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Earlier today, it was revealed that Dexter Romweber of rockabilly/punk blues band Flat Duo Jets passed away on Friday. Jack White, an avid supporter of the band who once called Romweber “one of the best kept secrets of the rock n roll underground,” has posted a eulogy.
The guitar and drums “power duo” lineup of Flat Duo Jets was a huge influence on the White Stripes and in 2011 White reissued their 1991 LP Go Go Harlem Baby on his label Third Man Records. A year earlier, White hosted the Dex Romweber Duo for the very first Third Man Live vinyl release. And in the 2008 White Stripes documentary It Might Get Loud, White plays Go Go Harlem Baby for Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and U2’s the Edge, saying “I went and saw him play and was blown away.”
“He was one of my favorite people I’ve ever known and one of my most cherished influences,” White writes in his statement on the musician’s passing. Read it in full below.
A brick crashed through my window last night. Cat Power had wrote to me; John Michael Dexter Romweber had passed away, passed on, bill past due. He wasn’t a Rock N’ Roll musician, he WAS Rock N’ Roll inside and out, without even having to try, he couldn’t help himself. People toss that around a lot, but in Dex’s case it was actually true. To call him Punk would be like calling the Great Pyramid a sand castle. He was the type that don’t get 3 course dinners, awards, gold records and statues made of them because they are too real, too much, too strange, too good. Dex was a true tortured romantic, unfairly treated and broken hearted at all times but still hopeful. He was an electrical outlet, an old soul, a vampire, a cave man in a modern age, a WWI trench soldier, a different kind of American, out of luck living on the outskirts of town, lonely even when in a room of thousands. He ate dinner with Van Gogh, loaned your friend his last ten dollars, and exuded innocent love and naivety. He stared at the moon, communicated with Gene Vincent from another plane, while reading George Gurdjieff by thrift store lamp and all out of cigarettes at 3 a.m. He was forever getting the short end of the deal but anyone who spoke with him could only want him to live in peace and love with no way to know how to truly help him get there. He was one of my favorite people I’ve ever known and one of my most cherished influences. He once finished the last chord of a song during a concert, threw his guitar down, jumped off the stage at St. Andrews Hall in Detroit, and ran straight up to me in a theater of ten people at the back of the room and immediately started talking to me. I had never met him before that. I was 18. Over time he passed on secrets I’ll never tell, and brought tears to my eyes when he told me how proud of me he was. But I was proud of him first, and always will be. He was an uncle that I would ride my bike across town to see. They don’t make them like Dex anymore, not till we get our act together as humans. I know your pain is over now Dex and you are living in true romantic bliss. You deserve it more than any of us.