Modern technology caught up with the scope of the Grateful Dead at the height of their popularity, and their most recent tours provided plenty of content for Without A Net. Besides being the first of their live albums to go gold—being a double-CD, double-cassette, or triple-LP helped—it also served as a tribute to Brent Mydland, who had become the third of the band’s keyboard players to die, not two months before the album came out. Because it was sequenced with the extended playing time of CDs in mind, most tracks stretch as easily as they would have on stage. With songs being allowed to last seven and, in some cases, over eleven minutes, the overall effect is of a laid-back, natural show, albeit edited seamlessly between almost as many shows as there were tracks. (Indeed, many of the original shows would be released in their entirety in the decades to come, as demonstrated below.)
In addition to the Dead in their element playing, if not necessarily hits, crowd favorites, there were a few tunes that hadn’t been on albums before, even if they were likely throughout collectors’ tapes. Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues” had been a relatively recent addition to their repertoire, after Bob Weir had done it on a solo acoustic tour with Rob Wasserman. “Looks Like Rain” had been a Dead staple since first appearing on Ace; “I Know You Rider” had been in their sets from the beginning, and often followed “China Cat Sunflower”, as it does here. A lengthy “Eyes Of The World” features Branford Marsalis on saxophone, a welcome difference from the some of the now-dated synthesizer sounds and MIDI effects elsewhere. “Victim Or The Crime” is more effective here than on Built To Last, and the “Franklin’s Tower” suite runs nineteen minutes before a crowd-pleasing “One More Saturday Night”. “Dear Mr. Fantasy” isn’t much to get excited about, except to showcase Brent; curiously, it fades before whatever it segued into originally. Throughout the over two hours of music, everything is mixed evenly and clearly.
Since the idea was to present an up-to-date representation of where the Dead had arrived at the end of the decade, Without A Net was successful, musically as well as commercially. And while it was good to incorporate longer songs, missing from the experience were the improvisational moments common to many shows, usually denoted as “Drums” and “Space” on most tapers’ cassette inserts. The band addressed this directly a year later with Infrared Roses, an hour-long collage consisting of four suites of three tracks each, selected and mixed by their sound guy and titled by Robert Hunter.
The program opens with “Crowd Sculpture”, putting the listener in the middle of the parking lot before a show. From there we’re plunged amid the drums, and jamming commences. Branford Marsalis appears again on “Apollo At The Ritz”, while “Silver Apples Of The Moon” is a duet between new official keyboardist Vince Welnick and common fixture Bruce Hornsby. It’s certainly for the initiated, even though the novice should recognize “Uncle John’s Band” at the start of the second suite, but as aural sculptures go, you could do worse. (Of course, this had nothing on 1994’s Grayfolded, a commissioned project that saw fragments of 25 years’ worth of live performances of “Dark Star” melded and overlaid over the course of 109 minutes on two CDs.)
Grateful Dead Without A Net (1990)—3
Grateful Dead Infrared Roses (1991)—3
Archival releases of same vintage:
• Dozin’ At The Knick (1996)
• Terrapin Station (Limited Edition) (1997)
• Nightfall Of Diamonds (2001)
• Formerly The Warlocks (2010)
• Spring 1990 (2012)
• Spring 1990: So Glad You Made It (2012)
• Spring 1990: The Other One (2014)
• Wake Up To Find Out (2014)
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