Meet-Up at the Movies
“Downhill from Here” July 17-19, 1989 at Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, WI
Our definition of “direct experience” is way too narrow. We fear, for example, that young people spend too much time in front of screens. When we encounter these Tik Tok teens and future Twitch streamers, we advise them to “go outside” or “experience the world.” It’s as if the real world can only be apprehended through, like, singing around a fire or some horseshit. I don’t buy it.
My feelings about experience are best summed up in a scene from the Taiwanese hyper-drama Yi Yi. We see two teenagers, Ting-Ting and Fatty, as they leave the cinema and go to a coffee shop. They are debating whether or not one can have an experience through film. Ting-Ting thinks that skip the cinema altogether. She says people should “just stay at home and live life.”
Fatty disagrees. He believes people have lived “three times as long since man invented movies” because they allow us supplemental experiences that we would never have otherwise. Very few of us are murders, Fatty believes, but we’ve all experienced the act of murdering someone by watching a horror film.
In 2012, I had never experienced a Dead concert at the hallowed Alpine Valley. Wisconsin officials prohibited the band from returning to the idyllic summer shed after an overcrowded three day stand there in 1989. Unable to pack into a defunct ski slope with thousands of fans, my next best option was to sit comfortably in a local independent movie theater with a few dozen other Deadheads for a showing of Downhill From Here.
A year prior, the Dead launched a virtual concert series where participating theaters around the US showed The Grateful Dead Movie for one night only. Dubbed “Meet-Up at the Movies,” the concept was novel to me. I, like many Deadheads all over the country, gathered to watch the band’s self-produced and (at the time) newly-remastered documentary.
The following year, the band announced the return of “Meet-Up at the Movies, this time showing Downhill From Here. I, honestly, was dubious that anyone would attend. While The Grateful Dead Movie was a D.A. Pennabacker style documentary with a hard focus on the fans, Downhill From Here was just a multi-cam concert video from the band’s 1989 Alpine Valley runs. Meanwhile, Bobby and Phil were touring almost year-round as Furthur. If you can get the real thing, why would you pay to watch a recording?
Yet there I was, against my better judgment, sitting in a plush theater seat wedged between an older professional couple and some stoned college kids. Some late period Joni Mitchell was playing as seats began to fill.
As the house lights dimmed, people around me started to stand up, light joints, and crack smuggled in beers. The projector started to whir—showing a high-angle shot of Phil and the gang sauntering on the stage.
I’m not hyperbolizing when I say people went nuts. Like, people started cheering as if they were a hundred rows back in a stadiym. There was a woman screaming Bobby’s name. One guy was yelling requests. A bottle of non-descript clear liquor was placed in my hands by some kind stranger while the air filled with pot smoke.
My friend, Maggie, once called Deadheads “the sport of all sports” because they tend to make the best out of any situation as long as there’s a Dead tune playing. It doesn’t matter if it’s in-person or on-screen, we will dance and cheer as if Jerry’s angel materialized Mufasa-style out of the clouds and broke into “Ruben and Cherise.” So, it makes sense that thirty people in western New York would want to re-create the sprawling lawn of Alpine Valley. But this was more than just mere nostalgia-driven simulation.
Alpine Valley is a thirty-seven thousand seat amphitheater into which the Dead regularly packed an additional ten to twenty thousand Heads. If you had a lawn ticket, you were most definitely standing so far back that your view was obstructed by a blur of hula hoops and patchwork shorts. This isn’t endemic to just Alpine Valley. I’ve been to a near-infinite amount of Dead and Dead-offshoot shows and have physically seen the band maybe a handful of times.
What I’m saying is: being present at a show doesn’t mean you’re actually watching the show. Most attendees of the ’89 Alpine Valley run were just listening to the Dead through the house PA. They weren’t able to witness subtle interactions between band members—like when Jerry upstages Bob during “I Know You Rider.” Even if they were able to see one of the amphitheater’s Jumbotron, they were watching the very same footage I saw in a theater a few decades later. If most attendees at Alpine Valley had to experience the shows virtually, why do we discount virtual experiences as “not the real thing?”
This question has been on my mind since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Over the past year, many music fans have become accustomed to virtual events and simulcasts. We’ve been lucky enough to watch young artists experiment with a new format while established acts, like the Dead, unearthed old concert footage from their vaults.
When screens became too overbearing, we got creative. I’ve seen socially distant outdoor shows, Zoom DJ battles, and weirdo noise artists playing to no one in particular in public parks. What do we do with these experiences? It would be false to say we’ve done nothing over the past year and a half. Maybe we should take a cue from the Deadheads who attended “Meet-up at the Movies.” To them, a Dead concert is any time a group of people listen to the band’s music together.
When Covid forced the live music industry to shut down, my friends and I started meeting every week to listen to a Dead show around a fire in our backyards. We dubbed our new tradition “Jerry Friday,” and it quickly became an anchor in a rapidly devolving world.
Today marks a year since we started “Jerry Friday.” Before Covid, none of my friends had been to a Dead show. Now they’re seasoned tour rats with a respectable fifty-two shows under their belts.
Join us for Jerry Friday and watch this show tonight, April 30, at 7 p.m. EST