—David Menconi, Down on Copperline
Were there any justice in the world, the scene shown on the cover of Dex Romweber’s fine new album “Good Thing Goin’” (Propeller Sound Recordings) would be a sight you’d see in real life, not just rendered as whimsical fantasy. It shows Romweber at the wheel of a 1960s-vintage Pontiac, seemingly trying to stay incognito behind shades while leaning out the window to sign autographs for a few excited young fans.
But even though Romweber’s outsider-art roots rock has never moved him beyond nighgtclubs, he’s always been a major star for those who know. Over the last four decades, Romweber has built a worldwide reputation going back to his group Flat Duo Jets – a gonzo guitar/drums duo that was a key influence on platinum-selling acts like Black Keys and White Stripes.
And yet roots rock is just one small part of Romweber’s diverse palette, because he’s the musical missing link between everything and everything else. “Good Thing Goin’” pairs his own original material alongside covers of songs drawn from a wide range of famous, obscure and highly unlikely sources. He covers 1970s-vintage lounge singer Engelbert Humperdinck with as much enthusiasm as the historically minded country hitmaker Johnny Horton, along with pianist/protest singer Nina Simone, German orchestra leader Bert Kaempfert and even a song by the fictional band from the 1968 movie “Wild in the Streets.”
Truly, the inside of Romweber’s head makes for one of the world’s most unusual jukeboxes. Thanks to a raspy soul-man yowl that has only gotten better with age, all his selections rock.
“I never wanted to be just one thing because I’ve always liked all kinds of music,” says Romweber, who is now 57 years old. “Jazz, classical, rockabilly, rock ’n’ roll. I don’t want to be put in a mold. Like Engelbert Humperdinck, man, he is really great. Robert Goulet, too, I love some of the Vegas singers. And I listen to Beethoven quite a bit now.”
Indeed, Romweber has classical-style piano on that internal jukebox, too, most notably his 2006 album “Piano” – a solo instrumental collection of dramatically rendered compositions in the style of Russian virtuoso Sergei Rachmaninoff, except with titles like “Carrboro March” and “Chapel Hill Concerto Without Orchestra.” That’s among the many musical tangents Romweber has pursued since Flat Duo Jets broke up in the late 1990s. Most recently he teamed up with his late sister Sara (a North Carolina music legend herself, thanks to stints in Let’s Active and Snatches of Pink) as Dex Romweber Duo.
“Good Thing Goin’” is dedicated to the memory of Sara, who died from cancer in 2019. That was part of a difficult year in which two of Romweber’s brothers also died.
“We were each other’s anchor,” Dex says of his sister. “She was a lovely, lovely person, but she was also human. She had a dark side, too. The Romweber curse was something she held.”
These and other family traumas served as backdrop for the period when Romweber recorded “Good Thing Goin’,” his first album in almost seven years. Despite the difficult circumstances, it’s more than solid, from the morbid 1960 teenage death song “Tell Laura I Love Her” to “Andrieux Boogie” (a swinging instrumental in the same general ballpark as Squirrel Nut Zippers) and Romweber’s pure-pop original “Sally.”
Mark Simonsen, multi-instrumentalist in the local pop-noir group The Old Ceremony, produced “Good Thing Goin’” in the studio and found it an entertaining experience.
“Dex has an uncanny ability to take a guitar that would be a challenge for anyone else to play in tune and make it sound amazing,” Simonson says. “I wanted to capture that spontaneity without making a lot of adjustments. Like Bugs Bunny put it, ‘Ya takes what ya gets.’ That was definitely the case with this. If there was something imperfect he wanted on there, we had to live with it.”
