I Don’t Want to Go Home: The Oral History of The Stone Pony
Released Just This Week. A Summer Read. The Jersey Shore
On the evening of July 4, 1970, a car was driving in the area of Springwood Avenue, a west-of-the-railroad tracks and racially segregated section of Asbury Park known both for its shopping district and the clubs and lounges that featured in the downtown nightlife. Seemingly out of nowhere, a group of youths walking home from a dance began to throw rocks, hitting the car and setting off a commotion described as “all hell breaking loose.” Rocks and bottles became Molotov cocktails. Just like that, the city was in the midst of a riot, complete with fiercely set fires and the attendant attacks on ladder trucks that had firemen pelted with bricks as they tried to salvage torched buildings. The unleashed anger lasted for days and only wound down when one hundred New Jersey State Troopers arrived in military gear. In the end, 75% of the businesses on Springwood Avenue had been burned to the ground; the city launched on a social and economic downward spiral.
This was a different downturn than the pre-1970 economy, which, like everything else, had been segregated. The black people who’d come to Asbury Park seeking work in hospitality were cordoned off on one side of town, away from the better jobs, the better housing, the better beaches. For the area near the boardwalk, things were slipping, but slowly. With the burning of Springwood Avenue, the whole town’s shift from its affluent, Victorian era, genteel-resort-past accelerated.
Four years later, two bouncers who’d tired of their work in a neighboring town on the Jersey Shore bought a small seaside bar in Asbury Park, sight unseen. In Nick Corasaniti’s just-released I Don’t Want to Go Home: The Oral History of the Stone Pony, he threads together the story of how that small seaside bar, opening for business against the backdrop of devastating race riots, became what Google Maps calls the “Legendary Rock Venue with Famous Alumni.”
For those unfamiliar, the Stone Pony sits on the corner of 2nd and Ocean Avenue across from the boardwalk in Asbury Park. Bruce Springsteen, who’d introduced himself to the world with his debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, called the city “a little, hanging-on-by-a-thread, blue-collar beach town that happened to be our home.”1
I Don’t Want to Go Home has much Springsteen lore (the live concerts when he’d show up, the fan mail from all over the world sent to him at the Stone Pony and addressed “Bruce Springsteen, USA”). Of the bar itself, it’s an on-point oral history with behind the curtain details, from its shaky beginnings (“But then they fixed the roof”), to the pinnacle of its success (“We were, I’m sure, way, way over fire code”). It's a deeply researched book on how the bar became a magnet to the rich music culture that was brewing in and around the city during the early ’70s. A place that Springsteen says:
was like bar life in a thousand other towns going on simultaneously. There was that one club where your local musicians gathered and would get up onstage and play. I think the only thing that was exceptional about it was that it was unexceptional. Looking back on it, it was just a very down-home place where that group of musicians who inhabited Asbury Park at that moment could gather and be together and create.
Fifty years later, what might otherwise have been just another dive bar now has its own Wikipedia page. If you’re a Springsteen fan, a fan of what’s called the Asbury Sound (known for the horn sections), or a music fan in general, there’s much to recommend in the book. The question at the heart of the project is what made Asbury Park…Asbury Park? Yes, there’s the link to Bruce Springsteen, who broke out of the New Jersey bar scene into the stratosphere of stadium-packed world tours and international fame. His music was the sold-out concerts and albums-selling-in-the-millions kind. His persona, spread so wide, was the inspiration for Sarfraz Manzoor’s coming-of-age; the story of a Pakistani youth growing up in 1970s London.2 The especially dazzling star of Bruce Springsteen made for at least part of the mythology; made the Stone Pony/Asbury Park shine like the brightest constellation, Ursa Major-style.
But what would explain tourist buses grazing past the Stone Pony years after the marquee artists it was known for had long moved on?
There are myriad reasons that places happen. Geography is often significant. High phosphorus and calcium deposits leeching into Kentucky blue grass, shoring up the horses who pasture in the region with stronger, race-horse caliber bones; the valleys beneath Mt. Etna in Sicily, thick with volcanic black ash, making for excellent grapes and wine cultivation. Sometimes it’s where everyone just showed up. Groups of ex-pats in Paris gathering at Gertrude Stein’s salon. New Orleans and St. Louis the homes to jazz and blues.
Soil. Happenstance. Asbury Park had a musical heritage already in place in the years before the Stone Pony. Convention Hall and the Paramount Theater, both on the boardwalk, had offered Top 40 acts and other popular music since the 1950s.
On what was called the other side of town, Springwood Avenue had drawn Ella Fitzgerald and Sidney Bechet in better times. Those better times had ended even before the race riots, but the live shows and vibrant talent pool that fomented in the West Side lounges had not. Closer to the boardwalk, the Upstage Club, opened in 1969, was the coffee house/live music venue that forged a community for Bruce Springsteen, Steve Van Zandt, Clarence Clemons, and Southside Johnny. During the riots, someone stood on the roof of its building with a rifle. Within a year, the club was gone.
The end of the Upstage Club left a void that allowed the Stone Pony to set up stakes and gain ground as a musical stronghold. The burning of the city and the chaos that followed created an aura of danger around the bar. Like CBGB’s on the Lower East Side, it was all the more rebellious to be there. Its origin story might not have been a paradox. “A nascent music scene requires a populace long neglected by their government, living in a kind of post-industrial tabula rasa, a DIY-or-die kind of pressure. Detroit, Manchester, Sheffield, New York before they cleansed it.” You could add Asbury Park to the list. Especially with the faded charm of its boardwalk, where Madam Marie and the Tilt-A-Whirl, made famous in Springsteen’s lyrics, were on-going attractions.
That the bar managed to hold onto its place on the concert circuit and draw crowds while “this endangered American treasure, this city”3 spent years trying to find economic vitality and breathing space reframes the question. Even with the bar’s own ups and downs, what accounted for the Stone Pony’s staying power in a city that had never stopped struggling with an entrenched urban decline? Was that the paradox? What lifted a town on the Jersey Shore above Detroit and Manchester and Sheffield to the point where that tiny dot on the map is known and loved worldwide? What gave it all the mysterious, elusive qualities of a starlet lighting up a room?
If you’re from New Jersey, you know Asbury Park as Exit 102 off the Garden State Parkway and you pass it visiting relatives on Christmas or going to concerts at the PNC Bank Arts Center (Exit 116) or going to any of the Shore towns with rental homes and pizza-by-the-slice and funnel cakes and Polish ice water on their boardwalks (places like Wildwood, which is essentially the un-Hamptons). Asbury Park is known for its music. Not beachy like its neighboring towns or those on the rest of the stretch down the Garden State Parkway all the way to Exit Zero (that’s Cape May). Asbury Park, now often referred to as “the new Asbury Park,” with its crepe shop and MOGO Korean Fusion Tacos within walking distance of the still vital rock Mecca that is now both the Stone Pony and the Stone Pony Summer Stage is considered re-gentrified. It’s upscale.
Gentrified or not, that anyone would find fascination with this seaside town is often bewildering to the people who have passed by Exit 102 without notice for as long as they’ve been driving to the Shore. I’m not sure I Don’t Want to Go Home has the answer to that fascination, but it gives a rich description of a time and a place that made Asbury Park, enough to establish the city and the bar as somewhere else. Somewhere else is a place that isn’t your small town. Somewhere else is a place that can be made to sound magical, which is really just about anywhere.
Episode Notes
This Week’s Recommended Reading
“Far, Far from the Hamptons: The Jersey Shore” by Jane Goldman (New York Magazine, 1986)
This Week’s Music
"I Don't Want to Go Home" by Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes (on Spotify and Amazon Music).
Just One More Thing
Jersey readers: what exit? All others, feel free to make one up.
“The House That Springsteen Built: An Oral History of the Stone Pony.” (Corasaniti’s book began as this New York Times piece.)
The words of Domenic Santana, a subsequent owner of the Stone Pony, from I Don’t Want to Go Home: The Oral History of The Stone Pony.
Love this! As someone not from Jersey but who has lived pretty close to Asbury Park for years, it’s definitely got a very unique appeal and old nostalgia that shines through the gentrification. And I love that MOGO got a shout out. That place is my favorite to eat there, it’s really good!