Every Saturday night at around midnight I head downtown, about five minutes from my apartment, to the local Punk Night. It’s in a small bar called Shadow below an extremely sketchy “hotel” (but the bar is cool, at least on Saturdays). My brother goes there, as do many friends of mine, and Molson Stock Ale is $2.50 a bottle. It’s always a good time, but the reason I mention it here is because the music is uniformly awesome.

Much of it is the usual suspects (Drew, the DJ, is of the principle that you play what people want whether you love it or not, albeit hopefully with some overlap between the two); Rancid, the Clash, Good Charlotte, Blink-182, the Dropkick Murphys, and so on.

But Drew also has The Futureheads and will usually play something for me (so far: “Stupid And Shallow”, “Robot” and “Trying Not To Think About Time”, all of which sound awesome live), Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died” has been a near-weekly standard, and My Chemical Romance is played often.

And that’s to say nothing of the dozens of songs I love after hearing repeatedly without ever finding out what they are. I could sing along to them in a second but couldn’t tell you their names. One I did ask about wound up being by Buccaneer, who (dancehall or not) gets played down there because he’s covered a punk song (can’t remember which), and it’s great. About the only thing I could request within the broad outlines of what gets played down there (punk, hardcore, emo, and all attendent subgenres of each, plus a little ska and reggae and some odds and sods)

Sure sometimes a song comes up I’m not a huge fan of, but he’s never played anyhing I outright hate (in over a year, no less), and it’s a really outstanding night, one I look forward to each week. Now if only I could only afford beer every week…