''Without a Net'' is the eighth live album by the
Grateful Dead (their twenty-first overall). It compiles performances from October 1989 to April 1990, and was released in September 1990. The album simulates the progression of an actual Grateful Dead concert and was
certified
Certification is the provision by an independent body of written assurance (a certificate) that the product, service or system in question meets specific requirements. It is the formal attestation or confirmation of certain characteristics of a ...
Gold by the
RIAA in November 1990. It is the final contemporary live album that was released in their career.
Background
The Grateful Dead's albums had frustrated critics and fans alike for neither approaching nor accurately representing the band's live concert sound and experience—to the point that band-approved,
fan-made tapes were preferred to official releases. The band's organization had poured profits into sound reinforcement and cutting-edge technology for their concert performances and were likewise frustrated by the seeming shortfall in capturing their sound on album.
With the advent of digital technology, ''Without a Net'' was the band's first contemporary live project in nine years, and featured selections from then-recent tours in an attempt to allow the home listener a closer facsimile of the band's engulfing sound system. Touting the advancement in production clarity, the accompanying
shrink wrap
Shrink may refer to:
Common meanings
*Miniaturization
*Shrink, a slang term for:
** a psychiatrist
** a psychoanalyst
** a psychologist
Arts, entertainment, and media
* ''Shrink'' (album), album by German indie rock/electronica group The Notwist
...
sticker proclaimed: "The world's grandest, largest, best live recording."
The resulting album achieved gold-status sales within weeks of its release—the first live album by the band to do so. A series of live releases followed, beginning with a complete
concert performance
A concert performance or concert version is a performance of a musical theater or opera in concert form, without set design or costumes, and mostly without theatrical interaction between singers.
Concert performances are commonly presented in co ...
in its entirety. The release of archival live performances continued after the
1995 dissolution of the band and is ongoing.
Content and packaging
The album title uses the idiom metaphorically, alluding to the band's disinclination for prepared set lists. They preferred just to play and let the song choice evolve by sense for each performance, pulling from a repertoire of over 100 then-common songs. In keeping with that notion, the packaging used a circus theme, with a "Big Top Limited Edition" also-available, featuring clowns and related artwork. The album's dedication to Clifton Hanger is a reference to keyboardist
Brent Mydland
Brent Mydland (October 21, 1952 – July 26, 1990) was an American keyboardist and singer. He was a member of the rock band The Grateful Dead from 1979 to 1990, a longer tenure than any other keyboardist in the band.
Growing up in Concord ...
, who used the alias for hotel registration. Mydland died before the album's release.
The album is an attempt to compile some of the best performances from then-recent tours and present them as a prototypical Grateful Dead concert, as they sounded at that time. However, Mydland's death and the subsequent addition of
Vince Welnick
Vincent Leo Welnick (February 21, 1951 – June 2, 2006) was an American keyboardist-singer-songwriter best known for playing with the band The Tubes during the 1970s and 1980s and with the Grateful Dead in the 1990s. He was inducted into ...
and
Bruce Hornsby
Bruce Randall Hornsby (born November 23, 1954) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. His music draws from folk rock, jazz, bluegrass, folk, Southern rock, country rock, jam band, rock, heartland rock, and blues rock musical traditions ...
had changed the band's live sound by the time the album was available. Seventeen songs were chosen from two of the most recent tours and sequenced to represent typical set placement (though the traditional "Drums" solo and "Space" improvisation are absent, and the final "encore" track is given an early fade out).
Track listing
Notes
*The vinyl pressing puts "Bird Song" before "One More Saturday Night" instead of after "Cassidy"
Personnel
*
Jerry Garcia –
guitar
The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected strin ...
, vocals
*
Bob Weir – guitar, vocals
*
Brent Mydland
Brent Mydland (October 21, 1952 – July 26, 1990) was an American keyboardist and singer. He was a member of the rock band The Grateful Dead from 1979 to 1990, a longer tenure than any other keyboardist in the band.
Growing up in Concord ...
–
keyboards, vocals
*
Phil Lesh –
bass guitar
The bass guitar, electric bass or simply bass (), is the lowest-pitched member of the string family. It is a plucked string instrument similar in appearance and construction to an electric or an acoustic guitar, but with a longer neck and ...
, vocals
*
Bill Kreutzmann
William Kreutzmann Jr. ( ; born May 7, 1946) is an American drummer and founding member of the rock band Grateful Dead. He played with the band for its entire thirty-year career, usually alongside fellow drummer Mickey Hart, and has continued to ...
–
drums
*
Mickey Hart – drums
Additional musician
*
Branford Marsalis –
tenor
A tenor is a type of classical male singing voice whose vocal range lies between the countertenor and baritone voice types. It is the highest male chest voice type. The tenor's vocal range extends up to C5. The low extreme for tenors is wide ...
and
soprano saxophones on "Eyes of the World"
Charts
References
{{Authority control
1990 live albums
Albums produced by Phil Lesh
Arista Records live albums
Grateful Dead live albums