgeable? I don’t fuckin’ know the word... I guess ignorant, haha… I knew what it was I was singing about and I could get into their heads a little bit.
BCR: So is that what made you love black music like you do?
SHB: It was one of the things that changed my life, and I didn’t realise it until recently. When I was a little kid in school we were all bought into the auditorium and the Sweet Cane Baptist Church Choir, a black religious choir, and they sang all these harmonies and religious music. And I remember I was impressed by it and I liked that sound. Some of the music that I love the most is the recordings of chain gangs. I feel like those people singing these songs in prison… that was the only thing they had to get them through the day and that was the bottom of the barrel. That’s the real heart coming through and I believe in singing from my heart. When I write my songs I try not to stray too far away from my heart and not to get too complicated, make it all flowery you know? It touches me, it makes me feel like a human being. I suffer from the human condition, just like everybody else and I like to sing songs about it. We’re all fucked from the day we’re born.
