Bruce Springsteen never asked the bar for a cent during the nearly 50 years he played at the famed Stone Pony, but one night he made the bar spend a pretty penny.
Boss worked the bar at a popular music venue in Asbury Park, New Jersey, helping patrons drink until they were full.
“You walk in through the front door and you see people around the front bar, and there he is behind the bar, handing out drinks to anyone who wanted one, getting drunk and having the fun of his life,” Jack Roig, who owned the Stone Pony from 1974 to 1992, told The Post.
And because the boss didn’t know how to mix cocktails, options were limited and cash sales plummeted.
“Beer and shots, he knew how to do it,” Mr. Roig, 82, recalled, laughing.
The rock ‘n’ roll god is a longtime patron and performer at the famous Jersey Shore bar, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
That’s also the subject of a new book, “I Don’t Want to Go Home: The Oral History of the Stone Pony,” out June 4, by New York Times correspondent and Garden State native Nick Corasaniti.
In the book, the 74-year-old Springsteen confesses, “I wasn’t much of a bartender, but I just served beer and had fun with the fans and had fun myself.” [My signature] It was beer, maybe with a Jack Daniel’s.”
Roig said Springsteen usually comes unannounced, but will contact him in advance if he’s bringing along an E Street band.
“He said, ‘Can I come hang out with you?’ Can you believe it? ‘Can I?'” Roig recalled.
Springsteen never asks for money.
“No one ever said that to me. And the legal capacity of this building is 556 people. Now, how do you pay a guy who can fill MetLife Stadium?” Roig said with a laugh. “One summer, he played there 11 of 13 Sundays.”
He even tried to pay the $3 admission fee to bars at the time.
“When he was on the cover Time and Newsweek in the same week [in 1975]”He’s at the back of the line, searching his pockets to see if he has enough money to get in,” Roig said.
Pete Llewellyn, a native of Spring Lake, New Jersey, worked as a bartender at the Pony from 1979 to 1992, where he served Springsteen his specialty Kamikazes and Budweisers, even though he never paid for his drinks.
“He would fire off four or five kamikazes, go over to the band and play for an hour,” Mr. Llewellyn, 63, writes in the book.
Springsteen, a native of Freehold, New Jersey, whose 1973 debut album was titled “Greetings from Asbury Park,” rented a garage apartment in Deal, less than two miles from Asbury.
“I think he wrote most of the ‘Born in the USA’ album there, and when he got tired of writing songs he came back in the studio and just wanted to blow off steam,” Llewellyn told the Post.
When the boss showed up, Llewellyn couldn’t understand how word had spread so quickly.
“It’s funny because there’s only like 200 people in that venue, and then when Bruce comes onstage, by the time he comes off there’s 800 in the crowd,” he said.
“All the bars in the area heard the news, ‘Bruce is playing at the Pony,’ and they all went.”
Llewellyn said Springsteen was a “really laid-back guy” and that patrons didn’t get in his way when he was there.
“He would come in in an old, beat-up pickup truck, and he’d come in and put on a red baseball cap,” he said, “and he was focused on his job, and people knew not to crowd around him and make a spectacle of him. He didn’t like that.”
However, women tried to flirt with him.
“What girl doesn’t want to go home with Bruce Springsteen in 1985? [who did]”I don’t want to say her name because she worked there,” Llewellyn said.
It was while Llewellyn was working for Springsteen that the rocker first laid eyes on his now-wife, Patti Scialfa, a New Jersey native who sings and plays guitar.
“He was sitting at the front bar and he stopped what he was doing and just sat there, transfixed by her. He liked what he saw. And I don’t mean physically. He liked the way she sang and he liked her presence,” he recalled.
“After the show, he went backstage and they were talking… and, of course, the rest is history.”
Llewellyn’s most cherished Bruce memory was when he came in one Sunday before “Born in the USA” was finished and sang songs from the next record just for the employees from 4 to 10 a.m.
“He hadn’t yet decided which songs were going to be on the album. He also played us songs that didn’t make it on the album. After he sang the songs, we all gave our opinions on them. Our opinions meant a lot to him,” he recalled.
Born in the USA, released in 1984, catapulted Springsteen and the Stone Pony to international stardom.
“When I was checking IDs at the front door, I saw loads of people with European passports,” said Llewellyn, who also worked as a bouncer there.
The boss would also receive letters sent to the bar from fans all over the world.
“It was addressed to ‘Bruce Springsteen, USA’ and it was delivered to us. Over the years we must have received thousands of pieces of mail,” Roig said.
