Best jukebox
When you go to a concert, the music you hear doesn't depend on the personal preferences of your fellow audience members. Sure, they share your tastes, but they ain't the ones picking the tunes. At a bar with a jukebox, though, that's exactly what happens: you entrust the musical landscape of the night to the dude in the Moody Blues T-shirt and the girl with a Hootie sticker on her phone. It's the privilege, and curse, of bar citizens selecting the songs. But if a jukebox is great, lame strangers can't pick lame songs. At Charlie's Kitchen in Harvard Square, the jukebox is famed far and wide. And when Phoenix readers sit hip to tattooed hip with their fellow patrons at the bar, they don't have to fear that the next person flipping through the discs is going to pick a playlist that sucks. You'll hear the Stones, the Kinks, the Cure, Lou Reed, Johnny Cash, Run-DMC, and Iggy Pop, to name a few.

Across the river in Boston, cuddled into a Financial District side street, JJ Foley's is another Phoenix-reader favorite in the jukebox category. Given the varied clientele of the place - business types in pastel sweater sets and Burberry raincoats, older locals with rosy noses that betray their bibulous habits, and rough-and-tumble bike messengers with their rogue style - it's a wonder the patron picks don't cause more fuss. Credit the selection: the Ramones, the Pixies, Springsteen, Jane's Addiction, Joy Division, Hendrix, the Pretenders, Siouxsie and the Banshees, R.E.M., the Cure, and the Allman Brothers.

Charlie's Kitchen, 10 Eliot Street, Cambridge, (617) 492-9646; JJ Foley's, 21 Kingston Street, Boston, (617) 338-7713.