A Pig's Tale: Roger Waters Traces the History of Rock's Most Famous Prop

So you had a new pig at each of these places.
Yeah. We release them. Any outdoor gig we snap the rope and up it disappears into the sun. A couple of places people will get uppity about it — in L.A. l think they've threatened to put me in prison if I did it again. I'm not prepared to go to prison for the pig's sake! You know, I said, "All right, put it on a very long piece of string then and make it look like its floating away" but then bring it down to the ground again so I wont have to go to prison. We don't have any kind of valves on it — as the pressure builds up inside it, it gets higher and they'll always burst and come back to earth, and usually they're just kind of a few bits of plastic rag when they land.

So what happened at Coachella, when the pig escaped, the festival's promoters offered a $10,000 reward for its return and a chunk of it showed up on somebody's driveway?
I had this idea in Coachella, and I ran it past the promoter and the local community, which was to drop confetti from an airplane onto the crowd — confetti that had the word Obama written on it, and with a box with a checkmark in it. You know, just to show my support for Barack Obama, not just in this campaign for the Democratic nomination, but also for November. Because this man could prove to be something of a savior for this great nation. Anyway, they said, "Absolutely not, you can not drop confetti. You can't. You would make a mess. Forget it!" So we did it, we had planned to drop a ton of confetti — I think he was a bit of a maverick, this pilot. He dropped about 70 or 80 pounds of confetti, which of course missed the site and ended up in people's swimming pools and they ended up complaining, filters and motors were clogged! And I apologized profusely because they need keep a good relationship with the local community because it's a great festival and it would be a shame if it got screwed up. So they sent out like 100 teams to clear up people's pools. I think that to some extent [the reward] was a PR thing, they said, "We'll give you $10,000 if you find the pig." I think it was a diversionary tactic, but it actually was great because these two separate people found two separate bits of pig, one draped over a bush and one was like in their dust bins, and their children said, "Have you seen any plastic around with some graffiti on it?" and they said "Yeah, we put it in the trash!" And they said, "Get it out 'cause it's worth 10 grand!" And the story that I had heard was that one of the women who found this stuff was actually wearing a Wish You Were Here T-shirt, which is quite synchronistic.

What did this pig look like?
It was particularly well-painted, this pig. The guy who painted it is a very, very good graffiti artist and the image of Uncle Sam was with two meat cleavers in his hand with the words, "Don't be left to the slaughtered" written underneath, which was quite incredible, really, in a good way. So the pig flies on at least until St. Petersburg, which is the last show we're doing on June 6th, so we'll have an extra big one. But obviously I won't write anything too revolutionary on that one or else you might get a poisoned umbrella up the bum, which is what happens to you in Russia.

How high does the pig fly until it explodes?
Well it depends entirely on the prevailing meteorological conditions. In Mumbai, for instance, it went straight up until it was a dot — it was so small you couldn't see it anymore. In Coachella it seemed to go up about seven, eight, nine thousand feet. So it's always different. It travels wherever the wind is blowing. I just wish in these last three or four years that I photographed every one of them just because of how they were painted. I've received four-inch long porcelain replicas of the pig from Chile and Peru, but with all the graffiti in Spanish, exactly copied onto them. They're really beautiful. They sit on my mantelpiece, at home. I treasure them.