by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
WHAT: Dex Romweber
WHERE: Jack Rabbits
WHEN: Wednesday August 22
Genres of music get so confusing these days. Are they indie, emo, new rock, alternative, radio rock, progressive, goth, or electronica? Is it still electronica, or is it electro-dance now? Thank God for musicians like Dex Romweber who plays straight-up rock and roll. Dex Romwever first appeared on my radar many years ago.
I was playing in a band called Clarity, and Paul, the guitarist and singer for Clarity, was way into the true rock and roll music that was born out of the blues and then got mad. His favorite bands were named after engine parts. Why do I mention that? Because he taught me that a duo-jet is one type of muscle car carborateur and a quadra-jet is another. Those are also the names of two of his favorite bands from back then.
The Flat Duo Jets was the monster rock and roll two-piece outfit that Dex Romweber played with in the late 80s and early 90s. Jack White even cites them as a major influence on his big-time two-piece rock outfit, the infamous White Stripes. The Flat Duo Jets aren't around anymore, but Dex is back in full affect, now touring as the Dex Romweber duo with his sister, who was the drummer from the 80s underground band Let's Active, on the skins. EU caught up with Dex at his home in North Carolina to find out what Jacksonville can expect from their upcoming date at Jack Rabbits.
EU: What have you been up to for the last five years or so?
Dex Romweber: (Laughing) Well I've been doing my share of touring and when I'm not touring I play shows around North Carolina - Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Durham.
EU: What exactly is the Dex Romweber Duo?
DR: Well, it's me and my sister, Sarah on drums. It's the same format as Flat Duo Jets but it sounds different because it's not the same people, but it's a similar vein of music.
EU: What's it like playing with your sister?
DR: It's good. She's a really talented drummer. She's made her share of records and of touring too. She's the most technically proficient drummer I've played with, actually.
EU: But tell me honestly, what did you think of Let's Active when you first heard them?
DR: I liked them. At the time I was quite young, but their songs I liked a lot. It wasn't my type of music, but they were all really good musicians and I remember being quite blown away in the day.
EU: What was the household like where you grew up? What was it that made you and your sister both grow up to be professional musicians in such different genres?
DR: Yeah, it was a pretty musical household. We had a lot of music going on and I was free to sort of roam about and raise hell a little bit, but we started playing when we were like thirteen. We were born into a musical family, my Mom was a classical pianist and we have done our share of playing gigs and smoking weed and drinking and going pretty wild, but music was always the focal point of it all.
EU: Is the South in your music?
DR: Oh, very much. Very much for me. I don't know if you could say that about Let's Active, but just the music that I listened to, Hank Williams and Benny Joy and Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis and everybody. You know, it's very influenced by southern music, you know?
EU: I know you don't like to talk about the breakup of the Flat Duo Jets, but what originally drew you and Crow together?
DR: Well, we met in fifth grade, so we were really young. We more or less grew up together. You know how you're more or less drawn to certain people when you're growing up. We were so young and he played guitar at that time and so we just naturally formed a band together quite early on. We had a host of other friends that hung around too.
EU: What was the music scene like in Chapel Hill back then?
DR: Well it wasn't like it is now or like it was in the early nineties. It was post-hippie bands. The new wave scene hadn't quite really hit here yet. And punk music, I just remember hearing about it on the news and stuff and there wasn't really a scene for it here. But by the early eighties, the mid-eighties and early nineties, a lot of different bands formed around here and they were playing some pretty radical music.
EU: Have you ever had any interest in punk rock?
DR: I like punk rock. I didn't really grow up on it that much, but I've always watched it with amusement and, frankly, I like really good punk music. But I think punk has been around a lot longer than the seventies.
EU: What do you think of the psychobilly movement, bands like Tiger Army and Nekromantix? Bands that are mixing rockabilly with punk?
DR: Yeah, I never got into the psychobilly thing, unless it was the real psychobilly from the fifties and sixties. But the genre of psychobilly, as they call it now, I have some friends who play it and stuff, there are some different chord progressions, but I'd rather listen to…I just don't follow that kind of music.
EU: What would you say is the key difference between rockabilly and the blues and rock and roll?
DR: Some friends of mine were over the other night and he put some blues on and I said 'that's rock and roll,' and this stuff was from the twenties and thirties. You know the chord progressions haven't really changed that much, it's just packaged different. It sort of matters how you do it. You can play a blues song done blues but you can play the same chord progression rockabilly and it sounds rockabilly. Or country. It just matters what way you're coming at it.
EU: I'm sure you're tired of this question, but when you hear about artists such as Jack White calling you a major influence, does that make you feel accomplished?
DR: I think it's fine. To be honest with you, I couldn't even tell you a White Stripes song. I couldn't name a song of theirs. I'm not really affected by it one way or another. There are plenty of musicians that have influenced me deeply. They may not be world famous, but we all sort of draw from where we can draw from. If Jack found something in my music that he really liked or influenced him, I think that's great.
EU: What is the significance of the seventh son?
DR: (Laughing) It's from a passage from the Bible. It's sort of a mythic thing. If you're the seventh son of the seventh son, it has to be two generations, then you have some sort of mythical powers or something. Yeah I know that's a passage in the Bible, but I'm not sure where it is.
EU: So other than rock and roll, what does Dex do for fun?
DR: Well, Dex fights off the IRS (laughs). I swim a lot. I paint surrealistic paintings. I write a lot, I'm writing autobiographical narratives right now. I write songs and I do a little work when I can. I might mow some lawns, do a little moving work when I can. I try to stay busy. I try to pay all of my bills. I have a nine piece band that just plays in Chapel Hill called the New Romans. That has horns and piano and bass.
EU: What is it about Chapel Hill that gets all these throwback bands?
DR: I don't know.
EU: It's awesome. It's interesting, you just don't see them coming from anywhere else. From Jimbo Mathus to Southern Culture on the Skids.
DR: Yeah. I just saw Jimbo because my sister was on tour with Squirrel Nut Zipper. He's a great cat, Jim is. I don't know what it is about that, I have no idea.
EU: You've touring and recording for a long time now, what changes have you noticed in the music business between when you started and now?
DR: I can see how big the Internet has become and that seems to change a lot of things. The record companies spend so much money doing things, and now I see people are doing it on their own. That's a big thing. You can even record your record at your house.
EU: When you record, do you prefer to do it in a Jimbo Mathus sort of studio where all of the equipment is from 1950 or do you prefer pro tools so you can mess with everything or do you not really care as long as you can get it all down?
DR: I pretty much don't care as long as I can get it all done. I've done recordings on four-tracks that I like and I've been in studios with half-inch tape and I've done it on Pro Tools and I've gotten good results out of all of them. I guess if I could choose anything, I'd choose recording to tape.
EU: So on this tour, when you get down to Florida, are you going to light up the stage like in the Flat Duo Jets days?
DR: Absolutely. We've been playing really well these days and our shows have been a real gas. I'm looking forward to it. I'm 41 now, so I'm not going to say I don't have the energy that I did when I was eighteen, but the energy is a little more refined.
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