New York-based No Wave band The Comateens’ “Danger Zone” and “Elizabeth’s Lover” have recently been reissued by Left for Dead, a label with a long connection to both the band and their original guitarist Ramona Jan. The tracks arrived on CD (with gatefold sleeve), 12” LP vinyl, and digitally via Bandcamp. The Comateens were founded in 1978 and while they are known today as Synth Punk due to their early adoption of synthesizer sounds, at the time, they were simply highly experimental and consciously minimalist. Something notable about their approach is also that they worked with a drum machine which was exceedingly rare at the time.
Ramona Jan and Nicholas “Nic North” Dembling recorded “Danger Zone” and “Elizabeth’s Lover” in 1979 at Mediasound, where Jan was an audio engineer, performing along with bandmates Lyn Byrd and Harry Viderci. Jan would continue in a lifelong career in engineering and production that led to work with Brian Eno, Talking Heads, The Ramones, and many more, as well as continuing to write songs and perform in other bands. Dembling would also continue in songwriting, recording, and in other musical pursuits. I spoke with both Nicholas Dembling (aka Nic North), and Ramona Jan about this time in their lives, the ethos of Comateens, and how they feel their experiences then continue to impact their lives today.
Hannah Means-Shannon: Ramona, I’ve previously talked with K.B. Boyce of Nastyfacts about recording with you back in the day. I think it was quite inspirational for them to see a woman working in a recording capacity.
Ramona Jan: If I was inspirational, I was unaware of it! But I have been told that by many people. Nobody told me that back then. If anything, they said, “You shouldn’t be there.” I heard a lot of that.
Nicholas “Nic North” Dembling: She was an inspiration to me as far as being in a band.
Ramona: And why is that?
Nic: Because you were willing to start from scratch. We had no preconceived notions of what we were doing and why we were doing it. The first song we ever played was “My Girl” by The Temptations. We played it in her apartment with a bass guitar and a rhythm box. There was no pretense of being musicians. I found it very freeing and very inspiring to work with Ramona.
Ramona: We were like, “We got through this song? Okay, we can do this!” In the TV shows that I grew up on, kids have a club and they just do something. They do whatever they want to do.
Nic: I had no idea that we would play in clubs or on stage. It was just a simple activity in a small room.
Ramona: What’s interesting is that we’ve only just discovered that Nic and I had totally different interior experiences while working together. He was just having fun. I was making major plans to be a Rock star! I couldn’t wait until we got our set down until we could play out wherever. I had no idea where we would even play, but that was my goal. I’m a very product-oriented person. Process? I’m not interested in it. I’d skip it over completely if I could.
Nic: She wants the results by hook or crook! [Laughs]
Ramona: I’m still that way.
Did you have contemporary bands who you looked up to that you wanted to emulate? Nic, you said it was more about this experience of being in a room, but did you have heroes?
Nic: I’m in the Beatles generation, but my idea about music was to strip it down as far as possible and make it as completely minimalistic as possible. Which is why I liked working with Ramona and the rhythm box. We used simple chords, simple beats, simple vocals, simple everything. There was a lot of this going on in New York City at the time, these minimalist bands that we called “No Wave”.
I liked them all and I was a big fan of James Chance and the Contortions, all those sorts of things. All the stuff that was happening at Max’s [Kansas City] was very inspirational to me because I’m a classically trained musician and I just wanted to get things down to zero and see what we could do with it. And that’s what we did.
Ramona: And I was just the opposite. My thing wasn’t to be elaborate, but I felt like, “This is enough.” Because I was not at all a trained musician, I had to work up to being minimal, whereas Nic had to work down.
Nic: That’s absolutely true! [Laughs]
Ramona: So it was a good pairing, though we didn’t really discuss that back then. As far as influences for me, there was zero. I didn’t grow up listening to music, I didn’t have favorite bands. I had only the music in my head, the songs that I wrote. The reason that I wrote them was because I was in emotional turmoil on every level and they were my therapy. Nic tries to guess which boyfriend each song is about, and he’s pretty good at it! [Laughs] Some boyfriends gave me 30 years of writing potential!
Nic: With my training, I was able to help her with certain things which we needed to move forward, and because she was at ground zero, it allowed me to get rid of a of a lot of nonsense that I didn’t need.
Ramona: That was very special because in a lot of groups that I played in later, like Venus Fly Trap, I was looked down upon for not having the same abilities.
Nic: That was because you were short!
Ramona: [Laughs] They couldn’t understand why I couldn’t do a lot of the things that they could do, and they didn’t have that attitude that Nic had, where he’d say, “Hey! This is a pretty good idea! Let’s strip it down and see what happens.” I think the others were more like, “Come on! Hurry up!” And I do hurry up, but it’s torture. I think those people seem to be less creative people.
Nic: The scary part for me of being in the Comateens is that it was the first group that I ever sang in.
Ramona: Oh my God! I can’t believe that!
Nic: I really felt like I had to pull it together and be good. I had always been just an instrumentalist before, starting as a drummer, then a piano player, and a bass player. But I had never sung.
Ramona: You didn’t know that you could sing?
Nic: I didn’t have a clue. But that was the ethos of the times. You just got out there and did it. I loved that.
Ramona: How did you work up the bravery to do it? Did you feel you could hit the pitches?
Nic: I felt that I could hit the pitches and I knew when I was off. Then, also, to sing the words as if I meant them. I knew that was the big thing, too.
Ramona: I was not a natural-born singer and I became a singer. When you’re a natural-born singer, there are elements that you can do all at once and don’t realize. One of those things is to hit the pitches, another to express the vowels, express the emotion, express the rhythm, and to have the air to sustain notes. There’s also phrasing. This is a lot to do in one moment. I think Nic does those things, and Lisa Lowell and Soozie Tyrell, who I sang with in Venus Fly Trap, they do it naturally, and my husband does it naturally. None of them could really tell me how to sing, but I did learn how to sing mostly through doing it. I realized that my brain didn’t get all of those things all at once and I had to separate those things out. I had to understand each one separately before my brain would actually wire up and do it.
Nic: I don’t understand that, Ramona, because you say that your songs are about what you’re feeling, and you go through that process of feeling it when you’re speaking. For me, singing is very much just musical speaking.
Ramona: See, there you go! That’s very much an example of a natural singer! [Laughs] When I was seven, I was considered the most tone-deaf child in my school. They sought that out to do an experiment. After six months of trying to train my ear, they decided it was not possible. They said that it was a fixed thing and I would go through my life like that. I could hear the pitches, and I had relative to perfect pitch. I could tell you if I was hearing a “D”, but I couldn’t produce it. It wouldn’t come out. That was so frustrating.
I learned through reading about it, and through talking with other singers. Linda Ronstadt was the first person to tell me that it had a lot to do with the muscles in your mouth and moving them in a certain way. I had to do exercises for nine months to lift my soft palette, but when that finally worked, it changed everything.
Nic: Ramona, I’m sure you saw that kind of thing working with Frank Sinatra. He’s obviously a natural singer.
Ramona: So natural. Talk about going from speaking to singing. I think that he was probably one of the best. On the day I was working with him to record the Disco versions of “Night and Day”, and one other classic, he had come off of a plane from Barbados. He didn’t do any warming up, which was very different from Liza Minelli, who warmed up in the studio when I worked with her. But Sinatra came in from the airport and started singing. Most of it was good, but he felt that he was off. No one in the control room, not even the Producers, could tell that he was off. He wanted to do it again. Whatever he was refining was in his internal self, and I find that is true with natural singers, that they often hear things that average people don’t hear.
How did you become known as a synth band? Wasn’t that pretty unusual at the time?
Nic: We got another band member named Lyn. Her first job was on stage and it was to operate our little rhythm box. So she stood there looking cool and operated this thing. Then Ramona had or bought a small synthesizer. It could only play single notes. It couldn’t play chords. We shoved Lyn onto the stage and said, “Here, play some simple synthesizer.” It was as simple as that. We just felt like Lyn was wasted standing in the background. She had taken piano as a child, and I wrote very simple synthesizer lines for her. So we were a synthesizer band all of a sudden.
Ramona: They call us “Synth Punk” now, which was not a term back then. We were not even considered Punk. Back then, I think they would have put us in the New Wave category, which I hated. I much preferred to be in the Punk category, so I’ll take Synth Punk.
Nic: We were Punks in the sense that we were kids with a lot of arrogance. We were arrogant kids who thought we were great, and we were going to do what we wanted to do. In that sense, we were pretty Punk.
You were also coming up with solutions of how to do things on your own. You brought in whatever instruments you could and solved problems yourselves.
Nic: In the beginning, we were playing only New York City nightclubs. We had such minimal equipment, we were proud to say, “We can get all of our equipment into a New York City taxi cab.”
Ramona: Plus us!
Nic: It was our guitars, our little rhythm box, a few cables, and us, and we’d get a taxi cab to the club, and then go back home in a taxi cab.
Ramona: Nic had experience playing in other bands and he knew that when you have a big drum kit, you basically need to hire somebody to drive you around. I didn’t know any of that! This is new information for me from Nic, that Nic was interested in working with those kind of limitations. We never talked about it back then. I didn’t know anything, so I thought this was how to do things, to take a taxi and go to the club. [Laughs] I didn’t know the realities of being in a Rock band!
Nic: Being in a Rock band is like being a construction worker. It’s physically demanding. Unless you’re very rich and famous, you’re lifting amplifiers at four o’clock in the morning up and down staircases and breaking your back.
Ramona: Yes! You don’t want a big Marshall amp or a big set of drums in New York City. A lot of what we’re talking about here is actually new information for both Nic and I, talking to each other.
What was your process for writing original songs?
Nic: It was Ramona, first and foremost. Then, input from me, and Lyn had a little bit of input. Our drummer Harry, every once in a while, would pop up with a very good suggestion, which we’d usually take.
Ramona: That was mainly on arrangements. The lyrics and melody were me and Nic, and we did that stuff seriously. To this day I do it. I feel like I emerged from that as a songwriter more than anything else, because I got very seriously into it. I really wanted to write songs that people would want to cover rather than just songs about my personal emotions, so I started lyric writing very intensely.
So the experiences that you had then have stayed with you your entire life, clearly, and influenced your trajectory. Nic, do you feel like working in that early period impacted you and your outlook?
Nic: Completely, because every time I do music now, I think, “Is there too much bullshit in what I’m doing, or am I really doing the core of what I want to do?” That comes from working in the Comateens for me.
