Deadheads around the world gathered at their local movie theaters on November 1st and 5th for this year’s Grateful Dead Meet-Up At The Movies. Featuring the Dead’s April 17th, 1972 concert at Tivoli Concert Hall in Copenhagen, Denmark from the band’s legendary 1972 European tour, the community cinema event brought fans together exactly 50 years after the release of the Dead’s iconic Europe ’72 live album.
Each year, Meet-Up At The Movies offers Deadheads the chance to unite with their local communities and enjoy classic concert footage of their favorite band. Of course, Deadheads meet up at Dead shows all the time, but Meet-Up At The Movies is different. For one thing, it attracts a more local crowd than a Dead show, which fosters community and connections between fans. Rather than a sea of anonymous faces, you might run into your old English teacher or a friend’s dad you didn’t realize liked the Dead. One fan on Reddit described meeting someone who happened to have attended the Tivoli concert while studying abroad in Amsterdam:
“First person I met outside of the theater was an older gentleman, and he was at the show in Copenhagen in ’72!! He was studying abroad there and caught the show. Said him and a load of people bought the first 2 rows of tickets.”
Also, even though the show is obviously pre-recorded, there is something special—and a little bizarre—about watching a Dead show in a dark, seated movie theater instead of a music venue. Many attendees described similar scenes of fans unable to resist dancing in the aisles: “We laughed, we cried, we sang, we danced,” wrote one Reddit user.
“F— yeah. First time I have ever danced in the aisle of a movie theater,” said another.
Other attendees described calmer theater experiences: “Had a great time! It was mostly full, and I saw a couple of people in the back of the theatre dancing in the aisles,” one fan observed, adding, “always nice to be packed into a room with other Deadheads.”
Someone else recounted, “One brave soul started dancing during China Cat. The rest of us just sat and head bobbed.”
Not every Meet-Up experience is created equal, though, and some theaters drew bigger crowds than others. “My theater was less than a quarter full,” one fan shared, while another described a theater in Berkeley as “pretty full … about 140 tix out of 180 capacity.”
“Ironically the showing I went to in Copenhagen was very tame,” someone shared from Europe. “Nobody was even singing along, haha. It was still a good time though and I stayed for a beer afterwards and chatted with a few folks who had actually been at the show we had just watched.”
Complaints about this year’s Meet-Up were few—some of the funnier ones were about a “lady … tunelessly singing along to all the songs and talking during all of the jams” and “a dude who was asleep before the show even started next to me. Snored the whole way thru”—but one seemed to be universal. In comparison to a three-hour Dead show, the sub-90-minute film wasn’t nearly long enough.