So I’ve mentioned on several occasions that Without A Net was a formative Grateful Dead album for me. I really cut my teeth on that record. Oddly enough, I distinctly remember being a big fan of Victim Or The Crime when I first got it.

Somewhere along the line, however, my appreciation for Victim or the Crime diminished, and it even got to be a “skip” song for me. I’m not quite sure why. I think I just got kind of bored with it and all the clanging seemed so unnecessary. I still don’t really know how I feel about the song in general, but it was really nice to give this particular version a close listen for the first time in a LONG time. Victim is a song I definitely have to be in the mood to hear and it’s not a wavering type of song for me; it’s very black or white, and very few Grateful Dead songs are that way for me.

Random bit of trivia: Without A Net was culled from the Fall/Winter 1989 tours and the Spring 1990 tour. Only four of the tracks are from 1989 and the rest are from Spring 1990, which has since been released in its entirety so most of Without A Net has been released twice.

Brusque and industrial, that’s the vibe a lot of folks get from Victim Or The Crime. A lot of the Dead’s songs play with the darkness and light themes, but this is probably the darkest song, sonicly at least, in their repertoire – perhaps lyrically as well. Still, the darkness has got to give at some point and I tend to regard the chorus as the “light” (at least comparatively) aspect of the song. Jerry gets a few measures to play after the second chorus. It’s very brief but it hits the stratosphere like a rocket ship. Pretty much all of the lyrics have been sung by the fourth minute and the floodgates open for Mr. Garcia. I think Weir plays some heavily compressed harmonics to get that pinging sound. While Jerry is boring his way to the center of the early Weir plays a really great little lick at 5:52. About a minute later some heavy MIDI action comes into play and the heavy industrial vibe returns among clanging, bombastic noises. After this the song starts to slowly peter out. Jerry tags the main melody a couple of times at the very end, just for good measure.

Complete Setlist 10/15/89

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