BEST PORTABLE FRIDGE

When typhoons hit, we were restricted to our barracks, so we partied. I had my camera on a tripod, and in this shot I'm the guy in front who was so loaded that I damn near fell over backwards after setting off the camera's self timer. I was dealing with jugglin' camera and flash exposure setting numbers in my head, had only been on the Rock (Okinawa) about a week and had just bought my first professional grade 35 MM camera -- an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic. So I forgot to smile as the flash went off right in my eyes and I fell backwards. Oh well, it's still a good photo to see some of my old buddies in.

You can now imagine how fantastic it was for me when, after graduating from Photo Lab Tech School, I arrived on Okinawa and discovered that there were high quality component stereo systems well placed in every barracks and their owners were often cranking out rockin’ sounds from them. They were rockin’ on The Rock.

On The Rock, the variety of recorded music that was available for listening pleasure was outa’ site. Some of us GIs had brought as many of our record albums as we could to The Rock, and the largest retail store on my U.S. Army base over there, the Main PX, not only sold record albums at the lowest prices that I had ever seen, there was an outstandingly large number and selection of them.

I had been collecting record albums since I was thirteen years old. I was one of the first kids in my high school to buy the first albums of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Cream, Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Country Joe and the Fish, Zappa, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, plus I had albums by The Animals, The Yardbirds, The Blues Project, Muddy Waters, West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and I could keep on truckin’ with puttin’ names this list. When I flew to Okinawa in June 1970, I took about twenty-five of those albums with me, in a psychedelic art covered record carrying case.

But (Hallelujah!) them army buddies of mine on The Rock turned me on to all kindsa’ new music.

My good friend Bart, from San Francisco, had all of Quicksilver Messenger Service’s album covers displayed on his barracks room wall, because that was his favorite band. I had never heard of them till he turned me onto to ‘um. Bart had grown up living two blocks from the world famous 1960s hippie haven known as Haight-Ashbury. When he was a teenager, hundreds of other teenagers were running away from their homes all over America to go to “The Haight” to “Turn On-Tune In-and-Drop Out” but all Bart had to do was walk up the street from his family’s home to get there. Them other kids were infamous for bumming spare change off of strangers in order to be able to buy themselves some food to survive on. Bart said he knew it was a good thing for him that whenever he got hungry all he had to do was walk home and ask his mother what was in the fridge that he could snack on or what was for supper.

I was in Bart’s two man barracks room one day when one of our barracks buddies walked into the room and said, “Hey man, I really dig this cat from England named Elton John, have any of you guys ever heard this album of his, ever heard of him before?”

Bart, his roommate, and I replied, “No.”

Then Bart told him, “No, man, we ain’t ever heard of him yet, but you can put that record on the turntable when this Pink Floyd one is done playing. We’re gonna’ finish listening to Careful With That Ax Eugene first. Crews never heard it before.” Musical adventures like that happened to us quite often on The Rock.

There are two other notable albums which I heard first, through friends of mine, on The Rock that are still amongst my favorites: First Step by The Faces, with Rod Stewart on vocals and Ron Wood on guitars, and one of the most finely crafted albums of that era–The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus by Spirit. Friends, buddies, and new acquaintances of mine over there often insisted that I sit down and listen to some record album that I had never had the pleasure of hearing before.

Some GIs had great selections of Rhythm and Blues albums to play for themselves and us buddies of theirs. They’d add to our musical mix the solid soul sounds of Diana Ross and the Supremes, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Areatha Franklin, Junior Walker and the All Stars, and the hardest workin’ man in show business—James Brown.

I love the fantastic 1960s-70s Top 40 songs that are still played on oldies radio stations today, but there are many other dynamite songs on those music artists’ albums that’re rarely ever heard by most people. On The Rock, and in army photo school, we were into what I have always been into, listening to whole record albums, not just the most popular songs on each album which were issued as 45 RPM singles and played over and over again on radio stations.

We GIs had some great Rock ‘n Roll and Rhythm ‘n Blues and Blues and a bit of Folk and some Jazz and a little Classical music listening times in our barracks on The Rock,

If you're betting if I'm going to be eating out, you lose. Behold the temp kitchen, courtesy of a rack from Storables and some creative arrangements. The fridge and nuke are not going into the new kitchen, but there's no reason I can't use them here. I also have a portable gas cooktop for heating water.