Dex's midnight rumblers
Music was left poorer by the 2024 loss of Dex Romweber.
The erstwhile Flat Duo Jets' frontman was a hulking and stentorian-voiced guitar-basher. He quivered and jittered in onstage paroxysms and, following the FDJ's term, issued numerous solo discs of rum aspect. Each slashed.
In 2025, he was posthumously inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame.
And last June saw the second North Carolina DexFest, at which family members, friends, and fellow musicians gathered to share reminiscences and coalesce in fond memorial. Bands appearing included tribute vehicle The Flat Do-Over Jets and Lenny Kaye and Friends.
Over solo years, Dex worked with collaborators including "Crash" Larue and sister Sara. Consistent, though, was roots-genres genuiness -- even if it favored brashly strutting interpretations likely to slap every skull in the place.
Dex's writing was of monumental stature. Fans (who were legion) bore witness to the union of hound dog rhythms and high musical art, as six-string manhandlings made unlikely common cause with majestic passages and august symphonic movements.
His was a class of one.
Dex's works were tunefully logical within helter-skelter contexts. Throughout floated ghosts lugubrious, stricken, and -- at moments -- jaunty and piano-rolling. It was as if each rising moon ushered an All Hallow's Eve you just couldn't dig enough.
Ethereal intonings, voodoo toms, kitchenware that rattle-clanked like skeletal percussion, and stark word murals clawed away a curtain behind which lurked strange terrains. All rampages were seized up from a familiar Rock'n'Roll cauldron, though accented in unique enunciation.
2023's Good Thing Going (Propeller Sound Recordings) proved to be Dex's final full-length wax. "Dex finds a balance between battered guitars, piano ballads, and reverb-drenched vibes while powered by the inspiration of classic Gospel and soulful R&B," reads Propeller's website description.
The wonderfully incendiary title number features quintessential Dex facets: Gruff vocals on first-name bases with every note on the musical rainbow; mad strumming straight out of a cloudburst; angelic choruses impeccable in grandeur; and determination so all-powerful one can see cords stand out from the author's strained neck.
Instrumental "Andrieux Boogie" does a fancy-footed ragtime promenade with jocular bell tinklings and piano skedaddling. Even those possessed of zero dancing skills will cut the closest rug to shreds.
Some tracks later, Mr. Romweber gave Mann/Weil's chestnut "Shape of Things to Come" crisp animation by asserting trademark boldness.
"Tell Laura I Love Her," a 1960 teen-heartbreak melodrama, was exhumed and revivified with the sincerity of its portrayals of loving-sacrifice and eternal devotion pledge.
The final of 12 cuts, "I Found My Love," unspooled in elegant simplicity. The understated echo on Dex's bottomless vocalizing emphasized the song's vitality. (He plainly knew the subject personally.) Guitar resolutely soldiered forward, its adamance proud.
Dex Romweber's was a funhouse zone in which curiosities, emotionalism, and demolition dive-bombing all held deeds. No one could have gotten out. But then, none of us desired to.
Facebook (Tribute page)
Facebook (The Dexter Romweber's Legacy Appreciation Society)
Propeller Sound Records
Videos: "Juvenile Delinquent" (:38 1987) "Brazil" "Jungle Drums" "Trouble of the World" Live (2023 acoustic performance 8:49) "Good Thing Going"
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