In the close to five decades he’s been playing at the famed Stone Pony, Bruce Springsteen never asked the bar for a dime — but he sure cost them a pretty penny one night.
The Boss jumped behind the bar of the iconic Asbury Park, NJ music venue — and made sure patrons drank till they got their fill.
“I walked in the front door and saw people around the front bar and there he is behind the bar, handing drinks out to whoever wanted ’em, drunk as a skunk and having the ball of his life,” Jack Roig, the Stone Pony’s owner from 1974 until 1992, told The Post.
And since the Boss didn’t know how to make cocktails, choices were limited and cash sales plummeted.
“Beer and shots, he knew how to do that,” said Roig, 82, laughing at the memory.
The rock-n-roll god has long been a patron and performer at the iconic Jersey Shore watering hole, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.
It is even the subject of a new book, out June 4, by New York Times correspondent and Garden State native Nick Corasaniti, “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. And he would get tired of writing and he would come in and just want to blow some steam off,” Llewellyn told The Post.
Llewellyn could never understand how the word spread so quickly when The Boss showed up.
“It’d be funny because it’d be 200 people in there, which is pretty empty in that place, and Bruce would get on the stage, and before he got off, there’d be 800,” he said.
“Every bar in the area would hear, ‘Bruce is playing at the Pony,’ and they would all go.”
Llewellyn said Springsteen was “a real laid back guy,” and patrons wouldn’t bother him whenever he was there.
“He’d pull up in an old, beat-up pickup truck. He would come in, he’d put a red baseball hat on,” he said. “And he would mind his business and people knew not to mob him and make a spectacle of him. He didn’t like that.”
Women, however, did try to flirt with him.
“What girl didn’t want to go home with Bruce Springsteen in 1985? Well, I knew one [who did], and she worked there, so I don’t want to mention her name,” Llewellyn said.
Llewellyn was serving Springsteen when the rocker first laid eyes on his current wife, a Jersey girl named Patti Scialfa, who sang and played guitar.
“He was sitting at the front bar and he stopped what he was doing. He just sat there and was glued to her. He liked what he saw. And I’m not talking physically. He liked the way she sang, he liked her presence,” he recalled.
“After the show he went in the back and they were talking … And then, of course, the rest is history.”
Llewellyn’s most treasured Bruce memory is when he came in one Sunday before “Born in the USA” was finished and sang songs off the upcoming record just for employees from 4am until 10 in the morning.
“He wasn’t quite sure what songs he was going to put on the album just yet … and we even got to hear songs that didn’t even make the album. After he sang a song, we all gave our opinion on it, and our opinion meant something to him,” he remembered.
“Born in the USA,” which was released in 1984, catapulted Springsteen — and the Stone Pony — to international stardom.
“When I used to proof people at the front door, you would see a tremendous amount of European passports,” said Llewellyn, who also worked as a bouncer there.
The Boss would also receive letters from fans around the world, mailed to him at the bar.
“It would be addressed to ‘Bruce Springsteen, USA,’ and it would be delivered to us. I bet, over the years, we got thousands of pieces of mail,” Roig said.
