I was at the nearby Clark Air Base a bit later….in the mid-80s. The live music in those off-base bars was fantastic. You’d walk in as a new guy, look around and think “C’mon. These are little brown people dressed up like Roy Rogers.” And then, they’d start up, and if you closed your eyes, you’d think that Willie Nelson or George Strait was up on the stage. The same could be had in almost any other genre.

Regarding those beers…..
I was flying the C130 at the time and we had a monthly mission to Jakarta, primarily in support of the US Embassy there. The Indonesians were sticklers for knowing exactly what names were going to be on the crew, so the crew had to be diplomatically cleared a month prior to the flight. As I recall, we’d fly down on a Saturday and return on Sunday. Anyway, on about the Monday or Tuesday prior to the trip, the Aircraft Commander (“pilot” in civilian terms, and usually the highest ranking guy on the plane) would get a call from somebody from the Embassy with the request to buy a pallet of San Miguel beer. Yeah, by the bottle, in an American’s eyes, it was pretty cheap, but explaining to your wife why you were buying a pallet of beer was a conversation that you had to explain to her. A significant part of the cost was the deposit you’d pay for the bottles. Indonesia is a primarily Muslim country and beer was hard to come by….it was placed as part of the Embassy’s Diplomatic Pouch. But the scheme worked month-after-month, without fail. The AC would go out and put $300 (or whatever it cost back then) of very cheap beer on his credit card, and on arrival in Jakarta, somebody from the Embassy would hand him $300 in cash along with a pallet of empty beer bottles.