WE ALL HAVE DIFFERENT measures of success. For some, it means holding the deed to a quarter-acre of ChemLawn at the Jersey Shore. Others want to see their name in lights.

For me, it’s friendship. Experience. Connection. My day job will never make me rich, but it helps to pay the bills, take care of the people I love, and, every once in a while, enables me to play a day of hooky at the shore.

Gary U.S. Bonds scored his first hit in 1960 with the sax-driven “New Orleans”. My mother was just 13 when “Quarter to Three” first crackled from her transistor radio in Barnegat Light. I was about the same age when I first heard the song on a compilation of what were then considered “oldies”, though all were new to me. Bonds had just turned 84 when I took my parents to see him play a free show on the beach in Somers Point a few years back. Splitting the cost of our no-frills motel room rendered a Friday night at the shore in late-July doable. We had a blast, and vowed to return if he ever played the Point again.

Last summer, Bonds came back, but this time to the Atlantic City Boardwalk as part of a midweek sister series to the beach concerts in Somers Point. The show was just as free, but the switch-up would mean taking two days off from work, plus the cost of a hotel room. Carmen, who together with his wife, Nancy, produces both concert series, dismissed my hesitation when we spoke a week before the show.

“Spare room’s open,” he said. “You can stay with us.”

We began talking at the beach shows a few years back and over time have become friends. I gave him copies of Beach Badge early on, and confessed my lifelong obsession with Eddie and the Cruisers. When his production company, Tony Mart Presents, hosted a special Sunday-night screening of the movie at the Gateway Playhouse in October 2024, I drove up from Baltimore for the day to help out with this and that. I’d accepted their offer of the guest room then, when it grew too late to head home, and later sent them a thank you note.

Now, he reiterated what had become a standing offer, subject only to availability.

“Do it,” D said without hesitation. “I’ll mind the house.”

I called out from work that Wednesday and Thursday and set about making plans. Since live music is best enjoyed in the company of friends, I reached out to my pal Louis, a fellow writer whom I’ve come to know through publishing his work in Beach Badge. A Philly native and longtime shore local, Louis spent the summer I was born making soft pretzels in his old man’s shop at Texas and the Boardwalk. He was all in for Bonds, as I had hoped, and suggested we meet up for a bite to eat beforehand.

I packed up the brand-new bike I’d bought that spring with the proceeds of a one-off editorial gig, along with a vinyl copy of Bonds’ second album, 1962’s Twist Up Calypso, which I’d found for $2 at Wax Atlas a few months earlier. I hit the road at first light Wednesday morning.

*****

The weather was as nice as anyone fortunate enough to be playing hooky at the shore on a Wednesday in July could ever hope for it to be. I parked near the old Convention Hall and rode the full length of the boardwalk until the cops finally kicked me off at noon. Then I went swimming in the ocean. The beaches here, unlike most of the Jersey Shore, are free to use. One of many reasons that this, the Shore’s last bastion of natural personhood, remains my favorite destination. Accessible. Scalable. And, true to nature, ever on the make.

The outdoor shower soothed my sun-warmed skin as it washed away the salt and sweat and sand. Inside the comfort station, I discreetly changed into my street clothes, then fetched the record from the car and headed off to meet Louis.

He was wearing blue Chucks much like my own when I found him on Iowa Avenue, outside Tony’s Baltimore Grill. “It might not be the best place to eat in AC,” he said, “but it’s certainly my favorite.” Tony’s dining room validates that rationale – a tableau of cheap beer and neon twilight, a hundred years of first dates and last rites recorded for posterity in midcentury Formica. Good pizza, too.

Dad’s Coast Guard career gave me a lot of early practice in the art of making friends. Even now, my old man squanders no occasion on which to send a card, though he himself has always struggled with cultivating friendships.

“You’re like my mother,” he once told me. “She made friends all her life, everywhere she went. But that’s never been the case for me.”

*****

The evening breeze kept the day’s warmth in play even as the sun retired to the mainland. Louis and I found Carmen supervising the set up at Kennedy Plaza, just outside Boardwalk Hall. I introduced them. Despite the crowds and open air, the sound here is better than most indoor venues. Carmen credits the massive façade of Boardwalk Hall, opposite the plaza stage. I covered state wrestling finals for The Press of Atlantic City inside that building, years before its relegation to Convention Hall Emeritus.

Carmen’s father, a Sicilian immigrant, first settled here, in Ducktown. He ran the original Tony Mart’s Café in Atlantic City until the mid-1940s, when he moved the operation to the former Schick’s Tavern on Bay Avenue in Somers Point. His new Tony Mart’s became a hub of live music and South Jersey nightlife. Bill Haley played there. Del Shannon, too. Levon and the Hawks were playing their summer ’65 residency at Tony Mart’s when Dylan called with his decision to go electric. While novelist P.F. Kluge introduced Eddie and the Cruisers at the fictional Vince’s Boardwalk Bar, in AC, director Martin Davidson moved the action across the back bays and marshlands to Tony Mart’s for his 1983 big-screen adaptation. For the last 30-odd years, Carmen and Nancy have carried on his father’s legacy with these shows.

Guitar virtuoso Billy Walton and his band took the stage, imbuing late-day gold with subtle shades of blue. Davidson was in the audience when D and G and I came to see John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band play here the year before. Their Eddie soundtrack was the first album I ever bought, and the only one I’ve bought on every format since. The whole band signed their setlist for G. Tunes, their longtime sax man, was nearly 84, and the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. He’d fire up a backstage stogie and come out wailing hard as ever, like a man playing for keeps. Mariette took my photo with him a few weeks later, outside the Pony, while we talked before their show. That fall, he backed Billy Walton when he covered “New Orleans” during the short concert that preceded the screening at the Gateway.

Carmen moderates a panel discussion featuring (from left) Billy Walton and Eddie and the Cruisers costars Michael “Tunes” Antunes and David Patrick Wilson on October 13, 2024, at the Gateway Playhouse in Somers Point. Photo by William Patrick Tandy.

I told Carmen I was looking forward to seeing Beaver Brown again in a few weeks, when they’d again play Somers Point. His smile eroded into something more somber. He asked if Tunes was with the band when D and I saw them at Wonder Bar the month before. He wasn’t. Carmen shook his head and sighed, suggesting he wouldn’t be in Somers Point, either. “I think he’s done.” he said.

A few weeks would pass before we knew just how right he was.

The sun had fully set when Gary U.S. Bonds stepped out into the stage lights and delivered a solid set of time-defying crowd-pleasers: “Quarter to Three”, “New Orleans”, “Out of Work”, “Angelyne”, “Jolé Blon”, “Soul Deep”, and more. What kind of verve he must have had at 22, I thought, as the latter-day Bonds rousted young and old alike, the most able and infirm, from their folding chairs with the infectious proto-ska of 1961’s “Dear Lady Twist”:

Because the doctors agree, I’ve been told

Do the twist and you’ll never grow old

Louis took his leave after the show. As the crowd dispersed, I found Carmen down by the stage with his headliner, who was sipping red wine from a plastic tumbler. Well-earned. Like Mom, the Boss and Little Steven grew up listening to Gary U.S. Bonds. I always respected how they used their later platform to promote him and his work. He signed my record, then Carmen pulled me aside.

“We’re gonna grab a late dinner – Nancy, Gary, and I, a few other people,” he said. “You’re welcome to join us.”

How could I say no? The show was over, yeah, but I was exactly where I wanted to be.

“Great,” said Carmen. “Place we’re going isn’t far from here – Tony’s Baltimore Grill. You know it?”

I simply smiled.

*****

Our server was the same tall, tattooed woman who had waited on Louis and I earlier that evening. Starting with Carmen, who sat across from me, she rounded the table taking orders. When she got to me she laughed.

“You…”

I smiled and nodded. “Yep.”

She smiled back. “So – how you doing?”

“All good here.”

When she had gone, Carmen raised an eyebrow, then leaned across the table, grinning.

“You, uh…know her?” he whispered.

“Oh, yeah, we go way back,” I said. “At least three or four hours.”

Tony’s was the perfect nest in which to end a perfect night with this flock of nighthawks: Carmen, Nancy, Billy, Gary, a handful of band members, family, friends…and me.

More tired than hungry, I mostly kept quiet, soaking up the ambience of a group of old friends gathered round a few pushed-together tables in Tony’s unrelenting twilight. Devoid of any pretense. Cracking wise. Talking shop. Shooting shit about the industry. Venues. Talent. Asking after friends and loved ones who were present very much in mind if not in body. We sat there – eating, drinking, talking, listening – long past midnight, until the staff eventually closed down the empty dining room around us, and the bright red neon facing Atlantic Avenue went dark.

William Patrick Tandy
Editor & Publisher
April 2026