Spam-a-lot

Spam-a-lot: If there's one thing the music staff here at the Dallas Observer can agree on, it's Vanilla Ice. We love Vanilla Ice. We want to party with him. We want to party with him soooooo bad! So imagine our happy surprise when, upon checking our tricked-out MySpace page, we noticed an Internet ad that read "Want to party with Vanilla Ice?"! Hell yeah! Dallas' finest musician! So we clicked on the ad, which led us to www.partywithastar.com. The instructions seemed so simple: 1) Enter your information. 2) Answer all questions. 3) Continue to the Thank You page. Cool! Our information is your information, and shit, who doesn't like to be thanked, right? You even get to choose which star you want to party with—Ice, Cindy Margolis, Ant the Comic (??), Steve-O or Traci Bingham. We chose Ice, of course, entered our e-mail address, name, etc.

OK, but, see, Step 2 is where things started going awry. "All questions" means about 200 yes-or-no checkboxes in which you must confess to, among other things, whether or not you use adult diapers, whether your credit is bad, whether you are willing to sell your soul for a free iPod (with the replies gathered from the Observer staff, the answer to all three is "yes"). But hell, it's worth putting your dirty secrets out there on the Internet to get some face time with the Ice Man, so we answered. We checked box after box. After box. It was an unending series of questions, more creepy and arcane than a CIA background check. Until, finally, the Thank You page!

That was two weeks ago. So far, no one has alerted us to our scheduled date for partying with Vanilla Ice. We have, however, experienced a three-fold increase in spam, our inboxes inundated with queries such as "WANT A FREE LAPTOP???" to which our answer is "NO!! WE WANT TO PARTY WITH VANILLA ICE!!"

Since the partywithastar Web site provides absolutely no contact information whatsoever, we have no way of checking on our submitted form. But we sit at our desks, fingers crossed, "Ice, Ice, Baby" running through our heads, knowing that if there's a chance we could party with, say, 2 Live Crew, we'd do it all over again.

---

Hour by hour: Our very own local kids makin' good, the Hourly Radio, will hit the road at the end of May for a 30-plus-date tour, along with Shiny Toy Guns and Stars of Track and Field. The tour will take the Kirtland Records band from their opening show in Little Rock, through the South, then through the Midwest and back around the East Coast. While you await their return, check the "Deaf Ears" video on Youtube... Hendrick has returned to the studio—Spaceway Studio, in fact, where Polyphonic Spreejust finished up—to work on their second album. No word yet on due date.

---

Handstamps: Fred's Texas Café in Fort Worth may be tiny, but the venerable burger 'n' brew spot is big enough—at least the patio out back is—to host a two-day music fest that guarantees to scratch that gen-u-ine down-home itch you've got. Saturday, May 5, the Fred's Festmusic starts at noon with John Burleson and ends with Josh Weathers Band's 9 p.m. set. Highlights include the 3 p.m. showing of the Electric Mountain Rotten Apple Gang, followed by a 4 p.m. set by Telegraph Canyon. Day Two's headliner is Darth Vato...Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin plays a 3 p.m. show at Good Records on Saturday following their Granada gig, along with Mute Math and the Cinematics.. .Two benefits you should know about: First, it's so freakin' hackneyed to use the term "blues legend," but there's no other way to describe Dave "Honeyboy" Edwards, pretty much the last man standing when it comes to early-generation, true Delta blues. He's headlining a benefit for the Blue Shoe Project, a nonprofit that "motivates students toward achieving academic excellence through the appreciation and preservation of blues music." Because, you know, blues performers are also so well-known as sticklers for grammar. Grapevine Arts Center on Tuesday, May 8, is the place to be for that, at 7 p.m....Sons of Hermann Hall, meanwhile, is hosting a benefit for KNON starring one Miss Candye Kane on Saturday, May 5. Kane is a self-proclaimed sex worker, i.e., former stripper and porn star, who also happens to be most talented at singing scorching blues. Now that's the kind of charity we can get behind!