The dulcet guitar that opens Bo-Day-Shus!!! is quickly interrupted by Nixon’s robust holler, setting the tone for the toe-tapping hootenanny that unfolds. Along with his washboard-playing partner Skid Roper, Mojo would conjure up some of the decade’s best rockabilly raves, and 1987 saw the release of the duo’s masterpiece, Bo-Day-Shus!!! He was born Neill Kirby McMillan Jr., but would rechristen himself Mojo Nixon after an alcohol-induced epiphany one night deep in the heart of Texas.
I’m talking about the ornery hillbilly who became the toast of MTV after spouting rants about barbeque sauce water slides and lowering the legal drinking age. However, there was a musical force more wild n’ wooly than Jon Bon that year, a crazed backwoods lunatic who better embodied the hot blue collar trend. Yessir, Americans were unabashedly enjoying the less refined elements of their culture in 1987. Also, Bon Jovi began their reign as the ultimate working man’s band that year with their first mega-hit, the low-income anthem, “Livin’ on a Prayer”. American’s sport of choice in ’87 was not baseball or football, but rasslin’ Wrestlemania III set indoor attendance records that March with more than 93,000 filling the Pontiac Silverdome to watch greasy shirtless dudes pretending to hit each other. At the movies, audiences were guffawing at the Coen Brothers’ trailer-trash comedy Raising Arizona. Quasi-cowboy Ronald Reagan was in the White House. If you had to throw a dart at one year to pinpoint the height of “redneck chic” in the US, you probably couldn’t do much better than 1987.
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