When Dave and I opened our downtown gallery in 1996, we had visions of creating a sophisticated "SoHo by the Sea," offering the finest contemporary American crafts for interior designers and the "artsy" crowd: handmade furniture, designer lighting, outrageous art quilts, original rug designs.

Then customers began arriving (veeery slowly at first!), and it seemed like every other one hailed from exotic locales like Rome, London, Brussels, Sydney, Tokyo and Cincinnati. And, despite their cultural differences, they always asked the same three questions: "Can I use your rest room?", "Have you ever met Bruce Springsteen?", and "Do you sell anything that says 'Asbury Park' on it?"

Asbury Park? You mean souvenirs?

So, rolling our eyes, we designed our first "Greetings From Asbury Park" t-shirts and hid them in the back room - just to satisfy the tourists, of course.

Well, the t-shirts sold out immediately, so we grudgingly added a line of Asbury Park sweatshirts - just to be obliging, of course.

Then came Asbury Park house flags. And clocks. And drinking glasses. And magnets. And greeting cards. And photographs. And vintage posters. And paintings. And steel wall shelves shaped like city landmarks.

And silver Tillie pins. And wacky Tillie earrings. And even wackier dried gourds, decorated with painted Tillie faces and black feather hair. (And, if you think there's no market for painted Tillie gourd heads, just check out the kitchen of a certain city councilman we know.)

Dave and I even designed a handmade, Palace-green rug, tufted with grinning Tillie faces, and sold it to a Palace Amusements fan for $1,100. (Yes, you read that right.)

But the day I finally threw our snob gallery image out the window was the day a Red Bank artist placed a special order that became an instant hit: a handmade steel Asbury Park toilet-paper holder, complete with a cut-out carousel house, Tillie face, and swan boats.

So much for sophistication.

And, not only did legions of Asbury Park music fans flock to our gallery (we were once startled to find 200 Europeans politely filing into our 12-foot-wide stop from a string of tour buses), but our Internet gift catalog sent us scrambling to fill orders from Europe, South America, Japan, and Australia.

That's why, when the Save Tillie group asked me to participate in an April 26 forum promoting music tourism in Monmouth County, I immediately agreed.

As someone who avoids crowds and loud music, doesn't smoke, rarely drinks, can't dance, and falls asleep before most bands start playing (but, yes, I'm still a groovy chick), I've taken a lot of teasing for championing the Stone Pony and other music landmarks like the Palace Amusements and Madam Marie's fortune-telling booth.

But I know from firsthand experience that other struggling cities would sell their city councils for the music tourism opportunities we have in Asbury Park.

Take Liverpool, England - the home of the Beatles - for example. In the 1970s, Liverpool demolished the Cavern, the dimly lit basement club where John, Paul, George and Ringo first found musical fame. By 1984, responding to the tourist outcry, private entrepreneurs were rebuilding it, using 15,000 of the old bricks to reconstruct its arches and vaults.

In the last two decades, Beatles walks and bus tours were initiated, and now there are more than 40 certified tour guides in Liverpool today. The National Trust - the UK's leading conservation and environmental charity - manages Paul's and John's childhood homes; a souvenir and memorabilia industry has taken off; a new experiential Beatles museum attracts 125,000 visitors a year; and there are even plans to develop a 120-room, Beatles-themed hotel.

And, each July, the weekend Mathew Street Music Festival draws in over 250,000 visitors.

What is the financial impact? According to Simon Osborne of the National Trust - the keynote speaker for the April 26 music tourism conference - Beatles tourism attracts 6 million visitors a year, spending $28 million in the local economy.

And the Beatles phenomenon is only increasing. According to Osborne, the group sold more records in 2000 than in 1970.

Closer to home, fans of Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes staged a three-day "Jukestock" festival in March, 2001. Tickets sold out the first day, drawing fans from 20 states and 9 different countries to, improbably, the Tinton Falls Holiday Inn. (No suitable Asbury Park venue was available - a loss for us.)

Co-organizer Jane McCreery, another speaker at the April tourism conference, estimated that fans pumped $100,000 into the local economy during a snowy, off-season weekend that would have driven more faint-hearted tourists away.

And Rick Harrison, the hotel's general manager, was relieved to find that nostalgic Baby Boomers are better behaved and more likely to spend money than they were in their earlier years. (See Matt Mrowicki's excellent article on www.chorusandverse.com for a complete update on the music tourism conference.)

But music tourists do much more than spend money on Asbury Park earrings and t-shirts. In the past few years, Save Tillie members from around the world have contributed generously to Asbury Park charities ranging from the Boys and Girls Club to scholarship funds for Asbury Park High School students to historic preservation drives. And the glory of Internet communication is that we can draw on them instantly in a time of need.

And that's just the Springsteen/Southside Johnny fans. Asbury Park's musical heritage encompasses 1940s Big Band concerts at the Berkeley Carteret and Monterey Hotels, decades of jazz and blues on Springwood Avenue, and generations of oom-pah band concerts on the boardwalk.

And then there were the great 1960s and 1970s rock concerts at Convention Hall: Janis Joplin, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, and more.

Hopefully, some enterprising souls will find a way to revive this vast musical heritage and bring people, money and jobs back to our shores.

In the meantime, however, we need to hang on to those few musical treasures that we already have.

To quote my overseas friend Maggie Powell - who flew across the ocean to help organize Jukestock and the music tourism conference - "No one is going to come all the way from Europe to see the spot where the Palace Amusements used to be."