Yarn Ball & Chain

3/1/97, Hamburg, GER, Markthalle

SET 1: Cities > The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony, Down with Disease, Weigh, Beauty of My Dreams, Wolfman's Brother -> Jesus Just Left Chicago, Reba, Hello My Baby, Possum

SET 2: Carini, Dinner and a Movie > Mike's Song -> Lawn Boy > Weekapaug Groove, The Mango Song > Billy Breathes, Theme From the Bottom

ENCORE: Taste, Sweet Adeline

Listen on phish.in

The Storm Thorgerson-designed cover of Slip Stitch and Pass depicts a man running on a beach, attached by a string to an Indiana Jones-sized ball of yarn. The yarn references the title of the album, a knitting term that Phish thought fit their interweaving style of improvisation. But the meaning of the cover is less clear. Is the man fleeing from the enormous yarnball? Is he held back and slowed down by its mass? Or has he unwound enough slack that he is about to break free? 

Slip Stitch and Pass is a very strange live album. It’s the opposite of A Live One in so many ways; where their live debut was a carefully-curated selection of original highlights from an entire tour, the follow-up is drawn from a single show, eccentrically deconstructed to fit on one CD and packed full of covers. The band issued it like a missive, with Mike definitively stating in an interview on Phish.com: “The tape represents what we feel is a new era for the band.” It was the Rosetta Stone that all fans need study to understand what was happening to Phish in 1997. 

So it was more than a bit perplexing that so much of Slip Stitch and Pass is based on the works of other artists. It begins with a cover of Talking Heads, slots a ZZ Top song two tracks later, and includes a Mike’s Groove centerpiece that interlaces no less than Pink Floyd, The Doors, and The Rolling Stones. Some deep cuts aside, it’s a typical hour on classic rock radio, interrupted by a commercial for The WB Network. Trey even referenced his local Philadelphia station when talking about the record to Parke Puterbaugh:

“I was listening to it and I suddenly thought this album is a real reflection of who we are, you know, we've become really comfortable with who we are. It's interesting to me that we're these four suburban kids who grew up listening to classic rock stations or whatever they were at the time, WMMR and stuff.”

But the band’s collective musical background is also the giant ball that they’re trying to escape, which they do in the Phishiest way possible: with humor. The Mike’s jam accidentally stumbles into the exoticism of “The End,” and the band acknowledges that kismet while doing everything they can to subvert it. First, they mash it up with “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” (Fishman is very proud of his Roger Waters scream impression); later, they turn Jim Morrison’s Oedipal nightmare into a wholesome conversation about cooking breakfast and borrowing the car.

“It's like the Mike's Song jam is really interesting because it's really rooted in Seventies rock,” Trey said. “But you can hear this intense effort to try to make something more out of it than hit-radio fodder. (laughs hysterically) I mean, you can really hear the struggle going on.”

But as much as they’re taking the piss out of self-serious classic rock, they still can’t help but love it. The “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” ending to Weekapaug is immense, the perfect release valve to a torrid version of the song. The sincere, languid reading of Jesus Just Left Chicago is the exception against my Phish-blues-hatin’ rule. Even moments from the show that didn’t make the CD cut sparkle with arena-rock pyrotechnics, with Possum sliding in and out of a heavy-metal arrangement, and Trey dropping yet another Gilmour-on-top-of-The-Wall solo in Billy Breathes. 

“I think it shows we’re trying to put out a fun album and we're not trying to show what we can do as much as provide fun,” Mike said. “Playing covers, for me, has always had that role. It takes some of the ego away, when you haven't written the song.”

Killing the ego has been Phish’s goal for the last year-plus, and the Wolfman’s Brother — the primary reason for releasing this particular show — is the consensus moment where that mission is finally accomplished. As stated previously, Mike’s new bass played a key role, and it truly does sound brilliant (as does Page’s rig) on both Slip Stitch and the full-show SBD. But another door is unlocked in Wolfman’s and other moments of this show which makes Hamburg feel like a revelation. Per Trey:

“So you've got this ‘Wolfman's Brother’ jam that to me is all four of us as equal voices in the jam, and it's funky and it's slow, and if anything it slows down over the period of however long that jam is, eight minutes or something.”

Slowing down is one of the toughest tricks for Phish to learn. From the very start, they were speed demons, full of nervous energy and excited to show you how fast they could play very complicated music. It was a hard habit to break. In The Phish Book, Trey talks about the band trying to play along with Meters songs in practice, matching their groove then muting the volume for a few minutes, always finding themselves far ahead when they turn it back up. 

The lesson drawn from Hamburg and the clubs of Europe in early 1997 isn’t specifically funk, but “playing slow and spacious, with each note really having a purpose,” Trey says. There’s the old Phish trick of playing as quiet as possible and forcing the crowd to listen — Trey even plays part of his JJLC solo unamplified. But then there’s the trick of this breakthrough Wolfman’s, in a song they’d struggled with since its 1994 debut. Over its 13 minutes, it adds more and more space, peels off layer after layer, until its pulse has calmed enough to saunter into ZZ Top’s woozy blues. 

It’s a move foretold by the rediscovery of Cities, already a half-speed experiment compared to the original Talking Heads version. And it’s reprised in the Doors-y second jam of Mike’s, which immediately, telepathically drops tempo and unspools into the leisure suit of Lawn Boy. The blistering Weekapaug that follows (the only version of the tour) is all the more exhilarating for those dynamics; it’s a 0-to-100 G-force, instead of just another sprint in a set full of them. 

So the symbol of the giant yarn ball is pulling double duty. It’s the band trying to escape its past and its influences, while still maintaining a comforting tether. It’s a resistance force intentionally applied in an attempt to rein in the band’s natural instinct to move as fast as possible, an unshakable reminder that slowing down can pay dividends too. And it’s about balance between the transcendental and the absurd, staying true to the playfulness at the core of Phish while also making a very serious effort to reinvent the band.

“I think when I listen to this album I have this experience like I said where I can see the whole picture really clearly on this album, more than on other albums, of exactly who we are,” Trey said, “going back and forth between just joking around and then striving for something, really, really caring about breaking into some kind of new ground.”