Last week, Jon Bauman paused in the middle of a Zoom call with Rolling Stone, put on his glasses and glanced up at a TV screen in his home. “You and I are right now in the middle of the vote on the Big Ugly Bill,” he said as the Senate cast its ballots for or against Donald Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” “This is the greatest loss of healthcare in the history of the country. No one’s ever tried to do anything like this before. It’s a horrible idea, and it’s all in service of giving the wealthiest Americans a tax cut they don’t need. That’s not a good enough reason. Sorry.”
If Bauman’s name doesn’t immediately ring any bells, his alter ego should. From 1970 until a farewell tour earlier this year, he was known to several generations as “Bowzer,” the cocky greaser with the flexed bicep, comically agape mouth, and heart-of-hoodlum-gold pose that made him the most iconic member of Sha Na Na, the long-running Fifties tribute band. Boomers remember Sha Na Na as the first retro oldies band, one that even appeared at Woodstock; Gen X knows Bowzer for his starring role on Sha Na Na’s syndicated TV show, which lasted into the early Eighties.
But these days, Bauman has his fist raised for a different reason. When he wasn’t on tour hosting an oldies revue, he’s spent the last two decades advocating for health-care issues. That phase of his life kicked in even harder in 2017, when he joined the Social Security Works Political Action Committee (PAC), an advocacy group that endorses and donates to candidates supportive of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, some of which are now imperiled by last week’s vote. “I really am part of the resistance,” Bauman, 77 and a Medicare and Social Security recipient himself, says. “Besides being Bowser, I’m pretty much a public policy wonk. And for better or worse, I do understand how this stuff works, and I do understand who you elect to public office makes all the difference in the world and how these things play themselves out.”
And he’s not shy about it. As he wrote in one of his many vitriolic recent X posts, “Some Trumpers want to know what we learned from the last election. We learned you don’t give a f*ck about anything but beating us. You don’t give a f*ck about your Social Security. You don’t give a f*ck about your Medicare. You don’t give a f*ck about your drug prices.” (When another questioned his expertise and relevance, he replied, “Eat shit. Blocked.”)
Bauman’s past is never that far back in the rearview mirror. In 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono headlined a benefit concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden to help a a home for disabled children and adults. In this year’s One to One: John & Yoko doc, about the show and their lives in New York during that period, we see the concert’s climactic moment: a sing-along of “Give Peace a Chance,” with … Sha Na Na? “I don’t know who asked us to do it, but we always had a great show,” Bauman says. “So I’m not surprised that people wanted us to do stuff. But I was a little surprised when we were singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’ and John turns as he’s playing and looks at me and goes, ‘Hey, come over here,’ and invited me to the mic.”
That clip was a reminder of how big Sha Na Na were, for a time, part of a retro nostalgia movement that also included American Graffiti, Happy Days, and the original Grease stage show. At least three times in 1973, one of Sha Na Na’s opening acts was a relative newcomer named Bruce Springsteen. “People on our crew were saying, ‘You gotta check out this local guy, he’s really good,’” Bauman says. “The stagehands said it. The woman putting the soft drinks in the cooler in the dressing room said it. So I stick my big nose out and see this guy with a saxophone player, and I listen to the first song and go, ‘Oh, that’s pretty good.’ You listen to the second song, ‘That’s really good.’ By the fifth song, you’re going, ‘ I hope we can follow this guy.’”
Bauman left Sha Na Na in the Eighties, moving on to a career that came to include acting roles (one episode of Miami Vice), voiceover work (My Little Pony), a brief VJ stint (on VH1), and years of touring as part of his Bowzer-fronted oldies show. He became a proponent of the Truth in Music initiative, a series of bills passed in more than 30 states that helped shut down unauthorized versions of classic R&B and doo-wop groups of the Fifties and Sixties. “The names weren’t properly protected, and [the original members] were just getting savaged by unscrupulous people who were pumping out dozens of Coasters and dozens of Drifters and dozens of Platters,” he says. “In the meantime, the audience is also being deceived, because they think they’re going to see something that has some connection to the actual group, and they’re actually just seeing a tribute show.” The bills have allowed state attorneys general to contact a venue about a pending “imposter” show, resulting in many being canceled.
The turning point in Bauman’s unexpected pivot to health-care advocate came with the 2000 presidential election, where George W. Bush prevailed over Al Gore. “It should never have gone to the United States Supreme Court,” he says. “I just said to myself, ‘Okay, I’m never sitting another one of these things out. I’m going to become involved in this.’” Bauman campaigned for John Kerry in 2004, and partook in rallies in support of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. On social media he regularly went after waffling politicians like Maine senator Susan Collins, whom he dubbed “Coward Collins.”
In the process, Brauman educated both himself and his assistance-inclined fan base about programs that Republicans have, to his disgust, called “entitlements.” “I understood that this was where my best usefulness was, and made myself an expert on senior issues, which you have to be if you’re going to do this kind of work,” he says. “I start every speech that I give with, ‘I love the music of the Fifties and early Sixties. But that does not mean I actually want to return to the Fifties or the early Sixties.’ I did not want to return to a time before Medicare was passed in 1965 when over 35 percent of American seniors had incomes below the poverty line.”
After Bauman resurrected the Bowzer character in 1987, his touring schedule brought him several times to what was called the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City in the early 2000s. Back then, Bauman says he barely knew anything about the person whose name was on the building. “It was just some guy who owned a bunch of casinos,” he says. “I did make the remark at the time, when I played there three years in a row or something, ‘If this is a Taj Mahal, I’m a big red steam shovel.’ The lamps were falling down. You could barely sleep in the bed. This was no kind of Taj Mahal. It was a dump.”
But Bauman was destined to reacquaint himself with Trump, especially once he won the presidency the first time in 2016. “I was known to say I have no interest in him whatsoever,” Bauman says. “That [Atlantic City work] was just a booking. Now I have interest in him because I think he’s a really awful person doing a really awful job. This is a guy who said, ‘I will not cut Medicaid,’ and they’re busy throwing at least 12 million people off it, and 17 million people altogether off of their health insurance. So, I mean, this guy just seems to be an inveterate liar.”
Like many, Bauman says he struggles to understand Republican support for the bill that was signed into law last week. “Donald Trump’s Big Ugly Bill makes the largest Medicaid cut in history, leaves kids and seniors to go hungry and blows up the national debt to give tax breaks to billionaires,” he says. “Why would anyone vote for that? I don’t know. I can’t answer that. Well, I can answer that. It’s because their donors want the tax cut, and they gotta figure out how to pay for it. It’s all money driven. It’s disgusting.”
So far this year, Bauman participated in almost a dozen events in swing districts with rural hospitals that could face closures once Medicaid cuts kick in. “This Big Ugly Bill is going to have terrible consequences for rural hospitals and nursing homes,” he says. “If this bill passes, and Medicaid is attacked in the way they’re proposing and those hospitals close, don’t think you’re escaping because you go to another hospital. Your hospital is going to get overrun by patients from the hospitals that close. Everybody’s going to be out on the street when that nursing home closes. This is something that affects everybody.”
Now that Trump has signed the bill into law, Bauman is putting his hope in what the calls “our consolation prize,” a backlash that would benefit Democrats in next year’s midterms. He’s also intrigued by Elon Musk’s proposal to start a third political party. “I have always felt that this is a coalition of the greediest among us and the most bigoted among us,” he says. “So anything that fractures that coalition is good.” And Bauman isn’t happy with the email the Trump-led Social Security Administration sent out, claiming the bill “reaffirms President Trump’s promise to protect Social Security”: “Someone like me is used to the hyperbolic marketing bullshit that’s at the heart of his regime. That’s exactly what this new Social Security propaganda actually is.”
Early this year, Bauman wrapped up his long-running “Rock ‘n’ Doo Wop Party,” a tour that featured him and other period legends like Chubby Checker and Gary “U.S” Bonds. The wear and tear of age had something to do with Bauman’s retirement from the road, although he gives props to those even older veterans still out there: “If I had the repertoire of a Paul Simon, I would probably still be doing it too.”
Bauman largely kept his political raps out of the show but admits that in the final performances in January, he couldn’t help himself. “I started talking much more about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and senior issues, because my audience is older, and these things apply to them in a very direct and not particularly partisan way,” he says. “A few maybe thought that the Bowzer character was a real guy stalking the streets of Brooklyn. I seem to get more positive feedback than not, and frankly, I don’t care. The country is in a very dangerous spot where we’re facing an attempt at an authoritarian takeover in every way, shape, matter, or form. And if I’ve lost some old fans over it, so be it. I would like to convince them that our country is worth saving.”