It’s been over a week since I learned of Dexter Romweber’s passing. What a gut punch that was. So many of my heroes and musical influences passing away recently, it’s really depressing. The thing that is extra sad about Dex is that he was only a couple years older than me. Most of my heroes are decades older than I am, it hits harder when it’s somebody in your same age group.
I’ve seen lots of other tributes on social media, and it seems like some people really knew and loved Dex. However, a great many people never heard of the guy. That obscurity was sadly his destiny. Dex was an outsider artist, a true genius who worked the outer margins of this behemoth known as the music biz. He definitely fell into the “If you know, you KNOW” category.
Let me set the wayback dial to the late 1980s. There was no internet, no social media, no YouTube, no cell phones. If you lived in a small college town as I did, finding things that were “cool” and on your wavelength was difficult. You had to really dig to find cool stuff out there. As a very young teenage kid who dug the wild sounds of 1950s rockabilly, surf, and garage, bits of coolness were doled out in miniscule quantities: a great record would show up at your local record store every month or two, and if you were really lucky, a great band would come play in your town. The nascent world of cable TV usually offered only middle-of-the-road, Top 40 fare that was safe for the general public.
That’s when Dexter Romweber and the Flat Duo Jets showed up, out of nowhere, on an MTV program called The Cutting Edge. That was the first that any of us had ever heard of him or the duo he fronted with his drumming partner, Crow. Here’s the segment.
Imagine the world of safe, watered-down college rock in the 1980s—bands who wore tennis shoes and polo shirts on stage, singing in a nonchalant, passion-free way about things that didn’t matter. I found it pretty boring then, and I still do. This was the beginning of what they called “shoegazer” music. Gazing at your shoes? C’mon, how friggin’ neutered and spayed was rock and roll supposed to get?
All of a sudden, on our televisions broadcast all over the country, from Carrboro, North Carolina, here was a young guy with a greasy unkempt pompadour and leather jacket who lived in a shack behind his parents’ house that he decorated like an antique funeral home. The segment was all about Dexter Romweber living in this shack, what he dubbed “The Mausoleum,” and his influences: Elvis, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, James Brown, the Munsters! Dexter seemed like a nut—a really, really cool nut! He used a coffin next to their couch as a coffee table! The place was decorated with fake spiderwebs, tree limbs, and other assorted detritus of the midcentury era and things that appeared to have been stolen from local graveyards. After the tour of the Mausoleum, Dexter and Crow went in the backyard and played (Dexter strapping on his trusty cheap guitar, a Danelectro/Silvertone “amp in case” model) the most insane, screeching, reverb-drenched version of Buddy Holly’s ballad “Girl On My Mind.” A ballad! A freakin’ ballad! But it was the most intense thing many of us kids had ever seen up to that point. This was life-changing television for young kids all over the country, much in the same way that lives were changed when Elvis or the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan.
Like many other malleable young minds across the nation, I became very intrigued with Dexter Romweber at that moment. He was a hero. How was this even possible, that he got on NATIONAL TELEVISION?
Turns out, Dex had a huge fan that also happened to be the manager of the band R.E.M. (If I get any details wrong, correct me, this is secondhand info I heard at the time). This manager also had a record label, and one of his goals was to spend a bunch of money so that Dex and Crow and the Flat Duo Jets could get some national exposure and make a name for themselves. He had first put them in the movie Athens, GA—Inside and Out, (which we saw some time later, this was an era where most of us couldn’t even afford VHS video players), then signed them to his label, Dog Gone Records.
A short time after we saw the Flat Duo Jets on that MTV segment, their debut album was released, and a national tour was booked. That manager from R.E.M. plowed a bunch of money into promoting the band, even sending out large letterpress old-school show posters to every small college town and city across the country (I still have mine, tucked away).
The first time we saw the Flat Duo Jets in action was at the long-gone and sadly missed Maxwell’s Club in Hoboken, New Jersey. We were on tour on the East Coast and were thrilled that we were finally going to be able to see these guys live in person. Holy cats, did they exceed our expectations.
Dexter left everything on the stage that night. What I mean by that is when he took the stage, he played with such ferocity and sang with such fervor that you thought he was going to explode. Crow played drums behind him with a feverish pitch. These guys were TIGHT from having played together since they were young teenagers. Dex was not an easy guy to back up, but Crow could read his mind and telepathically follow him as he veered into different songs and different feels. They were freaking great. When Dexter came off stage he was a sweaty mess. His guitar looked like it had been dragged behind a truck and left out in the rain. It’s hard to believe he got the sounds he did out of that one-pickup Silvertone guitar. He literally choked the sounds from it. They played so hard and intense, I’m not sure that they could have done one more song without collapsing. Now THAT was a serious dose of rock ‘n’ roll direct into the veins! We introduced ourselves to the guys and got to know them a little bit that first night. Dexter seemed like a guy from another planet to us, and he was. He was amazing and great and noisy and frantic and weird and mysterious, like all the great rock and roll legends. Our minds were blown.
The great thing about touring in that era was that if you had the time and the motivation, everybody got to hang out with everybody. If you wanted to, you could offer your place to your favorite band as a crash pad. I can’t even remember the number of bands that crashed at our place in Columbia, Missouri, back in those days. It was a lot. When I think about it, we didn’t have much to offer—a couple of couches and a floor, and a really small bathroom for all the band guys to compete with in the morning. I don’t even think we had extra towels! Nonetheless, hotel rooms have always been the expense factor that most touring bands want to trim while on the road—paying for hotel rooms on the road often meant the difference between losing money on a tour or coming home with some profit. So a lot of bands opted for the crashing-on-couches scenario, including the Flat Duo Jets. And that was how we hosted Dexter Romweber and the Flat Duo Jets at the Untamed Youth band house in Columbia, Missouri.
In the spring of 1990, The Cramps were on a national tour with the Flat Duo Jets as their opening act, and we got word that the Cramps wanted our band, The Untamed Youth, to open the show in our hometown. When we first heard the news, it was like something out of a dream. The Cramps had namechecked us in a few publications as one of the few new bands they liked, so we knew that we were on their radar. But this was…something else entirely. It was like the circus and the demolition derby and the burlesque convention were all coming to town at once! It hardly seemed possible. We were completely freaked out and consumed with excitement and anticipation.
By the time that the Cramps and the Flat Duo Jets came to our town, we had worn out the Flat Duo Jets first album, playing it thousands of times. That album, simply known as The Flat Duo Jets, stands the test of time. I still think it’s their best batch of songs. Dexter always had a knack for finding obscure songs and running them through the Dexter Romweber machine—drawing out every screech and howl, slathering it with reverb, and making it sound more intense, lonesome, tough. I wouldn’t call Dex a “refined” guitar player, but he was friggin’ brilliant at what he did. He knew lots of weird jazz chords, way more than any of us did. He could rip through surf instrumentals like “Pink Gardenia” with precision, damn impressive. And his singing? It was like he was bringing up his guts with every song. He put everything he had into performing. Dex was a caged animal set free, a wild man from Borneo on display for unsuspecting patrons of live music to witness. I dig that first album out from time to time and marvel at its perfection. It’s a perfect record. You should own it, if you don’t.
When we finally saw the Flat Duo Jets (with their new three-piece lineup, a brief period of time where they had a bass player, named Tone), they blew our heads off. It’s hard to put into words what a game changer they were to impressionable young minds. They were not virtuoso musicians, but that didn’t matter! Dexter played his Silvertone with such reckless abandon that he made it look easy, but the defining factor of his guitar playing is that he made a hell of a racket, and it never stopped (something essential if you’re fronting a two-man band). His guitar sound was like a tornado, it was fierce and strong and took out everything in its path. Crow and Tone were no slouches, either; they rocked. Crow’s drumming on their cover of the old big band show-stopper “Sing Sing Sing” was a sight to behold. What a great band.
Seeing The Cramps appear in our hometown was no less mindblowing. I remember them showing up to the Blue Note club in the afternoon, and it was like aliens had just landed from the planet Mars. Lux was wearing fishnet stockings and high heels and a patent leather bondage outfit. We just weren’t used to seeing that sort of thing out there in the Missouri cornfields. Poison Ivy and bassist Candy Del Mar were the hottest and most severely unattainable women we had ever laid eyes on. In fact, I believe that I just looked down at the ground when they came near me, unable to speak. It was like I had gotten too close to the sun. I acted like some kind of Amish kid or Middle Ages yeoman: “Don’t look at these ladies, or you’ll turn into a pillar of salt!” Drummer Nick Knox was silent, with his perfectly coiffed pompadour and dark sunglasses. He never broke character. None of them broke character. I remember a local goth weirdo in the alley behind the club waited for The Cramps to show up so that he could quickly hand off a necklace made of bones. Lux said, “Oh cool, a necklace made of bones!” and the kid ran off without saying anything, job completed. I don’t even think that kid went to the show. He just wanted to give Lux Interior a necklace made of bones. That’s the sort of weird thing that went on a lot back in those days. It must have been tough to be a goth kid in Columbia, Missouri, in that era.
The Flat Duo Jets crashed at our house, and in the Midwest tradition, lots and lots and lots of beers, cigarettes, and joints were consumed on our porch. Lots of late-night jamming and record playing occurred. A few photos remain, taken with a disposable camera (remember those?). That was my first glimpse of how strange Dexter Romweber really was. He was freaky brilliant. I remember some of those weird old songs coming out of him, sitting and playing on our couch. It was magical to us. We had never seen anything like him before. He was really intense, sometimes to a detrimental degree: at one point, we were watching old videos on a VHS player in our living room, people drinking and talking loudly, and some 1970s Elvis Presley videos came on. Most of us didn’t really appreciate the 1970s Elvis at that point in our lives—overweight, bloated—but Dex hushed us all from talking so he could intensely stare at the performance on the screen. “1970s Elvis is the BEST Elvis,” he said. I still am not really sure I agree with that assessment, but his proclamation did inspire me to appreciate the EP recordings of that decade more than I had previously. Dex stared at the television screen like he was possessed; the rest of us in the room stared at HIM, hushed into silence by the man himself.
Dexter slept on our couch. In the morning, we were amazed by his lack of hygiene. He had the stinkiest feet, with the worst-smelling socks. We could smell the socks from ten feet away. Nonchalantly, Dex put on the same set of socks for the new day. They had big holes in the bottom on one foot, and a hole in the big toe on the other foot. We wondered how many days in a row he had worn these socks. He smelled so bad, we all tried to get him to take a shower, but he wouldn’t. At one point, Dexter took off his socks on the front porch. A local dog carried one off, but only got about twenty feet away before dropping it on the sidewalk. They smelled THAT bad. This guy was our rock-star hero on tour with The Cramps, and we had seen Dexter’s magic melt the hearts of many of our local women. We wondered how this sock-feet-no bathing thing was possible. There was definitely a crack in the Matrix. Dexter was a complicated dude, as we were finding out.
After some more jamming with the Duo Jets guys on our porch in the morning, they had to leave to go do a radio station event over at the college. Our young lives were upended even further when The Cramps stopped by our house a short time later, piling out of a brand-new rental Lincoln Continental Town Car. We had suggested they stop by the band house at the show the night before, but didn’t think such a thing would ever happen. These were things we couldn’t comprehend as young Midwest farmboys: The Cramps drove themselves around—in a Lincoln Town Car. And they had taken us up on our invitation to stop by our house!
This post is about our late pal Dexter Romweber, so I won’t go into too much detail about The Cramps coming to our house. If you don’t know who The Cramps were, go read about them for a minute. They were legends from the big city of New York and, later, Los Angeles. They were scary and they were dangerous. They were psychobilly-punk-rock heroes at a time where such things were rare and unique and relegated to the hippest corners of the universe, not the Midwestern streets of Columbia, Missouri. We were absolutely terrified and completely out of our league. We knew that The Cramps came to our house to view us in our natural habitat, in the same way that people go to the zoo to see the monkey cage. Lux and Ivy and Candy Del Mar were nice (Nick Knox didn’t say anything), but they also began searching for the exit as soon as they saw how humble our abode really was. I somehow managed to blurt out that they should stay and watch our homemade horror film. Furtive glances ensued, at which point I told them our movie was less than ten minutes long.
Reluctantly, The Cramps sat on our living room couch and watched our Super 8mm classic (?), The Hideous Vomit Creatures from Planet X-9, starring all of us in the Untamed Youth (bass player Mace as the hero, yours truly as the announcer and filmmaker, keyboardist Sammy in bit roles, our roommate and best pal “Rabid” Rick Carter as the Hideous Vomit Creature, my dad and my old girlfriend Andrea as two of his victims). Lux and Ivy and Candy and Nick sat and watched it. I started sweating, noticing their ever-increasing impatience. When the eight minutes and twenty-six seconds were over, The Cramps made a beeline for the door. Pleasantries were exchanged, along with excuses about how they had to get to the sound check for their next show. Boy, did we feel young and dumb and stupid! This story seems like it couldn’t possibly have actually happened, save for one of us snapping photos of them scurrying to their Lincoln Town Car on our disposable camera. I can’t say that we made much of an impression on The Cramps, but I can say that they stopped by our house and sat on our couch and watched The Hideous Vomit Creatures from Planet X-9.
That afternoon, we went over to the college to watch the Flat Duo Jets play (on borrowed equipment) at this radio station event, outside the KCOU studios, where we spent a great deal of time. We all got to jam with Dexter some more, in front of a crowd of beer-drinking college students. Mace wound up with a football helmet on, and there’s a photo of me playing drums, which I don’t remember at all. But Dexter—Dexter was always great. Even in these weird, thrown-together scenarios, he would come up with something otherworldly, hypnotic.
And then, they hopped in their van, and they were gone. Can you imagine being a twenty-one-year old kid trying to go back to NORMAL after a weekend with The Cramps visiting your house and Dexter Romweber and the Flat Duo Jets crashing at your house? Normal just wasn’t possible after that.
A year or so later, Mace and I had moved to California to try and make the Untamed Youth happen. I moved out there to be with a woman (a girl, really—we were babies) named Jessica, who would become my first wife. Jessica was roommates with the artist “Coop” (Chris Cooper) in a small house in Yucaipa, California, about eighty miles east of Los Angeles, on the way to Palm Springs. When Mace moved out to California a short time later with his girlfriend Amy (now his wife), we all got a house in nearby Redlands—still a good hour and a half from LA.
We saw that the Flat Duo Jets were coming to Los Angeles, playing at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip. Dutifully, we piled in the car and drove seventy-five miles to the Sunset Strip, paid our $16 each (a fortune in those days), only to find the Flat Duo Jets finishing their last song—the club had made them play their set early to make way for some other rock show later in the night. As frustrating as that was, Dexter and Crow (now back to being a duo again) were happy to see us. We offered to let Dexter stay at our house and he happily agreed—not realizing that our house was seventy-five miles due east. To go from the hip and happening Sunset Strip in the middle of Hollywood out to Redlands, California, was a bit of a dirty trick on our part—a true logistical nightmare for everyone involved. But we selfishly wanted a little more time with Dex. He wanted to see a bit of Hollywood before we hit the road, so we drove down Hollywood Boulevard, only to see police surrounding a dead body on the side of the road. Well, he wanted to see a bit of Hollywood, I guess he got what he asked for!
We jammed with Dexter and recorded our efforts on a jambox cassette recorder. Somewhere I still have the tape, I wonder if it still plays? Dexter had some new songs he was working on, and came up with a band name for our trio—the “Hot Club du Redlands” or “Paris Opera House Trio” or something opaque and vague and optimistically bourgeois like that. We wanted to play some rockin’ tunes, but Dexter was in a Django Reinhardt 1930s torch tunes mood, and we attempted to play these weird songs that burst forth from him at three in the morning. What I’d give for a cell phone and a time machine so I could go video all these moments of that pre-internet era. They exist now only as dim memories.
In the morning, we had to leave Dexter alone at the house for a few hours. We were going through a particularly bad bout of poverty, and the only bit of food in the entire house was a frozen package of Sizzlean (for the foreigners reading this, Sizzlean was a strange, bacon-like product made of processed meat, a bit like turkey bacon nowadays, but—it was weird. I have no idea why we had a frozen package of Sizzlean in our freezer). When we came home, naturally, the entire package of Sizzlean had been consumed by Dexter. The socks appeared unchanged from the last time we saw him, a year earlier.
Crow and the road manager came to pick up Dexter (“You’re HOW MANY MILES AWAY FROM LA?”) and that was really the last time we got to hang for any length of time with Dex. We saw the Duo Jets play one more time at the original Spaceland club in Silver Lake in LA a year or two later. Then there seemed to be a long, long period of time where Dexter didn’t make it out to the West Coast. We were on the same record label (Norton Records), so we would hear bits of Dexter news from label honcho Billy Miller. But we didn’t see him for years. I was sad about it, because at one time they had people’s attention—their management even got them an appearance on the David Letterman show, and their records were widely distributed and promoted heavily. Then they went back to being like the rest of us, playing small clubs in their local area and just existing. I believe the last time I saw Dexter was a little over ten years ago, at the Norton Records benefit in Brooklyn. I wanted to catch up with him and tell him how much he meant to us. If you knew Dex very well, you knew there were some kind of mental issues with him—he was either in a great mood and talkative, or very withdrawn. That night, he seemed very withdrawn. It made me sad, because I had missed seeing the guy.
Around the time that I last saw Dex in person, a documentary about his life came out called Two Headed Cow. So much was revealed about Dexter in the movie that I guess we suspected, but never knew. He had a lot of mental problems and instability, and his mood on any given day depended on whether or not he was taking his meds, and the alcohol and drugs he was consuming. The documentary also made me realize what a fragile guy he was. He was living on the edge, all the time, and you never really knew when he was going to fall off the high wire. There’s a scene from the documentary that haunts me when I think about it: Dexter on a hotel room bed somewhere, trying to change the strings on his Silvertone guitar. He has an incredibly difficult time changing the strings. Such a mundane, ordinary thing was a huge ordeal for him. Dexter was magnificent as Dexter Romweber, holding a guitar, yelling into a microphone. In everyday life, the guy had a really difficult time. It probably wasn’t that much fun to BE Dexter Romweber. A strange juxtaposition to the amount of sheer joy that he brought to myself and so many other people. The word “genius” gets bandied about all too frequently, but the guy really was a genius. A tortured genius.
This is turning into another long piece, so to wrap it up I have to talk about Dexter’s influence. I remember when a band came on the scene making a bunch of noise called the White Stripes. As soon as I saw them, I said to myself, that guy fronting the band got a lot of his schtick from Dexter, molding the band after the Flat Duo Jets duo-“band” and Dexter’s ability to create a hell of a racket and fill up the sound with one guitar. Thankfully, Jack White has been pretty open about how he created the White Stripes in the Flat Duo Jets image, even bragging about how great Dexter was in the documentary It Might Get Loud to Jimmy Page. The other great two-man duo-“band” of the last twenty years, the Black Keys, also owe a huge debt to Dexter and the Flat Duo Jets. Think about how many millions of albums the White Stripes and the Black Keys have sold based on the template that Dexter Romweber created, when Jack White and Dan Auerbach were impressionable young dudes like I was. I also think a great number of other bands and musical acts were formed in the wake of the Flat Duo Jets national tours. Certainly you can hear Dexter in the music of people like Bloodshot Bill and Cat Power and Neko Case and a lot of other people who saw Dexter perform and said to themselves: that guy is great, and he’s not playing progressive rock. He’s not some virtuoso. He’s raw as hell, and people are digging it. He’s up there singing songs and I could do that too. Dammit, we need more musicians like Dexter Romweber. Think of how many more great bands we’d have if there were more inspiring people like him.
The thing I appreciate the most about Dexter, looking back at what he gave us, is his incredibly unique vision. When I was coming up, there was a lot of pressure to fit into a certain commercially marketable box. If you were a Top 40 band, you had to look and act like the current Top 40 bands. If you were a rockabilly band, there was a cookie-cutter quality that all the bands had. They all seemed the same, and many of them performed the same songs. This was true for so many of the various genres—all the 1960s garage bands mostly looked and sounded the same; all the punk rock bands; all the alt-rock bands; and so on. There was so little visionary thinking. So few people who appeared out of nowhere as Dexter did, with their own creative inspiration, their own vision.
Dexter showed up as a complete weirdo, a unique and raw and rough presence in a music business that processed uniformity like so much hamburger through a meat grinder. Dexter played rockabilly, he played surf, he played old torch songs, he played blues, he played weird songs he heard on the radio or heard through the air. And he was never anything other than 100% genuine. Nothing was a put-on or fake. People loved him for that. I’ve watched a crowd full of punk rockers stand still with reverence while Dexter sang a ballad, erupting into huge cheers and applause when he finished. He “moved” people who were very, very difficult to “move,” and that is quite an achievement.
It also made sense that Dexter came from the South. The old, strange, weird South. A place where danger and mystery and humidity and moss-covered trees influence the art and the poetry and the music that comes from those places. Dexter fit right in with people like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Edgar Allen Poe, Jerry Lee Lewis, Emmett Miller, and Andy Griffith. Dexter couldn’t have come from anywhere else.
There’s no Southern story without the story of a mother. Every Southern boy is a mama’s boy. I thought it was very astute in Rick Bragg’s biography of Jerry Lee Lewis (Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story) that Bragg asked about Jerry his mother, and it was quite revealing how much her influence was on Jerry Lee. What was even more revealing was that none of the East-Coast or foreign writers who wrote about Jerry Lee Lewis had ever thought to ask him about his mother; it took a Southern author to realize the importance.
If you haven’t seen the Two Headed Cow documentary, I urge you to rent it online, it is easily found. It brought me back to those days where Dexter was a lean, mean fighting machine, and I was flooded with memories. The best scene in the movie is when Dexter, the youngest of seven kids, sits at the piano with his very Southern mom, in a video that looks like it was shot on videotape thirty-five years ago. She plays and he sings the old Cindy Walker/Eddy Arnold ballad “You Don’t Know Me.” Watching the two of them perform the song, you understand everything. The whole of Dexter’s entire being is right there in that performance, on display. It’s touching and sensitive and great, and goddamn if it didn’t make me start crying. It’s hard to think that Dexter Romweber and his mother Sara are both gone. What a beautiful gift they gave to the world.
RIP Dexter Romweber, 1966–2024
