Bruce Springsteen bartending at The Stone Pony: ‘Handing drinks out to whoever wanted ‘em, drunk as a skunk’
nypost.com“I Don’t Want to Go Home: The Oral History of the Stone Pony.”In the book, Springsteen, 74, confesses, “I wasn’t much of a bartender, but I’d serve up the beers and just have fun with the fans, and just enjoy myself. [My signature] was beer.
With a Jack Daniel’s on the side, maybe.”Roig said Springsteen would usually come by unannounced, but would call ahead if he was bringing the E Street band along.“He said, ‘Can we come down and play?’ — Can you believe that? ‘Can we?'” Roig recalled.Springsteen would never ask for money. “Never, it was never even suggested.
And the building’s maximum legal capacity was 556. Now, tell me how I’m gonna pay a guy that can fill up MetLife Stadium,” said Roig, laughing. “One summer, he played here 11 out of 13 Sundays.”He even tried to pay the bar’s then-$3 cover charge.“When he was on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week [in 1975], he’s down at the end of the line, looking through his pockets to see if he’s got enough money to come in,” Roig said.Spring Lake, NJ native Pete Llewellyn worked at the Pony as a bartender from 1979 to 1992, and served Springsteen — who never had to pay for a drink there — his signature kamikazes and Budweiser.“He’d get four or five kamikazes in him and he’d go up to the band and play for an hour,” Llewellyn, 63, says in the book.Springsteen, a native of Freehold, NJ, whose 1973 debut album was titled “Greetings from Asbury Park,” rented a garage apartment in Deal, less than 2 miles from Asbury. “I think that’s where he wrote a good portion of the ‘Born in the USA‘ album.
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