Sibling punkabilly duo will be at Bowery Ballroom and Music Hall of Williamsburg this weekend (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Friday, November 12, Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey St., $15, 8:00
Saturday, November 13, Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 North Sixth St., $15, 8:00
www.myspace.com/dexterromweberduo
In Tony Gayton’s 2006 documentary TWO HEADED COW, such musicians as Neko Case, Jack White, Chan Marshall (Cat Power), and Exene Cervenka shared their love of Dexter Romweber, one of music’s best-kept secrets despite his wide influence over the course of several decades. In 1983, guitarist Romweber formed the experimental roots-rock outfit Flat Duo Jets with drummer Crow Smith, based out of Athens, Georgia, and Carrboro, North Carolina. Romweber went solo in the late 1990s before hooking up with his sister, Sara, who had previously played drums in Let’s Active and Snatches of Pink. Touring as the Dex Romweber Duo, last year the siblings released RUINS OF BERLIN (Bloodshot), a blast of good old-fashioned punkabilly featuring guest appearances by Case (“Still Around”), Marshall (“Love Letters”), and Cervenka (“Lonesome Train”). They later recorded the chestnut “Last Kind Words Blues” and the Dex original “The Wind Did Move” with White, whose Third Man Records released the duo’s LIVE AT THIRD MAN vinyl-only LP this past April. Nearly twenty years ago, we caught Flat Duo Jets at Wetlands, then saw the Dex Romweber Duo at last year’s Bloodshot Records fifteenth anniversary bash at the Bell House, where they powered through such songs as “Mexicali Baby,” “If You Love Me,” “Cigarette Party,” and “Grey Skies,” and wondered just what the hell we were waiting for all those years in between, when we should have been following Dex a lot more closely. The Dex Romweber Duo will be at the Bowery Ballroom on November 12 and the Music Hall of Williamsburg on November 13, on a bill with Nightmare Waterfall and Man or Astroman?
Director Tamra Davis (GUNCRAZY) transports viewers back to the 1980s New York art scene in the intimate documentary JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD. In 1986, just as the career of street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was exploding, Davis filmed him being interviewed by designer Becky Johnson, a revealing portrait that she put away in a drawer for more than twenty years. Davis finally brings out that footage, making it the centerpiece of this new examination of the ambitious, influential artist and musician who experienced massive success before falling hard and fast and dying of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven in 1988. Davis, a friend of Basquiat’s, conducts new interviews with many of the people from his inner circle, including art dealers Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian, Annina Nosei, Tony Shafrazi, and Bruno Bischofberger; Basquiat’s girlfriends Suzanne Mallouk and Kelle Inman; close Basquiat friends Diego Cortez and Fab 5 Freddy; NEW YORK BEAT cable TV host Glenn O’Brien; and fellow artist Julian Schnabel, who directed Basquiat in DOWNTOWN 81. Davis has also dug up amazing footage from the 1980s of Basquiat that shows him to be a unique, driven figure who used whatever he could — from broken windowframes and doors he’d find on the street to immense canvases — to spread his art and world view, which began with drawings in which he identified himself as Samo, criticizing contemporary art as “the same old shit.” Ultimately, though, it was his relationship with Andy Warhol that was the beginning of the end. JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD is a dazzling document of a fascinating time and a cautionary tale of success that comes too fast, too soon. The film is screening November 11-14 as part of the Maysles Institute’s Doc Watchers Presents series.
