Credit: Far Out / Andrés Ibarra
Roger Waters was very particular about every single instrument that ended up on one of his records.
Even though Pink Floyd was supposed to be a democracy, Waters was often the one calling the shots whenever he came up with the concept, and he wasn’t above firing someone if it meant that they weren’t pulling their weight when they made their masterpieces. But while his choice of firing Richard Wright was uncalled for during sessions for The Wall, he could afford to call the shots a little more when he finally reached his solo career.
Then again, it was going to be a while before everyone truly understood what he was going for in his solo career. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking wasn’t exactly one of the most pop-friendly albums of all time, and while he still had great concepts across every one of his records, he felt that he didn’t have the right idea for what he wanted to do until he finally hit upon Amused to Death in the 1990s.
This was the record that could stand alongside some of the best albums Floyd ever made, and while Waters was the puppetmaster behind every single tune, he wasn’t above getting someone else in to play on the tunes. The idea of getting Don Henley to sing on the record was definitely inspired, considering how different Floyd and Eagles were back in the day, but Waters also wasn’t afraid to bring in some new blood as well.
The 1990s were a fertile time for bands that had more of an eclectic style behind them, but even by the standards that Waters set for himself, Flea was a bit of a weird choice. Red Hot Chili Peppers were some of the biggest names in funk rock when they started, but if you look back at the kind of records that Flea had grown up on, he fit right in whenever it came to going outside of this genre.
He liked learning lines from people like Larry Graham and Bootsy Collins, but there was also a healthy amount of jazz in his vocabulary as well. He knew how to play over those complex changes that Waters had, but even after turning in time on the song ‘It’s A Miracle’, Waters felt that what the bassist was doing didn’t quite fit with the kind of tone he wanted to set for the album’s finale.
The song required something a bit more subtle, so Waters decided to completely scrub Flea from the final version of the song, saying, “We recorded ‘It’s a Miracle’ three times and the second time we recorded it, we did a very up tempo version of it and Flea came in and played bass. And wonderfully he played too. He was great. I loved it. But when we put the record together, this very uptempo version of ‘It’s a Miracle’ didn’t fit within the dynamic context of the rest of the record. So the very last piece of recording we did was to re-record ‘It’s a Miracle’ and just Pat [Leonard] and I sat down one afternoon at the piano and re-did it.”
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Anyone else would have been furious to see someone like Flea on the sidelines, but in this one instance, it actually seemed to be the right call. No one would have wanted everything sounding peppy and happy when talking about doing away with the numbed-out state of humankind, and while Waters seems to be trying on his best Tom Waits impression, he does serve the song a lot better than any kind of uptempo version.
That would have ruined the vibe of what the original tune was going for, and even if Waters had used Flea, there’s a good chance we would have heard a more muted version of what the bassist was used to. Flea could play anything that he wanted on most songs with the Chili Peppers, but this would have been an exercise in subtlety.
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