Some nights end badly. Some nights end with a public humiliation by the jackboot of the state in front of the teeming crowd of your peers, the assorted boozers and ecstasy-addled clubbers of Lower Greenville. After midnight you can witness the local cheese rousting belligerents on this corner, usually stuffing them into the white paddy wagon. The best part's the public frisk--always look for signs of amusement or disgust on the cop's face.

The best alternative club this year is not the same one as last year, even though both are named Trees. Since that time, Trees has undergone a significant makeover, classing up the joint (oooh, a velvet curtain!) while making it more fan-friendly in the process. Meaning: You no longer have to crane your neck around the air conditioner if you want to watch a show from the balcony, and the same goes for downstairs, where the revamped bar doesn't obstruct anyone's view of the stage anymore. But the extensive remodeling, the new furniture and a fancy light system don't have much to do with the fact that Trees is still the best alternative club in town. The reason: music. Duh. Trees is the place where you can see and hear Mudhoney, the White Stripes, Murder City Devils, At the Drive-In, Luna, Mos Def, Mogwai, Mouse on Mars, Tortoise, Idlewild and so many more. And now you can do it all in a more comfortable environment. Don't fight it.

Not surprising that The Cavern is the best rock hangout in town, given that it's named after one of rock and roll's landmarks, the Liverpool bar where John, Paul, George and Ringo played before anyone cared who they were. But the name is almost irrelevant (at least its origin is), and so is the Fab Four décor; this isn't a theme park. The bar really is a cavern, though--dark and comfortable, exactly the kind of place where you can lose yourself for a few hours inside a tumbler full of bourbon. The jukebox is full of small treasures, and on Mondays, The Cavern spins old rock and punk classics. And nothing is more rock and roll than drinking on a Monday night.

Ricki Derek doesn't look much like Sinatra, but he sounds kinda like him and, goodness, does he bring out a quirky crowd. Under his surreal crooning the bar becomes a haven for those who would rather be disemboweled by butter knives than go to the Beagle next door. There is no stereotype for the kind of person who enjoys Sinatra impersonators; they come from all walks of life, every social strata. In the dark confines of The Cavern you'll find drug-addled hipsters, aging swingers with tacky shirts and neighborhood types having a post-barbecue pint.

At most of the jazz clubs in town, with the exception of maybe the Balcony Club, the music there is nothing more than wallpaper, something to ignore, something that you won't remember five feet outside the door. At Sambuca, however, they never let you forget that the music is the reason you're there, and if you ignore it, it's not because they didn't do their best to open your eyes and ears. There aren't enough venues in town that care about jazz one way or the other, so Sambuca makes up for quantity with quality, doing it right every step of the way, from sound to talent to ambience to anything and everything else you might think of. Sambuca, at its best, provides a little bit of old Deep Ellum, a time when jazz and blues ran Commerce, Main and Elm, not developers. It's worth a visit for that reason alone.

Built in 1911, Sons continues to be the one legit honky-tonk island in a sea of bland imitators. It's one of the few venues that still books Texas and roots-country acts, and even though the Gypsy Tea Room offers many of the same performers (the Derailers, Tish Hinojosa, etc.), there is no match for Sons' atmosphere. From the long bar and jukebox downstairs to the dance floor, folding chairs and small stage upstairs, Sons is a respite of C&W joy for those of us who still love to swing, two-step and do the longneck bob.

Blues music might not have been born in Dallas, but we definitely helped raise it. It's kind of hard to remember that time now, an era when Blind Lemon was a man (Blind Lemon Jefferson, the prince of country blues) and not a crappy bar. Leadbelly and Aaron "T-Bone" Walker lived here, played here, and if you don't know those names, get yourself to a bookstore and pick up a copy of Alan Govenar and Jay Brakefield's 1998 book, Deep Ellum and Central Track. Even if you don't know those names, well, we're sure Stevie Ray Vaughan will ring a bell. Yep, he's from here, too. You can still find the spirit, if not the talent, of those men at Hole in the Wall, which is just what the name implies. It's one-stop shopping for Dallas blues.

We know Christmas is a long way off, but cut out this tip and save it for later. Christmas is a time for visits from family, and what better way to get them out of the house, ahem, we mean show them that the TV show Dallas was actually a documentary, by taking them on a drive-by tour through Highland Park? The annual tour is, after all, a showstopper, particularly along Beverly Drive, where residents spare no expense in covering every awning, tree and shrub in sight with lights so uniquely hued that even Ralph Lauren would be impressed. "Holy shit," was the response we got from the visitor we took there last year. And he's from New York.

A secret, a jewel, a hidden paradise: Around Lakeland and Ferguson Road in East Dallas, downhill from the grand manses of Forest Hills, Little Forest Hills is a quirky, delightful architectural mélange that looks as if it were spun of Berkeley, Seaside, Charlevoix, and an all-cousin East Texas trailer park. Built long ago as summer cottages for city dwellers, the idiosyncratic little hand-built houses were all throwaways 15 years ago. Now hip people are coming in and giving many of them a very cool flair to be found nowhere else in the city. Two shady creeks and even a little-known summer camp hidden in the bottom of a hollow make this a refuge where you can forget you even know about the rest of the city.

OK. So you're going north on Central Expressway and you need to get onto LBJ. Thanks to the not-so-long-ago completion of 75, the traffic flows pretty well until you get within about a mile of the LBJ interchange. Then bam! You're stuck in stop-and-go traffic, your vision blocked by the enormous back end of a Ford Expedition or some other monstrosity. Well, as much as we hate to give this away, there is an alternative: Move over into that free-moving right lane and get off on Coit Road, which will allow you to bypass the interchange. Instead, you'll wind around a corner and find yourself right back at the entrance ramps for LBJ. From there, you just wait a light and merge back onto LBJ, having skipped over the whole mess.