Last Friday, on February 16, Dexter Romweber wasn’t answering his phone. That wasn’t terribly unusual—he was frequently incommunicado while playing music or painting—but as the day wore on he wasn’t calling back. That left his sister Monica concerned enough to go looking for him. She found him home in Carrboro, dead from an apparent cardiac arrest at age 57.
“It’s all just a little…strange,” Monica Romweber said the next day. “I don’t think it really hit me until I had to call my sister-in-law, Joe’s widow. We’re sad. Shocked. Even though it’s not really a surprise.”
Dexter himself used to talk about “the Romweber curse,” and there might be something to that. The death of Dexter, among the most acclaimed musicians of the American rock underground’s past 40 years, is just the latest sad chapter in a monumental litany of tragedy.
The Romweber family’s travails started five years ago, with former Let’s Active/Snatches of Pink drummer Sara Romweber’s 2019 death from glioblastoma.
Two brothers, Luke and former UV Prom frontman Joe Romweber, each died within a few weeks of each other. And last October, family matriarch Sara Romweber (named, like her daughter Sara, after her grandmother Sara Teresa) died from a stroke.
As word of Dexter’s death spread during the weekend, there was an enormous outpouring of remembrances on social media as friends and fans posted pictures, tributes and memories.
The acclaim came from beyond Chapel Hill, too, as famous musicians and peers across the nation paid their respects. Writing on Instagram, Chan “Cat Power” Marshall gave Romweber credit for inspiring her to play guitar and signed off with, “I cannot comprehend a world without you Dexter.”
Jack White of the White Stripes called him “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…He was one of my favorite people I’ve ever known and one of my most cherished influences.”
Dexter Romweber made his biggest impact with Flat Duo Jets, a guitar-drums duo that presaged acts like White Stripes and Black Keys. Playing roots rockabilly with punk-rock intensity, Flat Duo Jets’ career highlights included a scene-stealing star turn in the 1986 documentary film Athens, Ga: Inside/Out, and an explosive 1990 performance on Late Night With David Letterman.
After the Jets broke up in the late 1990s, he continued on with Dex Romweber Duo, with his sister Sara as drummer for five years. They had a very close bond, and he took her death hard. Michael Benson, owner of Chapel Hill’s Lapin Bleu and a longtime friend of the Romweber family, remembered Dexter’s performance at her memorial show as “the rawest emotion I’ve ever witnessed.”
“It was like him going through public stages of grief, banging the hell out of his guitar and howling like an animal,” said Benson. “So powerful.”
Dexter continued playing music over the past five years, mostly as a solo act. He also released a fine new album in 2023, Good Thing Goin’, on which he covered songs by everybody from Nina Simone to German orchestra leader Bert Kaempfert in his usual over-the-top style.
Still, Dexter was not well. He largely stopped eating after Sara’s death, becoming painfully thin as his diet became mostly coffee and cigarettes.
Dexter’s final post on his Facebook page came three days before his own death, with a birthday remembrance of Sara. It concluded, “Sara I can’t look at your photo without tear’s falling!!!!! And Tis’ life.”
“Sara’s birthday really affected him even though she’s been gone for five years,” said Monica Romweber. “Losing Sara was huge for him and I don’t think he ever got over that. I say he died of a broken heart.”
At this time, funeral and memorial arrangements are still to be determined.
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