Category: Comedy

There existed back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s an underground music scene as lively, wilful, and independent as Stiff, SST, and Sub-Pop combined. This scene was made up of the pro- and semi-pro musicians who played a circuit of private members-only bars operated by fraternal and veterans’ organizations such as the Fraternal Order of Eagle, Loyal Order of The Moose, VFW, American Legion, etc. in the Midwestern and Southern United States. These venues fulfilled an important social function, allowing men a safe space to behave in ways which were growing ever less socially acceptable; business was conducted, off-color jokes were swapped, money was lost quasi-legally gambling, and, as concerns us here, country music singers were cheered.

Among these performers was the notorious Boner Jack, who, in the early 60s, was known as Bruce Jackson, a classic country singer in the Hank Williams mold.

Movie-star good-looking with the slick hair of Sal Mineo, the perfect teeth of Tab Hunter, and the strong jaw line of Rock Hudson, Jackson was regularly seen in the company of gorgeous women during his first flush of (semi) success in the 1960s. Nonetheless, he remained a confirmed bachelor until long after his show business career was over. Indeed, as quiet and retiring off stage as he was flamboyant on stage, Jackson’s personal life was a closed book to all but the series of young, handsome personal roadies who always accompanied him on tour.

Jackson was perhaps best known for his flashy stage appearance, replete with a pink pearl snap shirt with white fringes, diamel-encrusted 10-gallon hat, and a gaudy gold-plated belt buckle big enough to poke a bear’s eye out. He released several well-received singles on Wheeling, West Virginia’s Turn-Pike Records, starting with “Sweet Harvest Moon” and “Runnin’ (With the Devil)”. The others followed suit with plenty of regional airplay, but no traction anywhere other than the tri-state area.

All he needed was a break.

An appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1968 should have been just that break. But apart from striking up a friendship, based on shared experience, with fellow Ohio-native Paul Lynde backstage at NBC Studios, Jackson came away with precious little from his Burbank adventure. While the broadcast gave a bump to his then-current Lp, Tomcattin‘, it was nothing like enough to sustain a career; while the single he was promoting, “Gorgeous Eyes”, struggled to make 113 in the Country Music charts, let alone a showing in the American Top 40. Soon, people stopped returning his calls.

And thus by 1975, age just 32, Jackson’s singing career was all but over; not so much a ‘has-been’ as a ‘never really was’. Eighth on the bill in a regional touring Hee-Haw-style variety show called Corn Pone, he began to resent the very songs he’d recorded over the previous decade which had so signally failed to break him nationally. One drunken night in the middle of the tour, in a perverse act of revenge heedless to the sensibilities of what remained of his fan base, Jackson re-cast his entire back-catalogue with smutty lyrics assured to offend anyone in earshot: “Gorgeous Eyes” became “Gorgeous Ass”, “Runnin’ (With the Devil)” became “Fuckin’ (With the Devil)”, etc., etc. He debuted the new versions the following evening at the Memorial Theatre in Mount Vernon, Ohio. The audience gasped open-mouthed as Jackson snarled one sexually explicit, profanity-laden song after another. As he begun to sing his final song, “Sweet Harvest Poon”, the revue’s panic-stricken director cut power to the stage as a chorus of disgusted boos reigned down from the hall. It was as twisted a musical self-sabotage as anything this side of Metal Machine Music. Sure enough, Jackson was fired as he walked off the Corn Pone stage. He was replaced by a Ken Berry look-a-like comedy monologist.

But in one of those strange twists of showbiz fate, Bobby Sirica was in the audience that night. A booking agent who dealt exclusively with fraternal organizations in the American South and Midwest, Jackson’s puerile re-writes had him in stitches and gave him a flash of inspiration. Immediately after Jackson was dropped, Sirica strode up and told Jackson he could guarantee him five nights a week performing his ‘blue’ act at his clubs in states as far west as Illinois, as far east a Pennsylvania, as far north as Michigan, and as far south as Tennessee. With no other options on the horizon, Jackson summarily ditched the straight Country Music career he’d been denied, spurned the Country charts to which he’d been barred entrance and set about, with his brand new booking agent, creating a new show-biz persona: Boner Jack.

A flamboyant, filthy-mouthed caricature, Boner Jack would be a magnification of Jackson’s already fairly over-the-top stage incarnation. What had been a career suicide attempt turned into a nothing less than a lifeline.

Sirica was true to his word and, shortly, had Jackson working more than he ever had before. Private members clubs pay well and operate under an entirely different legal rubric to their public counterparts and so, unrestrained by obscenity laws or, indeed, taste, Jackson took his stage act to outrageous new heights. He found he enjoyed openly flaunting his personality and was beloved in a way he could have never been previously.

In addition to scatological takes on his own old material, Jackson parodied well-known songs (“Don’t It Make Your Brown-Eye Red”, “When I Get Her From Behind Her Locked Drawers”), as well as newly-written songs in a similarly rude comic vein (“Tanya Fucker”, “I Wouldn’t Kick Her Outta Bed For Eatin’ This Cracker”). Jackson soon incorporated a drag persona named ‘Dolly Hardon’ into the show, performing covers of “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA” and “Stand By Your Man”, and new purpose-built originals like “Are You A Donnie Or A Marie?”. He further supplemented his income by selling 8-tracks and cassettes of his shows such as Boner Jack’s Triple XXX Party!, Bugger’s Banquet and (as Dolly Hardon) Here You Cum Again, none of which were likely to ever trouble AM radio.

He did, however, get the attention of at least one station owner. In late 1978, country radio maven, Marshall Rowland, received a cassette copy of Jackson’s Hell-Bent for Pleather from his friend, the cult humorist and musician Jerry “The Mouth of Mississippi” Clower. Rowland loved it, knowing, of course, he couldn’t play note one of Boner Jack’s music on any of his radio stations. But he wrote Jackson to offer encouragement and a promise of future help should the opportunity arise. It was only six months later that he called Bobby Sirica to offer Boner Jack a gig with Clower, who was hired to play at a swanky private party in suburban Atlanta. Jackson was scheduled to play the ‘after hours’ part of the show when the more sensitive guests had been packed off. He duly showed up at the Tuxedo Park mansion the day of the show, but Sirica, a life-long Democrat affiliated with the labor movement, refused to let him to perform on discovering Clower didn’t belong to the Musicians Union. Rowland was angry and embarrassed. The situation was only remedied when a last-minute deal was struck to allow Jackson to perform as Dolly Hardon. Honor was duly saved, but any hope of a lasting friendship between Jackson and Clower was dashed following an awkward misunderstanding during a drunken good-night hug.

It was shortly after this that Jackson was offered a potentially lucrative slot as warm-up act on a tour with George Carlin. Calling him a “lank-haired pornographer”, Jackson dismissed the comedian’s observational style as “dirty, and not in a good way” and turned down the offer “on aesthetic grounds.”

Still, the Carlin opportunity lifted their sights. And, per the example of Redd Foxx, Jackson and Sirica, began to plot a move from X-Rated comedy in the denizens of private members clubs into more mainstream entertainment. As they put feelers out, his old friend Paul Lynde booked the singer to perform (under his real name) one of his less lascivious new songs in a (never aired) 1980 re-boot of Lynde’s Halloween Special. Alas, shortly before he was to fly to Los Angeles for the taping, Jackson’s mother Alma suffered a massive stroke and he remained in Ohio to look after her. While the stroke didn’t kill her, it left Alma severely incapacitated, and so her dedicated son turned his back on his second show-business career to look after her.*

She passed away quietly in her sleep in 1987, by which time Jackson had settled down to a modest life with Pat Meecham, the private carer who’d helped look after his mother during her final years. The couple were married on June 27, 2015.

*In the post-pandemic era, as recently as 2022, Boner Jack performed a “’22 Comeback Special” at Flaming Saddles, NYC’s campy cowboy bar.