Music

Birthday Bash

Arts Magnet High School is throwing itself a party

By Zac Crain 

Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (better known to most as Arts Magnet High School) will host a 25th birthday party for itself May 26 at Gypsy Tea Room. It's the curtain-closing event of a Memorial Day weekend that will reunite every Booker T. Washington graduating class--or attempt to, at any rate. Among those graduates are Grammy winners Erykah Badu, trumpet player Roy Hargrove and gospel group God's Property. These acts will perform at the Tea Room along with The Munchpuppies featuring New Bohemians, Patrice Pike and the Black Box Rebellion, Shackleford Brown, Clumsy, The Burden Brothers, Flipside and Kristi Kruger, all of whom feature Arts Magnet alumni. The show kicks off at 4 p.m. and tickets are $35; call 1-888-597-7827 or head to www.startickets.com. It's steep, sure, but how often do you get to see three Grammy winners on the same bill? Exactly. Plus, most of the money goes toward building a new school, so it's worth the cash no matter if you're in for a good show or a good cause. (There will also be another, lower-profile Arts Magnet alumni show the night before at the Arts District Theater on Flora Street, with former students performing dance, music and theater pieces; tickets are $20 and available at the door.) The most remarkable thing about all this is that the show at the Tea Room features only a handful of the talent that's made its way through Booker T. Washington; they could have assembled a dozen different lineups without any of the same acts. It's only too bad Norah Jones couldn't make it...

Adventures of Jet and Darlington bassist Omar Yeefoon and a friend of his (who call themselves GoFast Promotion) have put together a shindig at the Red Blood Club on May 25 called, simply, the Rockabilly Revival, an all-day show with performances by Poison Okies, Mack Stevens, The Bop Kings, The Fabulous Harmonaires (Yeefoon's doo-wop vocal group), The Hotrod Hillbillies, The Susans, EO11 and Atomic Hillbilly. It's all part of GoFast's aim to support rockabilly, roots and punk rock in the area, genres (well, rockabilly, at least) that tend to get pushed to the margins around here. Yeefoon says there's going to be a barbecue in the afternoon, and they also plan to line Commerce Street with classic cars and hot rods for the duration. So if you're not into the bands playing, you can look at some purty cars. Or something like that. Not sure how much all this costs, but we bet you can afford it. If not, don't complain to us, because we're broke...

Lot of spots have weekly or monthly hip-hop nights--Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studio's every other Thursday get-together, hosted by Necessary Essentials; Evolutions Wednesdays at Inferno Lounge with DJs KP and VJ Smooth; Liquid Lounge's Final Friday and plenty more--and now you can add Milkbar to the list. The Lower Greenville bar joins the fray on May 30 with a night hosted by MYK (who's also performing with his group, the Burn Unit) that features Baby G, the Austin-based former DJ for locals Mad Flava and winner of the DMC World DJ Championships in 1990. Sounds like a good start; come early and stay late...

Hand stamps: Doosu performs at Good Records on May 25 at 4 p.m., followed by Secret Machines the next day, also at 4 p.m.; The Rocket Summer plays a rare show on May 24 at The Door; Warsaw, the Joy Division tribute band featuring members of the Toadies and Baboon, is at Liquid Lounge on May 23, with Fauxfox and DJ Kinetix; Macavity and Bee perform May 29 at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios; The Burden Brothers and Dead Sexy open for the Supersuckers on May 27 at the Ridglea Theater...

This week in Sack of Kittens, because we like to piss off both sides of the fence: Jay Quinn. Looks like? The carefully tousled star of many SMU sorority sis' dreams, or someone who used to work at the Dallas Observer. (Back when he was pushing classified ads for the Observer and firing off angry letters regarding our thoughts on the Dave Matthews Band, Quinn was known as Quinn Nagurney and/or the guy we tried our best to avoid when we were outside having a smoke.) Sounds like? A CD changer filled with Jackopierce, Counting Crows, Hootie, Zac Maloy, Train, Dave Matthews (but of course) and so on. In other words, the kind of "rock" moms listen to while driving their kids to soccer practice. Why we think we might be too late? Quinn and his band sold more than 6,000 copies of their debut and almost 10,000 of their second disc, Believe, which was partly produced by the patron saint of this sort of sappy/happy singer-songwriter shiznit, Cary Pierce. (With guest appearances by Maloy and Vertical Horizon's Sean Hurley.) Other people to blame for all this? The owners of Fat Ted's, who gave Quinn and band their first regular gig in town. You could also point the finger at the fine folks at Aware Records, who included Quinn's song "I Need" on the eighth installment of their successful series of compilations; John Mayer, for instance, got his big break on an Aware comp, and he sold out Gypsy Tea Room a month or so ago. Where can you find him? Recently returning to live performance, including an upcoming acoustic gig with Pierce; making us wish he'd been more successful selling classified ads. Number of kittens in the sack he's currently standing on? Five or six, but that's only because Pierce is standing on a couple for him.