Another Brick In The Wall: Pink Floyd’s Wall Consultant
Keaton Patti is a rock and roll writer currently interviewing lesser-known figures in music history for a yet unnamed and uncreated magazine. This article is a part of that project. If you’d like to be interviewed for the project, that’s nice.
“Those boys barely knew the difference between a retaining wall and consumption wall. They had never even fathomed a crinkle crankle wall or a good old-fashioned riprap! I was like, ‘How you gonna write an album about a wall if you don’t know a riprap!’ Hahaha. But they were good boys.”
Chuck Bronson addresses me in the home he built with his bare hands out of home ingredients. The “boys” he’s talking about are Pink Floyd, the most successful rock band to write an album about a wall, Chuck’s area of expertise. When Roger Waters, the band’s main songwriter, decided he wanted to write an album called The Wall, his record company flew Chuck in from Nebraska to speak with the band. The rest, as the people I refer to as “the rest,” say, is history.
“I met the boys in their studio,” Chuck says. He’s nearly 90-years-old, or 85,493-walls-old as he says for some reason, but still talkative and spry. He stays active volunteering at the local middle school as a crossing guard and claims no children have died on his watch that didn’t deserve it. “They were all very nice. Told me the concept of the album and everything, and then I gave them a crash course on the history of walls.”
“How long did that take?” I ask. I figure walls have been around for 70 years tops, and doing a year a minute would be 70 minutes, so I’m guessing 75 minutes, giving 5 minutes for breathing and coughing.
Chuck consults a journal he has on the coffee table in front of him. He’s a constant note taker and has been his whole life. He knows exactly what he was doing when JFK was shot: looking at a wall. “Let me see…yes! It took 4 months and 7 days.”
“So roughly 75 minutes?”
“No.”
“Interesting. How did the band feel about the whole thing?” Chuck has a pet iguana in a tank to the side of us. It doesn’t have a name. Chuck says names are for humans and walls. Every wall in his home has a name. The room we’re in has Marshall, Winthrop, Diane, and Sting, all of which I think an iguana would love to have as a name.
“A month or so in they began to question why they needed to know as much as I was teaching them. Apparently they had an album called Dork Sign on the Moon or something — ”
“Dork Sign of the Moon,” I correct him.
“Yeah, and they did that record without learning about the Moon, and figured they didn’t need to know about what sort of wall Julius Caesar liked most to stand against in order to write the new album. So naive!”
“How’d you get them to keep learning?” I hated learning in school too, but I had great teachers that kept me interested by threatening my life. “It’s MATH or DEATH,” said Mr. Hendricks, who once held a sharpened protractor to my throat in order to help me finish a test. He didn’t even teach math, that’s how devoted he was to helping me.
Chuck sips his Harvey Wallbanger (he only eats and drinks things with “wall” in their name). “It wasn’t me. It was the walls. Walls are so fascinating. It just took the boys some time to realize that. Soon they were asking me all sorts of questions and feeling every wall in the studio and pretending they were walls.”
“Sounds like they were on drugs.”
“Drugs are the walls of the mind, ya know?” Chuck winks at me and takes a bite of a Walleye fish filet, one of the few things I assume he can eat. “After my final lesson, the boys thanked me and wrote the album as easy as pie! Nothing easier than pie, is there?”
“Probably cake.”
“Nope, cake is hard.”
“Uh, then probably pudding.”
“Pudding’s easy, but still harder than pie.”
“Well, then Jell-O.”
“Nah, pie is easier.”
“Pie is not easier than Jell-O. You just add water and, like, shove it in a cold room.”
“Well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”
“Pies have like a lot of ingredients and you gotta bake them. That’s hard. Thinking back, that’s definitely harder than pudding too.”
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinions.”
“What sort of pie are you making that’s easier than adding water?”
“Plenty of pies.”
“Admit you don’t know what pies are!”
“…never!”
“Admit it or I’ll throw your stupid iguana against one of these walls!”
“No!”
“I’ll throw it against Sting! I will!”
“Not Sting! He’s load-bearing!”
The rest of the evening is a blur. All I remember is Pink Floyd may or may not have thanked Chuck with a coupon for half-off The Wall on vinyl, but the coupon got wet in the mail so Chuck never bought the album and has never heard a song off of it. I may or may not have slammed a nameless iguana against a named wall. An old wall expert may or may not have chased me out of his house and placed a “wall curse” on me that will cause every wall I see to slowly get closer to me until they smash me like that garbage compactor from that one Star Wars movie (the one with the force).
I do remember this: Chuck Bronson is partly responsible for one of the greatest rock albums of all time and he doesn’t even know what the fuck a pie is.
