You have to have wasted your youth in specific, deafening ways to understand why someone would spend half a million dollars trying to save a cramped, windowless nightclub in South Jersey. Domenic Santana and David Cruz (two men about whom I know nothing, but whom I somehow imagine being partly bald and bunching together the remaining hairs on the back of their heads into little rat tails) have scraped together $375,000 to buy a decrepit, one-story corner building at 913 Ocean Ave. in Asbury Park. Add another $125,000 for renovations, and they're staring down the barrel of $500,000 for this place, all because Bruce Springsteen used to play there a quarter century ago.

On May 29, Santana and Cruz are holding a grand reopening for The Stone Pony, where Springsteen and half a billion guys you never heard of used to hang around all night wishing they could play someplace better.

In America, this sort of thing passes for historical preservation. The English have the Globe Theater, so New Jersey gets the Stone Pony, New York punk rockers have CBGB, and San Francisco comedians talk about the Holy City Zoo (the cramped, windowless training grounds of Robin Williams, Kevin Pollack, Rob Schneider and half a dozen other comedians now getting on your nerves at a theater near you). If we want to save the log cabin where Lincoln grew up, we also want to maintain the club where, in August 1974, Didi Ramone threw up on somebody's shoe.

The only problem is what becomes of these places once we preserve them. Basically, they attract three kinds of people: The first kind used to go to the club and are trying to recapture their youth or at least find a headband they lost in 1987. The second kind did not go to the club in the old days and are trying to recapture the youth of the first kind of people.

And, of course, the third kind is tourists who wouldn't have gone into the Stone Pony during its hey-day if you'd paid them in Biscotti and Peter Frampton albums. All they know is that Bruce Springsteen is this big, groaning, sweaty tycoon who did the soundtrack for ``Philadelphia,'' or ``Amadeus'' or ``The Rockford Files'' or some damn thing, and now he's richer than Pat Robertson after a solar eclipse. So they'll suffer through a bunch of unknown, unpleasant . . . unnecessary local troubadours, hoping The Boss will arrive and make their drab, torrid little evening ``worthwhile.''

They wouldn't have supported Springsteen when he started out, and they aren't helping any unknown musicians now. So to hell with them. They deserve to go to The Meadowlands and spend $200 for a seat near the Port-A-Johns.

Where were all these people two years ago, when the Stone Pony was closing down? By then, most of the local bands available were hard-core punk, and the crowds for those shows had a tendency to pull urinals off the wall, according to the club's old owner, Steven Nasar. A sense of history is nice, but it's not quite as nice as finding a urinal more or less where you left it. So Nasar renamed the place Club Vinyl in late 1998 and advertised jazz and swing music until everybody went away. And who can blame him?

But I've got news for you. That's how rock clubs are. They're smoky, they smell, they're full of drunks, and their bathrooms are a heinous crime against God. But most of all, they're not about who played there in 1977, but about who's playing there tonight. New rock legends arise only where you have a dedicated base of local fans who, frankly, don't have enough self-esteem to go see anyone bigger.

Sure, the new Stone Pony will have a bang-up opening and it'll get some tourists. And maybe, someday, Springsteen will drop by and sing deep, humane songs about turning 50 and chasing kids off his lawn. But it's not a real rock-and-roll club if all you're selling is history and Nike T-shirts. The only thing you'll ever do in a place like that, the only thing you can ever do in a place like that, is make money.

Which, I know, is all any club owner is ever trying to do. But when they really start doing it, it's not worth going anymore.