The Stone Pony
Near Asbury Park, New Jersey
On Ocean Avenue, across from the boardwalk, stands the most famous small rock club in America. The Stone Pony opened in nineteen seventy-four, in a building that had long been a beer garden called Mrs. Jay's.
The early years were rocky. What saved it was a house band, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, whose weekend crowds kept the doors open. And then there was the neighbor who kept dropping in.
Bruce Springsteen made the Stone Pony his unofficial home, wandering onstage unannounced. A young Jon Bon Jovi got early stage time here too. The club has survived bankruptcy, and more than one closure, but it always comes back.
The club filed for bankruptcy in nineteen ninety-one, reopened the next year, and was renovated and reopened again on Memorial Day weekend of two thousand. The Summer Stage outside holds about forty-five hundred people, against about eight hundred fifty inside. Marshall Crenshaw played the room in February of two thousand one, Counting Crows in June of two thousand twelve, and the Stone Pony Foundation now promotes music education.
In two thousand twenty-four the writer Nick Corasaniti published an oral history of the club, titled I Don't Want to Go Home. Fifty years on, it is still booking bands and still, on any given night, capable of a surprise.
