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. The band issued it like a missive, with Mike definitively stating in an interview on Phish.
So it was more than a bit perplexing that so much of Slip Stitch and Pass is based on the works of other artists. Trey even referenced his local Philadelphia station when talking about the record to Parke Puterbaugh:. 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.
It takes some of the ego away, when you haven't written the song. Per Trey:. 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. So the symbol of the giant yarn ball is pulling double duty. I imagine this must have been very difficult for the band trey especially to change after working and striving to make it for so many years.
