Flat Duo Jets Releasing Special Box Set For RSD

04-13-2017
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Flat Duo Jets have announced that they will be celebrating this year's Record Store Day with a special reissue of their 1990 self-titled debut album, expanded into a new three-disc vinyl box set.

The new package will be entitled "Wild Wild Love" and will include a 40-page booklet with vintage show flyers and photographs, plus liner-note essays by Bingham, Grier and critic David Menconi.

We were sent the following details: Singer/guitarist Dexter Romweber and drummer Chris �Crow� Smith were still teenagers when they formed Flat Duo Jets in Chapel Hill in 1984. Inspired in equal measure by the Cramps� haunted rockabilly and vintage drive-in horror movies, they cooked up a metallic version of rockabilly that sounded as if it had been launched into the deepest quadrants of the astral plane.

�I had this place behind my mother�s house, The Mausoleum, and that�s where we formed the Jets,� says Romweber. �It was this campy �40s horror kind of place. Gothic, but not English neo-gothic � more like the �Addams Family� � and that�s what we tried to make Flat Duo Jets.�

The combination of Romweber�s wild-eyed rockabilly howl, madman surf guitar and Crow�s pulverizing runaway-train drums made for a stage show that blew minds all over the college-radio circuit. The Jets spent just enough time in R.E.M.�s hometown to appear in and steal the 1987 documentary Athens, GA: Inside/Out before they expanded to a trio lineup and connected with producer Mark Bingham to record Flat Duo Jets, an album that still sounds just as powerful today.

�No overdubs, no nothin�, just straight to tape like it was 1957,� Bingham says of the recording sessions. �So we had to do it right the first time. It was very seat-of-the-pants, which seemed fine with what the Jets were doing.�
Disc One of Wild Wild Love has all 14 Flat Duo Jets tracks, including �Wild Wild Love,� which they played in a career-making 1990 performance on �Late Night With David Letterman.� Disc Two adds a baker�s dozen outtakes, and the ten-inch third disc has all six tracks from the 1984 cassette-only mini-album (In Stereo), appearing on vinyl for the first time.
�About 1,500 of the cassettes were spun up at a manufacturing facility in Burlington, one whose usual output was gospel recordings and self-help narratives,� says (In Stereo) producer Josh Grier. �This really was the definitive home-grown product.�

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