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Rocker JOAN JETT gives Tinker star treatment
from: Tinker AFB
True to her trademark song, musician JOAN JETT loves rock and roll. And she admits to having a soft spot for America's military, too.
Jett spent hours June 6 showing Tinker Air Force Base personnel her commitment to the troops runs far deeper than a 20-minute photo op and spans decades and generations.
Tech. Sgt. Richard Klinski, a power production technician with the 31st Combat Communications Squadron, was just 13 when he attended his first concert in Seattle, Wash.
"I think it was JOAN JETT's first tour," Klinski recalled. "She opened for Foreigner, Blue Oyster Cult and Lover Boy."
He bought a concert shirt as a souvenir, but couldn't get backstage passes to get his prize autographed. Still, for the next 22 years, wherever Klinski moved, he took the shirt with him. Last week, he finally got an autograph to complete his souvenir.
Jett was surprised, he said, when he handed her an original shirt from that concert to be autographed.
"She said she'd never seen something like that," he said. "It's too bad the shirt doesn't fit me anymore."
Petty Officer 2nd Class Justin Klumpe, a Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron THREE aircraft mechanic, brought his 4-year-old daughter, Jazmine, to meet Jett.
"It was good," Klumpe said. "My daughter likes to listen to her songs."
Klumpe said he found Jett to be "very friendly."
"I'm glad she could come out and see people in the armed forces and show some support," he continued. "Right now, there are so many mixed feelings about the armed forces, about what we're doing in the world … and it's nice to see that there's another person out there that supports us."
In fact, the performer's support of the military in terms of longevity and a willingness to visit bases others forego may be rivaled only by someone like the legendary Bob Hope.
"We'll go places where nobody else wants to go or where others feel unsafe or whatever," Jett said. "We're not into the necessarily cushy bases with all the nice amenities like this one. We try to spend as much time as we can just hanging out, talking, doing autographs, photos. Discussing America, family life, just the connection we all have.
"I like to perform for the troops because they're a wonderful rock and roll audience and they're just people like all of us [who] happen to have the dangerous job protecting our [butts] … They protect our country and our freedom, and I just think that's very admirable."
Jett thrives in the one-on-one interaction of meeting military members, learning their names, hearing their stories and seeing first-hand the missions of various units. The satisfaction she gleans is a fair trade for the time she spends bringing a bit of the States to those deployed.
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"If you're overseas and in some place like Afghanistan, they're just happy to discuss anything that's American, whether it's their family or just food, rock and roll, music," she said. "It really varies with the person. A lot of these people I've seen through the years. I saw them when they were stationed in Guam 20 years ago and now they're a captain or a major or general some place. It's just interesting to relate to people."
Jett's road manager, KENNY LAGUNA, said the star has been going out of her way to meet and greet the military since the early 1980s.
"A lot of those soldiers we met turned into high-ranking officers and as the years went on, we got access to go wherever we went around the world," Laguna said. "We would contact somebody in the military and say, ‘Look, we're here' … and we always just managed to walk on the bases with commanders or public affairs people."
Such informal access to military installations dried up in the harsher world political climate of the 1990s and that's when Jett began working with United Service Organizations - a relationship that sent her into places most folks try to avoid.
"We've been blessed and honored by being the first ones into a lot of the war zones," he said. "We've been into some very far forward locations in the last few wars."
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