2024 marked the 50th anniversary of the legendary Stone Pony, the Asbury Park, New Jersey icon that has been the lifeblood of a region and of numerous music scenes since well before any of our regular readers were born (except probably my parents!…hi guys!). The venue closed out its 50to year anniversary celebration with the return of another local institution that helped revitalize both the venue and the Asbury Park area itself: the Bouncing Souls Home For The Holidays celebration.
I will admit rather candidly that I love Asbury Park. I’m not “from there.” But I was raised in a house where music was ever-present and the music of Bruce Springsteen was probably the closest thing we realistically had to Gospel, so the myth and the lore of both the city as a whole and the Pony as a singular place have been part of my upbringing pretty much from the beginning. Some of my earliest family vacation memories were my parents loading my younger brother and I in the car for the six-hour drive from New Hampshire to my aunt and uncle’s house in one of the Brunswicks so that the adults could go see Bruce at what was then Giants Stadium.
You certainly don’t need me, very much an outsider, to explain to you the importance of the Stone Pony to Asbury Park and to the history of modern American rock music. That’s been done before by people smarter and more connected than I – check out Nick Corasaniti’s wonderful I Don’t Want To Go Home: An Oral History of The Stone Pony that came out last year and includes discussions from everyone from Springsteen and Southside Johnny and Steve Van Zandt to Brian Fallon and Geoff Rickly and Pete and Bryan from The Souls. But what I can tell you that 2024 being the Pony’s 50th anniversary was enough to get the Souls to resurrect their “Home For The Holidays” festivities for the first time in almost a decade. And what I can also tell you is that because of where it fell on the calendar and because of who was on the bill, it made sense to finally make the drive to Asbury in the Winter and to finally…FINALLY…see a show inside the friendly confines of 913 Ocean Avenue.
I’m a veteran of a few Bouncing Souls “Stoked For The Summer” festivals. They tend to be a highlight of any summer season. If you’ve not been, they take place on the Stone Pony Summer Stage, which is essentially an outdoor venue created in the lot immediately adjacent to the Pony. It’s a big, outdoor space that holds somewhere around 4500 people and it’s directly across the street from the Boardwalk and the beach and the Atlantic Ocean, and on the right day it’s just a perfect place to see a show. (Seriously…watching a sold-out hometown crowd sing the chorus to “Gone” in unison under a warm, mid-summer twilight sky is the type of memory that can make the hair stand up on the back of your next for years after.) The bonus is that the regular venue is open, so you can use the bar and merch area and bathrooms inside the venerated venue and take in the history and the weight of the place in comparative calm. It’s a pretty cool experience and you should do it.
But seeing a show inside the Pony itself – as yours truly finally for the middle night of this year’s HFTH – is different. The decor and the footprint have changed a few times and the audio and lighting rigs have been updated several times over, but for all intents and purposes, walking in under the awning at the corner of Ocean Ave and 2nd Ave feels much the way it has for five full decades. The venue is much wider than it is deep, so even if you’re in the back by the soundboard, you’re not super far from the stage. When the show is banged out – as was the case for all three nights of this year’s Home For The Holidays – it is really banged out. It’s a tightly packed venue that becomes a little hard to maneuver through, but when everyone is dancing and enjoying themselves, it very much feels less like a crowd and more like a living, breathing organism.
Seaside Caves kicked off the festivities on this particular evening. As memory serves, it was the New Jersey-based four-piece’s first show since before Covid, yet you’d never really know it. Their half-hour dark synth pop set was super enjoyable and took advantage of what seemed to be the venue’s surplus of smoke machines and chaotic lighting. The band also just put out a new album on bandcamp. Entitled drugless, it’s a collection of songs written and recorded over the course of the last four years. It’s fun and moody and it was recorded by Pete so it obviously sounds great. The Ratchets (pictured below) were up next. Aside from the Souls themselves, The Ratchets have probably been as synonymous with the Asbury Park punk scene as anyone over the last decade-plus. The Pirates Press stalwart four-piece ripped through a half-hour set of no-fuss, no-muss, straightforward street punk jams that included the recently released ripper “Hoist A New Flag.”
Dave Hause And The Mermaid occupied the direct support slot on this middle night of the weekend-long festivities. I’ve seen Dave solo, as a duo alongside his brother Tim, and fronting numerous iterations of The Mermaid for years now, but this was the first time I’d seen him on anything close to “home turf.” Yes, I know Dave and Tim are Philly guys, but Philly and Asbury Park are only just over an hour apart, and Dave spent years as a part of the Souls camp, recorded with Pete a few times, and has been a part of the scene for years; his first solo record, Resolutions, has a song about the old Lanes that name checks a great many of Asbury Park regulars (hey Christina!).
Hause and Co. took the stage accompanied by Tom Waits’ junkyard boot-stomper “God’s Away On Business,” a song that would have been particularly apropos in Asbury fifteen years ago, a spiritual kin to Springsteen’s “My City Of Ruins,” which, while it appeared on the latter’s post-9/11 ode to NYC The Rising album, was actually written about Asbury. But I digress. The band ripped immediately into “Pretty Good Year,” the first of two classic Loved Ones tunes that the band would perform on the evening. While they aren’t Hause solo songs per se, they do have a special place in his musical catalog, as the Loved Ones second album, 2008’s Build & Burn, was recorded by Pete and Bryan from the Souls right down the street at Little Eden. We did an oral history of that whole project a few years ago – read it here if you like.
Hause has employed numerous iterations of his backing band, The Mermaid, over the last decade or so, but the one that appeared on this night at The Pony is probably the tightest and highest energy, with longtime collaborator and Jersey native Kevin Conroy on drums, another Jersey native Mark Masefield on keys, Nashvillian Luke Preston on bass and Hause’s brother Tim on guitar and backing vocals. The band is a juggernaut and seeing them in this capacity at this venue accentuates the elder Hause’s ability to engage the crowd as in a way that draws heavy on his past life as a punk rock band frontman. A personal favorite in the set was “Autism Vaccine Blues,” and other highlights included “Damn Personal” and “Dirty Fucker” and set closer “The Ditch.”
And then it was time for the Souls. At 9:25pm promptly and accompanied by their longtime walkout music, Simple Minds’ 1985 classic “Don’t You Forget About Me,” the quartet took the stage and immediately vaulted into the singalong that is “Here We Go.” Granted every song in the Souls catalog turns into a singalong at some point, but if there were any audience members who weren’t already primed and ready to go based on the openers, they were immediately brought into the fold here. Frontman Greg Attonito sported a walking boot and a cane, the result of an injury suffered while he was playing soccer with his son. He stated from stage that he’s almost all healed, and he was still just about as energetic as ever, but there’s no doubt a joke to be made here about lacing up your Samba’s and kicking it about above a certain age.
What followed was a solid mix of longtime crowd favorites and more than a few “holy shit!”-inducing songs from the back catalog that keep the audience guessing. Near as yours truly can tell, this night marked the first time that “Serenity” had been played since pre-Covid and the first time that “Holiday Cocktail Lounge” had been played since before current drummer George Rebelo joined the band in 2013. The Bouncing Souls – Pete and Bryan and Greg and now George – have attained legendary status for a reason, and it was on full display on this night, as the band blew through two dozen songs in as tight and energetic and catharcit fashion as they ever have. They really do seem to be getting better and better with age. Oh, and speaking of drummers…old friend Michael McDermott, who was in town to play the following evening’s HFTH show with his new band The Kilograms, hopped behind the kit for “Gone.” Another fun moment was “Lean On, Sheena,” a song that was certainly popularized by the Souls but was initially written and recorded by The Kilograms‘ Joe Gittleman in his Avoid One Thing days (Gittleman would join the Souls on stage for it the following evening).
Sure the Souls got their start in the New Brunswick area in the late 1980s, but for all intents and purposes, they’ve been synonymous with the Asbury Park area for close to twenty-five years. They’ve started businesses there and raised families there and brought more friends and attracted more like-minded individuals that have helped shephard the Pony and the greater Asbury area through the resurgence it’s seen in the last decade. Obviously the Home For The Holidays long weekend is trickier to pull off now, what with only Pete and Bryan being locals nowadays (and George splitting his time with a little band called Hot Water Music). That just made this tenth (and final? maybe?) HFTH that much more special. Home For The Holidays is obviously more than just a punk rock show or three. It’s an art show and a flea market and an acoustic singalong and it features events at a variety of venues and it helps breathe life into a week that can be a little slow, what with a lot of folks traveling between the holidays. For those who do stick around – or in our case who make the journey – it can feel like Olde Home Week, with lots of friends and hugs and familiar faces that we see less and less frequently. To have all of it take place in such a storied venue in such a hallowed place seems nothing short of special. And sure it’s the last (?!?) Home For The Holidays, but the Souls aren’t going away. They’re recording as we speak, in fact. So they and their influence and certainly this weekend’s festivities are by no means in jeopardy of being forgotten any time soon.
