In 1980 and in the handful of years that followed it, the ultimate form of school rebellion was to sing the chorus of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” at the top of your lungs as an entire class choir during a field trip bus ride. At that age we still had no idea what dark sarcasm was, but we mumbled through that part of the lyric to make sure we could yell “HEY! TEACHER! LEAVE THOSE KIDS ALONE!”
I was only familiar with Pink Floyd as a radio act for the several years following. In the anemic Twin Cities radio market, this meant some of the classic songs from Dark Side of the Moon, which I thought were unnecessarily weird at the time, and a handful of singles from The Wall: Comfortably Numb, Run Like Hell, and occasionally Hey You, along with the aforementioned Another Brick in the Wall — usually only part 2 was played, but if you were lucky, you could occasionally catch the version that included Part 1. I was never that impressed with Roger Waters’ voice — he always sounded like he was trying too hard to emote. Pink Floyd purists originating back in the seventies would consider it heresy for me to say I didn’t really become a fan of the band until 1987’s David Gilmour led “A Momentary Lapse of Reason” since Roger Waters was out of the band by then, but I’ll still stand by that as a strong album of the time. And ultimately, it made me curious enough about the band to go back and revisit The Wall in its entirety.
The student union at St. Cloud State University, known to the populace as Atwood Commons or Atwood Center or, most commonly just plain Atwood, had a smallish movie theater tucked in the back of it, large enough to hold maybe one or two hundred people. It wasn’t big enough to show first or even second run movies — we had a theater a few blocks away from campus that did that for only a buck fifty (earning the moniker “the buck fifty place”) but campus did dig out some older hits or lesser-known cult films to show on the weekends. One Friday night in the winter of 1988, the posters went up declaring The Little Theater would be showing “Pink Floyd’s The Wall,” on…wait for it…Laser Disc. It was the eighties, and this was still a big deal.
Undoubtably this was coming on wave of popularity following the recent success of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, but my roommate Steve and I didn’t care. Neither of us had seen the movie but had heard all the stories: The dude who shaved off his nipples, the Nazi symbolism, and, of course, the urban legend of how the movie had been purposefully made so the only way you could truly understand what was going on was to watch it while you were high. I think that came legend came more from the frequency of Pink Floyd’s music being used as the soundtrack for so many of the laser light shows held in planetariums around the nation back then. Steve and I didn’t bother testing the theory, and walked across the snowy campus only under the influence of a shared Domino’s pizza.
I made the mistake of buying into the rumors and hype before seeing it and spent the movie thinking way too hard, convinced that each scene contained multiple layers of symbolism meant for me to unravel. Ultimately the story was little more than a non-narrative telling of a little boy who never got over losing his father in World War II, grew up to be a rock star, then reached a popularity that led him into a brief flirtation with military fascism before he went completely crazy. This is the kind of story that seems pretty deep when you’re twenty years old. That winter it became a favorite pastime of ours to turn off the dorm room lights, plug in the Christmas lights we had hung up around our lofts, put my A Momentary Lapse of Reason CD on Steve’s massive stereo, turn it up loud enough for the entire floor to hear or feel, and then just sink into our dorm room furniture and tune out. It was almost like accidental mediation.
I started keeping an eye out for The Wall during my music store visits, but hesitated to buy it each time I found a copy. After all, I was a college kid. These were the days when I could carry a $50 dollar balance in my checking account and feel totally secure with it. And The Wall was a double album, which meant twice the price. I only finally cracked when I found it in a version I had no idea even existed, and probably didn’t exist that far beyond a band like Pink Floyd offering a special cash grab mini-boxed set release: A CD set with gold-leaf plating on the discs. According to the box, which of course would have been completely truthful, the gold on the discs was only going to increase the sound fidelity, revealing unheard nuances of the music.
Total nonsense, but it looked cool. The case secured the discs with some hard plastic lever in the center and would only release the disc if the tray was raised a certain number of degrees (such was the importance of protecting the precious metals). It was soon after this that Floyd put out a double live album, “The Delicate Sound of Thunder” featuring several songs from their Momentary Lapse of Reason tour and classics from The Wall, as well as older standards. Because of the louder recording, that started getting more airplay from me than the original “Wall” discs did.
I felt proud of myself in a way, for connecting with an album that was so widely viewed as a classic instead of the usual hair metal of the day; it made me feel like I had an extra layer of depth. I could appreciate the music and began to understand the story better, but I didn’t really take ownership of the album until January of 1991.
A month earlier, while visiting my grandmother’s house at Christmas, I heard bits of a conversation regarding how my cousin Kelly was being deployed to Iraq. Kelly was in the army, and eligible for activation if the need ever arose. The closing days of 1990 and the opening days of 1991 saw the onset of Operation Desert Shield. Soon after that came Desert Storm.
The world had been waiting on the brink of war for months, so even though it felt like an inevitability when it happened, it was still something of a shock. This was war, after all. Real, honest to God war. America hadn’t been engaged in a full-on war of this scale since the Vietnam era. Sure, there had been military incursions around the world, but this was bigger than any of those. And in the dawning days of the twenty-four hour news cycle, this was going to be the first war of our time that would be televised.
I had been at work in my afternoon job at a Boys and Girls club. Our site closed down at 6:00 PM, but we usually only had to stay as long as the last kid needed to be picked up. I drove home, parked my crap-colored 1983 Dodge Colt in my rented parking space, walked up three flights of stairs, opened the apartment door and was greeted by the sound of explosions and the sight of green tracer fire lighting up our living room from CNN’s live broadcast out of Iraq. My roommate Greg caught himself before throwing the Nerf basketball at the hoop we had mounted on the door and looked over his shoulder at our other roommate Chris, who looked back and me and said with a stone-cold sober face: “It started.”
Back then, we had no idea that the active combat part of the war, in earnest, would be over in a matter of months, with only the years of messy clean-up to follow and the Shock and Awe sequel to follow in the wake of 9/11. That night there was nothing to latch on to, no guidance to be provided as to predicting what could happen what impact it would have on our country or the world in general, or how long it would last. All we knew was that things were different now. The three of us stayed there in the living room, quietly watching for the most part with exclamations of surprise or bits of commentary at some of the facts being revealed. After a half hour or so, I realized I only had a quarter tank of gas in the car, and quickly got up to drive down to the convenience store a few blocks away to fill up, just in case something was going to happen with the worldwide oil reserves and gas would cost ten dollars a gallon the following morning, money that I didn’t have because I was a college kid and just as broke as you would imagine. I got home in time to discover that the knock-off Hamburger helper Greg had made for dinner hadn’t turned out to the level of quality he expected — even now I can’t help myself but to laugh when I think of the number of times he said “Hamburger Italiano” that night while mocking it — and our fourth roommate Dan had gotten home from his job. The four of us nervously spent the evening watching TV together, mostly CNN since that was the only serious 24-hour news channel in the game back then, occasionally flipping over to network broadcasts to see what the anchors and reporters we were more familiar with had to say on the matter. Real life intruded, and one by one we peeled away and back to our respective bedrooms to take care of whatever homework assignments we had to deal with, periodically taking breaks throughout the evening to check in on the TV on that evening, even when nobody was in front of it.
And even though I never said anything, I kept thinking, “She’s over there somewhere, in the middle of all that.”
Kelly was, and still is — spoiler alert, she survived the war — two years younger than me, and was also in college at the same time. Her degree was pharmacology, which led to the joke of how it wasn’t enough that she was in college to get drunk but to understand what was happening to her body when she did. She spent most of her deployment a fair distance from the fighting in a M*A*S*H unit, but not always so far that she completely avoided ever hearing sirens warn her to put on her gas mask on the off chance a SCUD missile might find its way to her hospital.
I don’t know if there’s something wrong, or possibly right, with my brain, but I have a deep archive of songs in stored memory that I can have the most random thing trigger an ear worm that will be stuck in my head for days. This predilection is one of the reasons why I’ve built an inescapable and lifelong relationship between Desert Storm and “The Wall.” Even when I wasn’t parked in front of the television on that first night and was back in my bedroom trying to focus on whatever remnants of homework I had to deal with before starting my student teaching experience two months later, it was impossible for me to stop hearing the barely minute-long interlude of the half song from the second disc, “Bring the Boys Back Home.” I hadn’t picked that song to play through my head on purpose, but there was no doubt about where it had come from.
I felt guilty and helpless in the first weeks of the war, knowing Kelly’s whole world was what was going on there. I tracked down her address through the aunt, uncle, and grandparent grapevine (this was all before Facebook and email and cellphones, remember) and started writing her letters regularly, thinking if the one thing I could do was send her occasional bits of distraction from home, I was going to do it up right. I’d tell her about whatever mundane things were going on in college life, what it was like to live through the last stupid weeks of winter in comparison to the desert, what music I was listening to, which sketches were the best ones of Saturday Night Live that week, and any stories that came up of funny things that happened with the kids at the boys and girls club. She replied when she could, telling me about the people she had met, the experiences of desert life in the military, and relieved me quite a bit as I came to understand that being in Saudi Arabia didn’t necessarily mean that chemical weapons and bullets were constantly flying at her head.
Combat ended and she made it home safely, after staying longer than it seemed necessary. She wasn’t the last of my cousins to experience war, but since she was the first she was the template for me.
To this day, whenever I hear something on the news about military engagements or human atrocities taking place around the world, and if I sit in front of the television for more than ten minutes watching the coverage, my mind begins shuffling through the songs on that album.
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