With a name like Cobra Ramone, chamber quartets, electronica, jazz and gospel likely weren’t going to be found at the end of a musical road.
So it’ll be no surprise, then, that when Ramone (vocals, guitar) visits the Elk & Oarsman, Wednesday (March 4), she, Trevor Snakedust (keys, guitar, vocals) and Pat Steward (drums) will offer up some “bluesy grit and greasy rock.”
Cobra Ramone (her real name) is originally from Calgary, but has called Edmonton, Toronto, and now Vancouver, home.
The band’s Oarsman gig is the first on a tour that will take them into April in support of recently released (Feb. 13) EP Bang Bang – a project funded with almost $20,000 raised through an Indiegogo campaign.
“When I lived in Calgary, I spent a lot of time in Banff, so I’m excited to be going back there,” she said, Thursday (Feb. 26).
Bang Bang follows Cobra Ramone and The Flood, her earlier releases. “Wrath Like A City” was top 40 for five weeks on the CanadianActive Rock Chart, “I’m the One” was featured on the TV show L.A. Complex and “Guns Blazing” was heard in the movie All the Wrong Reasons.
Ramone’s current tour will run through bars from the Oarmsan to Edmonton and back to Vancouver, where a CD release party is slated for April 3.
Spending time in bars is nothing new for Ramone, whose music is nearly a full-time occupation, along with working in a bar.
“I work in a strip club where we shot a video,” she said. “And just to be clear, I’m a bartender there and I work a couple of nights a week. Trying to be a full-time musician is a lot of work and unfortunately, these days I spend more time on a computer than playing.
“There’s so much to do when you want to be indie. It’s all do it yourself.”
In the past, Ramone penned her songs from a solo perspective, but on Bang Bang, she split those duties with Snakedust (lyrics) and Steward (music).
“It’s been a good fit for me,” she said. “I wrote the last two albums pretty much myself and this works. It’s nice to have band members help out.
“I write most of the lyrics, though, and I think it’s important to believe what you’re saying. If I don’t believe, nobody else will either. Parts of my life bleed into the songwriting and when I work, I see a movie playing in my head, then I imagine that in song.
“Some of what’s in the songs is personal, some is fiction, it’s a blend. I think you write what inspires you and there is more of me in this than in the past.”
As to musical background, Ramone was surrounded by her parents’ music as a child and first picked up a guitar at 13. “I found one in a church basement and they let me take it. My grandfather was a country musician and he directed me some.
“I used to listen to my parents’ 8-tracks and records in the basement, they had a Woodstock collection, too, and I was obsessed with grunge bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam.”
After playing the guitar obsessively, Ramone added singing to her repertoire as a teen, “and I had my first gig at 16 in a coffee shop.”
After dropping out of high school to pursue music, she’s been at it ever since and her somewhat unlikely name likely couldn’t have been more fortuitous for a rocker.
At least some of the credit for her naming came from her dad, Rocky. “I don’t know, maybe my parents though my life would go this way somehow.
“Although, in a coffee shop where they yell out orders, I lie about my name. It’s easier to do that than explain all the time.”
Generally, Cobra Ramone and her band stay relatively close to home in the Lower Mainland, but they’ve toured across Canada and in May will be in Ontario as a second part of the present tour. They also get quite a few gigs in L.A.
“I think it’s important to establish a fan base and a home base to work from.”
In 2013, her band was slated to play the Canmore Hotel, but the June flood put a halt to that.
