These Little Piggies Didn’t Stay Home

Carl Sandburg was wrong.

They tell me Roger Waters is wicked and I believe them.

The rock musician has made a career out of being cruel to large, inflatable pigs.

Well, OK. I guess if you want to split hairs, he’s actually made a career out of being a former member of this psychedlic English rock band named Pink Floyd.

You know the cats — “Comfortably Numb,” “Wish You Were Here,” “Another Brick in the Wall” and that one album that syncs with “The Wizard of Oz.” You don’t need no education on that.

But it’s Waters, not Sandburg’s beloved Chicago, that proves to be the hog butcher for the world when puffed-up, plastic porcine is concerned.

This man has been an oversized pork menace dating all the way back to the ’70s. Where you’ve found Waters’ tour bus, you’ve found him setting helium-swelled swine loose into the heavens for their own rendition of “The Great Gig in the Sky.”

That’s why it was no surprise when one of his herd of flying oinkers was cut from its tether and sent skyward in Southern California during Waters’ recent set at Coachella Music Festival in Indio.

I didn’t understand the fuss at first. I suspected some in the Coachella audience were seeing pink animals dancing across the blue above for many hours before Waters took the stage. But then I reconsidered — though neither was truly in the flesh, elephants aren’t easily confused with pigs.

Furthermore, given Waters’ rap sheet for sailing swine is longer than all nine parts of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” he has a long-standing record of crafting oinkers for an airborn purpose.

But the newsmaking Coachella porker, unlike some of its predecessors, wasn’t supposed to leave its pen. In order to retrieve it, Waters and festival organizers offered $10,000 and four lifetime passes to the show for its return.

Three days after the festival closed, the bad news arrived: This little piggy bought the farm.

A pair of SoCal couples were the ones to carve up $10K. The large inflatable swine’s final resting place was torn in pieces at a nearby country club.

But if you’ve studied your Floyd properly, you’d know that pigs could fly. This was no oddity. Many oversized, plastic animals were hurt during the making of Waters’ concerts.

Maybe the first time he uncorked a porker into the heavens dates back to his days in Pig Floyd. Uh, I mean Pink Floyd.

During the shoot for the cover of 1977 album Animals — which depicts a pig flying between towers at the Battersea Power Station near London — the band hired a marksman to aim at Algie, the original piggy, if it escaped. But the oinker took too long to inflate on the first day of the shoot, so everyone came back the next day.

Everyone, that is, except for the marksman, who was only paid for one day of work.

So, the next day, sans sharpshooter, the band put the tethered piggy into the sky. Algie freed the moorings, took flight and baffled aircraft attempting to land at Heathrow Airport. After many hours in flight, the hog landed in Kent, around 60 miles away.

Fttingly, it fell on a farmer’s property.

There are many other reported instances of Waters’ pigs breaking free. After one left the Hollywood Bowl and drifted toward downtown Los Angeles in 2006, Waters was threatened with arrest.

Even after the Coachella incident, the former Pink Floyd member continues to deliberately dedicate pigs to an atmospheric demise. He loosed fresh hogs on the Houston and Dallas skylines last weekend.

Crafting oversized plastic swine to let loose into the air at a concert is so deliciously rebellious and intelligent. The symbolic imagery isn’t very subtle, but the result reminds me of the Project Mayhem concept from “Fight Club,” where the violent revolutionaries create chaos to screw with the system.

That’s what these pigs do. Disrupting air traffic at Heathrow? Infuriating LAPD cops? I’m being nonchalant about this, but, you know, sometimes futzing with “the order of things” is good. And if we can’t rely on rock ’n’ rollers to go out of their way and make a serious commitment to pork-related mayhem, who can we trust?

So I raise my goblet of rock to Mr. Waters and I say job well done, sir. Cheers, mate. Have a cigar.

Way to show up Carl Sandburg, you magnificient helium-swelled hog butcher for the world.