Phish ‘Slip, Stitch And Pass’ In Hamburg On This Date In 1997

One of the most important Phish shows in the band’s 39-year history took place on this date in 1997. That night, the quartet brought a tour of intimate clubs and theaters in Europe to Markthalle in Hamburg, Germany. Phish thought so much of the resulting performance they released highlights from the concert as Slip, Stitch And Pass, their second live album and first culled from a single show. Slip, Stitch And Pass came out on October 28, 1997 – less than eight months after Phish left the Markthalle stage.

The nine-track live album starts with a cover of “Cities” by Talking Heads, the band’s opener from Hamburg. Phish had played “Cities” just once over the previous eight years despite its status as a staple in the 1980s. The band’s funky and slow rendition of the song from Talking Heads’ 1979 LP, Fear Of Music, has been back in rotation ever since Hamburg. Phish has only gone more than 20 shows between “Cities” performances a mere four times over the past 25 years.

Slip, Stitch And Pass continues with a transcendent “Wolfman’s Brother” that marked the Hoist track’s birth as a jam vehicle. Mike Gordon swapped from his trusty basses designed by Paul Languedoc to a Modulus with striking results. Gordon’s work during the 14-minute “Wolfman’s” was a revelation at the time as he helped lead the improv in a way he didn’t often previously and has plenty of times since. Notably, Phish’s Mike-heavy soundcheck from Hamburg was dubbed “Attack On The Bass” by the band. The cow funk of “Wolfman’s” dissolved into the ZZ Top classic “Jesus Just Left Chicago” and Phish kept the pairing intact for Slip, Stitch And Pass.

Mike Gordon’s songwriting is also displayed on Slip, Stitch And Pass via the “Weigh” and “Mike’s Song” that follow the ZZ Top cover. The live album was the first time Phish officially released “Mike’s Song” and its frequent partner, “Weekapaug Groove.” German fans and many Americans who traveled overseas for the tour were treated to a wild “Mike’s Groove” featuring Page McConnell going lounge singer on “Lawn Boy” to connect the two songs. Phish worked portions of The Doors’ “The End” into the “Mike’s Song” jam and teased the tune during “Lawn Boy” and “Weekapaug” with the latter left unfinished and featuring a “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” jam.

The live album ends with an a capella “Hello My Baby” and a tight “Taste.” However, plenty of additional standout moments from Phish’s March 1, 1997 concert at Markthalle didn’t make the LP. The night featured a rare standalone “The Oh Kee Pa Ceremony,” a “Possum” that included a heavy metal-style intro, an early “Carini” and gorgeous “Billy Breathes.”

Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio and bassist Mike Gordon discussed the Slip, Stitch And Pass show during interviews in September 1997 with author Parke Puterbaugh posted to Phish.com around the time of the album’s release. Read thoughts from both musicians below.

Putting The Tour Into Context

Mike Gordon: The German crowds have sort of taken to us. I don’t know if it’s the biggest European country for us, but they’ve warmed up to us a bit. It’s different playing in small places like that. We still feel intimate playing in big places, but there’s something about having a smaller production that makes us feel more humble.

When we go to Europe, maybe it’s one truck and a 15-person crew. And when we come home it’s five trucks and a 40-person crew. When we got home, what we’d forgotten about was, you know, we get to the venue and there’s just people there to do everything, and they’re constantly worrying about every detail, and it’s great, cause we’ve got an awesome crew. But it more makes you feel like, “Oh, we’re putting on a big concert,” mentally, whereas when we get to the club in Germany and there’s a couple hundred people outside, maybe, a lot of them Americans, but we can sort of walk through them and talk to them, it’s no big deal. Then we walk in, the people at the clubs, they’re excited about it but they don’t really treat us like “stars.” It’s just kind of like another day at the office or something, so it’s a lot more low-key and we get on stage and people are drinking, you can hear glasses clinking and all that.

So it’s kind of fun. Maybe we sort of let loose in a different kind of way. There’s less pressure to be something, which is good because probably the best stuff happens when you’re not trying to be something.

Trey Anastasio: I think there was a lot of stuff going on at the time, I mean those Europe tours particularly. It was a particularly good tour. The whole mood was pretty loose, you know? But then we were also going through a big transition, I think, on a bigger scale, through the last part of 1996 into the Europe tour. I think we were trying to change musically. It’s easy to say this after the fact, but just trying to break through to a different kind of jamming, you know? Slower, funkier, more group-oriented and less guitar-solo oriented.

I think we found it was a little harder to do that in the context of the American tour that was happening before that, which was kind of our first full arena tour ending with this big New Year’s show in Boston. I think when we went over to Europe, playing in these little clubs and everything, that change occurred without us even really noticing it. You can hear it in the “Wolfman’s Brother” jam. It’s like this relaxed, slow, funky…

And then when we came back to the States, it was still there, you know, and everyone was saying, “Oh my God, you guys sound so different!” That’s exactly what we had hoped for.

A Response To A Live One

Mike Gordon: We have been talking for a while about putting out more albums, include live albums and different projects, where not everyone is a huge production that takes half a year to make. Trey was listening to some tapes. I don’t know how much he was thinking about an album or just sort of curious about some different tapes. He even read some listings from the Phish.net. There’s something called Rosemary’s Digest where this woman compiles what people are talking about, the most interesting stuff. They were comparing different years and how we’d jam in different years and what some people’s favorite shows are. So Trey got tapes of those and tapes of the Europe tour from February, and after listening to a lot of stuff. this one night shined thorough as a particularly good tape. He called me and said, “You’ll like it cause you can really hear the bass.”

The tape represents what we feel is a new era for the band. It’s not always clearly new, as opposed to old, but generally, we like to think of it as being an era where our jamming is sort of funkier and less crescendo-oriented and more just playing funky grooves for long periods of time. We kind of feel that on the last live album, A Live One, we all liked the long “Tweezer” jam. That represents the sort of jamming we were doing a couple years ago, which was going off in a lot of different directions with different little ideas and sort of running with it, which is cool. Last year, ending with New Year’s Eve, we thought that we were really capping off an era of building things up to peaks a lot and blaring a lot – having there be a lot of sound and a lot of noise.

We feel like this year, especially since we were in clubs in Europe and the whole feeling was sort of smaller and funkier, we just got into jamming where, rather than a lot of noise and blaring and building things up to a peak, there’s just a lot of these funky grooves. At night in Europe a few times we ended up going down to discos and dancing to house music. On the bus we were listening to James Brown. Trey’s got this new collection of interesting…I don’t know what you’d call it…house music CDs, I guess. So we were listening to a lot of that kind of stuff and we were around it so it’s just a different vibe. And then when we came back to the U.S. tour, both of the Europe tours ended up being a nice setting of the tone for this new 1997 version of Phish.

Suburban Kids Make Good

Trey Anastasio: I was thinking another thing about this show when I was listening to it the other day. This might be interesting…how do I put this…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, and here we are, you can hear it obviously in the album because we’re always throwing in those little quotes: The Doors, The Stones, Pink Floyd, ZZ Top, Talking Heads. You know what I mean? It’s really second generation or something. I guess my realization is the first thing you have to do is know thyself and admit who you are. It’s like, “Be yourself, because nobody else can.” And it’s like the suburban New Jersey mall life is so void of any kind of meaning or anything…

We all grew up on a block with 25 kids playing army and stuff and waiting for the Good Humor man. Going to the mall and hanging out at the pizza place. Somehow I think that a whole explanation for this touring phenomenon is that you’ve got all these kids searching for some kind of excitement or meaning or adventure in their life. I don’t know if that’s the way you see it.

An Original Take On Covers

Mike Gordon: I think it’s significant to note that we have three covers on this album. I was really happy about that. I think it shows were trying to put out a fun album and we’re not trying to show what we can do as much as provide fun. Playing covers, for me, has always had that role. It takes some of the ego away, when you haven’t written the song.

Obviously, you’re going to play it for fun rather than to show, “Didn’t we write a great song?” With The Doors stuff, ever since we’ve been a band we’ve gotten to these modes now and then where we’re doing silly sort of making fun. There was a time four or five years ago where all the good jams ended up turning into seventies songs. We had to consciously decide not to do that. And they were all songs we had never played before. The idea was to latch on to some song we’d never played and wing it, or part of it. We used to do that all the time, and now we don’t do it so much. But we were just kind of having fun with it, and it just sort of happened.

It’s pretty amazing how it sounds when the chord changes, in that we always do that chord change in the “Mike’s Song” jam from F sharp to F. But if you listen to it, as soon as the chord changes and it starts turning into that Doors thing, it happens immediately and it sounds planned but it wasn’t planned. I don’t know if it took us one beat or two beats to decide, “Oh, this is going to be like a groovy sixties thing.” It just happened by itself. It was almost like an inevitable thing, I guess.

Trey Anastasio: Even though by the time I got to Goddard I was listening to Stravinsky and trying really hard to discover all this different kind of music, but then in the end, who am I? I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, listening to The Doors and Stones and stuff. Just like all three of the other guys in the band: Basking Ridge and Syracuse and it’s so funny the way it comes out (laughs). In the same way that I see people who are into the band, you wonder, how did we get so popular, right? But it seems kind of obvious when you look at it that way. Because our experiences are similar to so many people that it speaks to them or something. On the album, it shifts back and forth between striving for some kind of depth, some kind of meaning, and then just joking around and having a good time…

Mike Gordon: It was a long time ago that we used to play [“Cities”]. I think we played it back in ’84 when we had Daubs [Marc Daubert], the percussion player. He used to play a balaphone, and one problem with Daubs was that he was overplaying. He was playing constant loud 16th notes. It was kind of cool, I liked it at the time. So I guess we were playing it in ’84. We probably play it once every three years or so, except this past year we started playing it a little bit more.

Trey Anastasio: “Cities” was one of the first tunes we covered, too. Both of those tunes [referencing “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking”] were back from when we played at Nectar’s.

I mean, take away everything and put us in a bar in front of 300 people in the middle of a really fun tour where we’re just getting away from the whole bigness and everything of what’s happened to us in the last three years, all expectations. And we’re over there and we’re just hanging out and going out on the bus, having a great time, and then when I listen to the album I’m like, wow, in a funny way this is really who we are more than any of the albums, I think. Know what I mean? Take it or leave it. This is the music we listened to when we first got together. A couple of the covers that we did at our first gig. Yet at the same time there’s been a lot of progression.

Approaching Future Live Releases

Mike Gordon: We like the idea of putting out one sort of bigger production every year or two and then in between putting out a more casual live album or some other sort of project.

Trying some more bizarre things, like maybe we would release an album of just sound checks or something. There’s some different ideas like that have floated around, and we’re feeling like we might as well do them. So this is sort of a first like that. And we definitely had a lot to do with the mixing and choosing of songs, but we weren’t there. We were doing it by mailing tapes back and forth, which makes it more casual for us, too. It doesn’t mean that we care less about it, it means that we’re more …

The problem with A Live One, one problem is that it took us two or three months or more to listen to all the tapes and choose which songs we wanted to have, and that was very interesting for us. I don’t regret doing that. But it was so democratic a process and it went on for so long that maybe we lost some perspective. Maybe it would have been better to put out one night, even back then, rather than all different songs. There was so much decision making and then we spent a month or two in the studio mixing and we just thought to let someone else do it is another humble thing about it, just entrusting other people rather than getting in there and spoiling it, almost.

Trey Anastasio: We want to release a lot more albums. I started kind of putting [together] this little compilation of all these songs that never made it onto an album, and I’ve been coming up with some really interesting stuff. There’s so many of them, you know?

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Phish tickets for their Spring & Summer Tour 2022 go on sale Friday, March 4 via Ticketmaster. Additional Phish tickets can be purchased via AXS. Also available are CID Entertainment Travel Packages.

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Source: JamBase.com