Free Beer Tonight!

Walking through the University of Colorado campus in the early eighties, I used to see signs taped to light poles (and underclassmen who made the mistake of passing out on the sidewalk) advertising "Free Beer tonight at Tulagi's." Tulagi's, aside from being the nominally most frat-infested bar within stumbling distance from the campus, the bar where the apocryphal tale has it that REO Speedwagon wrote the song "Ridin' the Storm Out." I mention these two qualifiers to suggest that perhaps this place might periodically need to give away beer to get a more discerning clientele through the doors.
Amusingly enough, "Free Beer" was the name of a band. As it turns out, there have been and continue to be many different groups of arrested adolescents working on this same notion. It might have been the one that got its start in the San Francisco Bay Area, but was probably not the one that was rambling around Detroit back in the 90's. That being said, I confess that I never bothered to attend a show by either one of these bands - but I admired their marketing savvy. If they had wanted to get hungry drunk boys to their shows they might have only accomplished this feat better by smearing a trail of Dominoe's pizza grease leading up to the front door of the club.
I was a sucker for a thing called "Animal Drown Night." This was held at the local 3.2 beer establishments during the middle of the week when things were slow. You paid some mildly ridiculous cover (like five or six bucks) and then you were allowed to drink all the watery, salted beer you could hold down. A variation on this trick was to have "Ladies Night" when young women were allowed in for free, and then were encouraged to buy pitchers of beer for only a dollar. There wasn't a real concern about who drank the dollar pitchers, they just wanted to empty those taps. There never was any free beer.
I guess that 's why I still find "Barenaked Ladies" so damn amusing.