Bruce Robert Jackson (3 June 1949 – 29 January 2011) was an Australian audio engineer who co-founded JANDS, an Australian audio, lighting and staging company. He joined American touring audio engineer Roy Clair and mixed concert stage monitors for Elvis Presley in the 1970s. With Clair Brothers, a concert sound company, Jackson designed audio electronics including a custom mixing console. Beginning in 1978, Jackson toured as Bruce Springsteen's band engineer for a decade, using Clair Brothers sound systems. A business interest in Fairlight CMI in Sydney introduced Jackson to digital audio, and he subsequently founded the digital audio company Apogee Electronics in Santa Monica, California, where he lived at the time. After selling his share of Apogee, Jackson co-founded with Roy and Gene Clair a joint venture which produced the Clair iO, a loudspeaker management system for control of complex concert sound systems. Jackson turned the venture commercial with the help of Dave McGrath's Lake Technology. Dolby Laboratories bought the technology and formed Dolby Lake with Jackson as vice president, then in 2009 Lab.gruppen acquired the brand. Jackson was honoured with the Parnelli Innovator Award in 2005 for his inventive loudspeaker controller.
While still a partner at Apogee, Jackson began touring with Barbra Streisand, mixing concert sound and serving as sound designer from 1993 to 2007. With two other audio engineers he received an Emmy Award for sound design and sound mixing on Streisand's TV special Barbra: The Concert. Jackson worked on sound design for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney and served as audio director for the opening and closing ceremonies. He performed the same role in Doha, Qatar, at the 2006 Asian Games and in Vancouver, Canada, at the 2010 Winter Olympics.
JANDS Bruce R. Jackson was the first of five children born to Bruce H. Jackson, Sr and Mavis Jackson, living in Rose Bay. His wealthy parents moved to a mansion in Point Piper, a harbourside suburb of Sydney. (The mansion, "Altona", is one of Australia's most expensive homes.) Jackson first expressed an interest in electronics at age 13 when he set up a basement workbench and small lab under his parents' mansion. While at Vaucluse Boys' High School, Jackson was discovered by investigators of the Postmaster-General's Department, along with a group of his electronics-minded schoolmates, Phillip Storey, Wally Pearce, Bruce Morrison and Adrian Wood operating a pirate radio station "2VH", with a too-powerful AM transmitter—which the boys operated during and after school, and on the weekends, tuned to 1350 kHz in the upper end of the commercial AM band to avoid more powerful commercial radio station signals. The boys did not know that their tube transmitter and very long, very efficient full wavelength antenna were so well crafted that their unlicensed signal was broadcasting all over Sydney and parts of the state of New South Wales 600 km away, at night time.
At age 18, Jackson and one of the boys, Phillip Storey, dropped out of university and became partners in an electronics business. They used their surname initials to form the company name: J&S Research Electronics. The partnership's largest customer, Roger Foley, doing business as Ellis D Fogg, a producer of psychedelic lighting effects, refused to write out the full company name and instead wrote JandS on his checks. The partners added an equipment rental company with the name JANDS Pty Ltd, in response. After moving the company from Point Piper to Rose Bay, JANDS made "whatever the hell they felt like", according to Jackson: lighting equipment, guitar amplifiers and public address system components such as column loudspeakers. He described how, with so many American servicemen stationed in Vietnam spending their recreation time in Sydney, Australian bands and clubs were doing well: "the live music scene was jumping, and we were busy". JANDS' successful rental business paid for the design of new gear. After two years, Jackson and Storey quarrelled and the two decided to disband the company. They sold out to Paul Mulholland, David Mulholland and Eric Robinson, who were operating a small lighting company Jubillee Gaslight, on Sydney's north shore. Later, JANDS grew under Mulholland and Robinson to become Australia's largest sound and lighting company. Jackson and Storey served as consultants to JANDS, from time to time.
Clair Brothers Jackson first met Roy Clair in 1970 during a world tour by the band Blood, Sweat & Tears when they stopped at Sydney for a concert held at Randwick Racecourse. Clair had brought his unusually large American concert sound system to Australia and Jackson was curious to hear it, and to see how the big black 'W' bins were designed. He and a friend sneaked into the concert and spoke with Clair, asking "a whole stack of questions". Clair decided to leave his sound system in Jackson's hands for a series of Johnny Cash tour dates coming up in some six months, rather than shipping all the gear home to the USA and back in between. Jackson stored the system and then mixed the Cash tour across Australia. Afterward, Clair invited Jackson to visit him in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Following a trip to London, Jackson stopped in at Clair Brothers and stayed to live in Pennsylvania.
Jackson assisted Clair Brothers by teaming with Ron Borthwick to design a mixing console that folded up into its own road case, a proprietary model used by Clair Brothers for some 12 years of top tours. The console used novel plasma bargraph meters which displayed both average and peak sound levels, combining the characteristics of fast peak meters and slower VU meters. Clair Brothers built 10 of the consoles, the first live sound console to incorporate parametric equalisation.
Elvis Presley
Working for Clair Brothers, Jackson toured with Elvis Presley, mixing monitors while independent engineer Bill Porter mixed front of house (FOH) for the audience. Clair Brothers supplied all the audio gear; Jackson designed a powerful stage monitor system for Presley's show. To make more room for audience seating, he also used a sound reinforcement system that was not mounted on scaffolding but hung with steel chain above the audience from overhead beams, using chain hoists rigged upside down to raise the loudspeakers from the floor—a now-common method used by licensed riggers. Jackson has said that he made a number of concert recordings during this period, all unreleased.
The earliest of these Clair Brothers-supported dates did not have a dedicated monitor engineer—monitors were mixed from FOH by Porter, assisted by Jackson. Jackson noticed that Presley's performance was very much dependent on how easily he was able to hear himself from the monitor speakers. Jackson said, "some nights would work well and others would be a total train wreck." He advocated for a separate monitor mixing position at the side of the stage and after overcoming resistance to the concept was given this dedicated position. Asked whether he thus invented the role of concert monitor engineer, Jackson replied, "no, not really. It was more that its time had just come."
Jackson had to deal with Presley's absence from rehearsals at Graceland and concert soundchecks. The singer would usually show up at the concert venue at the last minute, walk out on stage and start to sing, having never heard the sound system. Presley sometimes turned to the side of the stage to ask Jackson to make changes, and a few times he stopped the show to have Jackson come out and stand center stage and listen carefully to the monitors while Presley sang to 20,000 people. One night in Fort Worth, Texas, Presley led the audience in singing "Happy Birthday to You" in honour of the engineer's birthday—an "amazing, and very embarrassing" occasion for Jackson. Jackson can be seen at his side-stage mix position in Presley's 1977 "CBS Special" TV show. At Presley's final performance on 26 June 1977, he said "I would like to thank my sound engineer: Bruce Jackson from Australia."
Touring with Presley was like no other assignment. Presley and his entourage travelled in four or five jets to the next tour stop: one for Elvis and his closest colleagues, one for the band, one for Colonel Tom Parker (Presley's manager), one for concessions and crew, and a Learjet used by RCA Records management to fly ahead of everyone else. For two weeks during June and July 1973, Elvis flew on an all-black DC-9 airliner with a Playboy logo on the tail; the aircraft was named Big Bunny. Jackson said he and the other Elvis-chosen passengers were served food and drinks by elite Playboy Bunnies called "Jet Bunnies".
Parker managed the concert tours for Presley, and exerted a strong influence. Jackson quit his job while on tour after he was "pushed too far" by Parker, according to Roy Clair. Presley apologised to Jackson, and he rejoined the tour as an independent engineer, answering only to Presley. Jackson mixed hundreds of concerts for the singer, who called him "Bruce the Goose"—a working life filled with strange hours, hard physical labour and constant travelling. In August 1977 he was in Portland, Maine setting up at the next Presley engagement when he heard he had died.
Independent engineer
Bruce Springsteen
As an independent engineer, Jackson signed a contract to work directly for Bruce Springsteen, on concert tours supported by Clair Brothers. Jackson mixed Springsteen on four major tours from 1978 to 1988, and is credited as engineer on the album Live/1975–85. The tours include Darkness, The River, Born in the U.S.A. and Tunnel of Love Express. Prior to each tour, Springsteen and the E Street Band practised at Clair Brothers in Lititz to check out new sound system components and lighting effects, and to give crew members a chance to work out the technical details. Jackson mixed the rehearsals and concerts on the folding console he designed for Clair Brothers. Springsteen called him "BJ".
Right away, Jackson noticed that Springsteen was a very particular critic of his own concert sound. At every new venue, Springsteen would take "BJ" around to various seats in the concert venue, sitting in every section, even the last row of seats, and listen to the band play. He asked Jackson why the sound was not so good far away as it was up close, and if the audio crew could do anything about it. Jackson said, "we can do a lot about it", and worked with Clair Brothers to design a ring of delay loudspeakers positioned closer to the farthest seats to augment the high frequencies lost over distance by sound waves travelling through air. This made the hi-hat sound more "crisp and clean", with higher quality sound in the back row than previously experienced in such large venues. Throughout Jackson's years with him, Springsteen maintained his interest in delivering high quality sound to every seat, and the solutions grew in size and complexity until by 1984 there were eight delay towers set up for the largest venues.