Article Contributed by Gabriel David Barkin
Published on 2026-05-09
Grahame Lesh - photo by Gabriel David Barkin
The music never stops for Grahame Lesh. The website for the Marin County musician lists a slew of bookings over the next five months with his band Midnight North, a smattering of Grahame Lesh & Friends appearances, several shows costarring Daniel Donato, and a sequence of symphonic gigs featuring civic orchestras playing alongside Lesh and fellow musicians including Melvin Seals and Tom Hamilton.
Phew!
Lesh is also a pivotal performer in a number of Terrapin Roadshow events scheduled throughout the summer. More than just another musical tribute, these shows are a direct outgrowth of the post-Grateful Dead environ planted and nourished by the Lesh family. There’s an easily traced lineage from the Dead to Phil & Friends and then to Terrapin Crossroads, the dearly beloved destination venue founded by Grahame’s mom and dad Phil and Jill Lesh in San Rafael. That lineage is primarily wrapped around the music – but it also encompasses a community of musicians and fans who share a culture that has proven its durability even following the passing of several key founding members.
In keeping with the spirit of Terrapin Crossroads, this summer’s Roadshows will feature a variety of performers, with Lesh as an anchor. Each venue will have a completely different lineup. (See below for a complete list of shows and performers.)
I met with Lesh last week over Zoom to ask him about the Terrapin Roadshow, Midnight North, and the legacy of his father’s music.
(The transcript below has been edited for clarity and brevity.)
Gabriel David Barkin [GDB]: What's going on with Midnight North these days? You've got some dates coming up, even hitting the South for a few shows.
Grahame Lesh [GL]: Midnight North is, and always has been, the main, original project for me and Elliott [Peck] and the rest of the crew. We have a lot going on in our lives, and a bunch of us have had some big life changes that keep us busy. Plus, we’re in other bands. Our plan this year is basically to hit a weekend a month in all of the various fun places that we enjoy. This month it's Southern California. We did the Bay Area last month.
[Visit https://midnightnorth.com/ for tour dates and more info.]
We're excited to get back out there a little more regularly and get a cadence up. In the meantime, we're always working on new music and trying to see what else can come of all of our work together.
GDB: Midnight North is such a great band, I really enjoy them and I'm looking forward to hearing some new stuff too.
Switching gears, you also have these Terrapin Roadshow gigs coming up, which of course will feature lots of Grateful Dead music. This is a bigger tour than last year with five venues this time. You've got a lot of inertia. Are you feeling there's a lot more demand and interest in this music in the wake of Bobby [Weir] passing, and of course your dad a year earlier, and Donna [Godchaux]? An end of an era ethos?
Where do you see the Terrapin Roadshow, and Grahame Lesh & Friends gigs, and the Unbroken Chain benefits fitting into that?
GL: The Grateful Dead history and legacy is obviously something that my family and I think about a lot, to start with. The Terrapin Roadshow, obviously, is sort of celebrating and continuing a specific strand that came out of Terrapin Crossroads specifically. And that was built on Phil & Friends. Which was built on the Grateful Dead.
It was also built on Levon Helm's whole deal in Woodstock with the Midnight Rambles. My folks got the idea of Terrapin from our family going to a Midnight Ramble in 2010, and all of us performing there. So the Terrapin thing is a sort of a specific thing.
GDB: True that! It was a treat seeing all the people that played at Terrapin, especially with Phil. And seeing you and your brother Brian getting to play with your dad, all of us got to enjoy your family making music together. We were lucky to have all that in our backyard here in Marin County, that’s for sure!
GL: We have such an amazing community here in the Bay Area and Marin County. It's a community of fans, of Deadheads, of families, of Marin music lovers. They don't even have to specifically be Deadheads. And then within that, an amazing community of musicians – not all of whom came from Grateful Deadland. There's the Scott Laws and the Stu Allens of the world who have a pretty deep background in Grateful Dead music. But also the Mother Hips and people like that who we got to know through other connections. And they brought their sound to the Grateful Dead vibe and vice versa. We're learning from them, too.
The Terrapin Roadshow is really is about bringing that community to back to San Rafael, and also to these other places. Last year we did Monte Rio and Truckee. This year, the fourth and fifth stops for these little mini festivals are in Oregon and Colorado. So we’re spreading it out.
During the ten years that Terrapin was open, people came from all over to see my dad. But they also came to see what this Deadhead destination was all about. It became a musical stopping point for everyone.
GDB: You're the only kid of a member of the Grateful Dead who’s out there performing regularly. Do you feel anything like a personal obligation to your family legacy to be playing this music?
GL: I don't think that whether I keep playing this music is going to have much of an effect on whether it keeps being played and listened to. It's way beyond me. Bob's 300-year plan would have happened – will happen – no matter what. This music is timeless. But I'm trying to help it out. I love it too. I love gathering and I love live music. I love human beings creating things in the moment on-the-fly together. That is what this music is all about. It’s about real community and being in a place with other people.
That's what Dead & Co. was doing for the last ten years. That's what all of those thousands of Dead cover bands are all about. I'm just one piece of that.
GDB: Did your dad ever say anything like, Hey, son, I'm really glad you're taking on the family business, or anything like that?
GL: We just loved playing music together. That was the main thing. It wasn't so much that someone that he was related to was keeping it going. But we had a really great time performing together. Pretty awesome! It was a really special thing for us.
GDB: I was so glad to see you step into Phil’s shoes to play bass at the 60th anniversary show in Golden Gate Park last year with Dead & Co. You’re more widely known as a guitar player, but I see that you're slated to play bass at least a couple of these upcoming Terrapin Roadshows.
Do you have a favorite between bass and guitar? Does it change your musical mindset when you're playing one versus the other?
GL: I don't have a favorite. A bass is just a guitar kind of tuned down. Especially the way my dad invented his style of playing in the Grateful Dead. You have to play bass very similarly [to guitar] in this music.
I’ve played bass in [non-Grateful Dead] situations. I was in a band playing bass with Amy Helm, Luther Dickinson, and Allison Russell, Capitol Sun Rays. We did a bunch of shows in 2019 or so. In situations like that it's more standard bass playing, more Americana, almost country style.
With Grateful Dead music, I feel like it's a real asset that I'm not a bass player – that I have no training in playing bass. Because my dad didn't know how to play bass when he started. He invented his own style. He was influenced by people like Charles Mingus and Paul McCartney and other bass players he'd heard. But he wasn't doing anything traditional. He was also influenced by classical counterpoint and baroque countermelodies and all of these things.
I feel strongly that for me, it's really important that I don't play this music like a bass player. I play it like a guitar player. I find that really makes the music come alive. And it's very fun.
But it is a different thing than being a guitar player. [There are] other trade-offs – like, it's harder to sing on bass.
GDB: I have an observation about that – there are so many players who emulate Jerry Garcia’s playing style. John Kadlecik and Garrett Deloian and Stu Allen, for instance. A gazillion people that we know. But I've probably seen as many Grateful Dead cover bands as anyone, and very few bass players really play anything like what Phil was doing. People have their Jerry tone, they emulate his picking style and scales, albeit with some distinctiveness of course.
But there are very few bass players who even try to play like Phil. Oteil [Burbridge], for instance, doesn't play anything like Phil.
GL: Yeah, and [Oteil and I] have talked about it a lot. He says Bob told him, Don't try and play like Phil, play like yourself. That is really what the music lends itself to. You have to bring yourself to it and it'll sound right. It might not sound exactly like Jerry or exactly like Bob or exactly like Phil or exactly like Kreutzmann. You have to sound like yourself. And if you know the material, then you can play it in a unique way every time, a way that sounds authentic to yourself.
My authentic self on bass is a guitar player who has played alongside my dad for so many years. I know a lot of the little things that make it sound kind of like him. But hopefully, I'm bringing myself to it too.
The other thing is that this music can't be stale. It's not going to last for 300 years or forever if it's the same thing.
GDB: For sure. I mean, on the one hand there's Dark Star Orchestra, which hews pretty close to the bone when they play this music, that’s their thing. But then on the other hand, just to name one, there’s JRAD [Joe Russo’s Almost Dead], and they use the Dead’s compositions as a springboard to go in their own direction.
GL: You know, Rob Barraco [of Dark Star Orchestra] was in The Q with Phil & Friends. [The Phil Lesh Quintet, a.k.a. The Q, was a highly acclaimed lineup of Phil & Friends in 2000-2003 with Warren Haynes, Jimmy Herring and John Molo alongside Lesh and Barraco.] That was a rocket ship of a band too, doing stuff totally differently.
Even with my dad, we did plenty of stuff at Terrapin that was more of a re-creation. But, you know, it's not note for note. It can't be, there's too many notes.
GDB: I also really loved the Telstar stuff, that offshoot of Phil & Friends which we got to experience at Terrapin Crossroads from time to time. It was like, We're barely if at all gonna even sing, we're just gonna do improv’y stuff based on the music and see where it goes.
GL: My dad loved that. We brought that back in the last year of his life at the Terrapin Clubhouse. We were doing the Darkstarathon YouTube videos that are still up there. That was the same concept – like, maybe we find our way to a song, but we never stop. We have no plan.
GDB: I have an unrelated history question for you. A month ago at the Junction in Mill Valley, at the Unbroken Chain show, you played that namesake song, “Unbroken Chain.” It was the anniversary date of the first time the Grateful Dead ever played it live, which was in 1995. While you were playing it, your wife told me that the 1995 bust was because you had requested it. You were like seven years old! Is that true?
GL: I liked that song. I was told the Grateful Dead had never played it. I was like, Why?! I just didn't get it. Obviously, now I know it's a complicated song. Even in the recording process, they had to splice parts together instead of playing it all the way through. I just didn't get that. I was like, This is a good song. You should just play the song. So yeah, I put that put the bug in my dad's ear, I claim credit.
GDB: So that was history, now let's look forward. You've got Midnight North gigs. You've got these current gigs booked with Terrapin.
GL: And all kinds of Grahame Lesh & Friends shows. This weekend I'm going to New York. I have a run starting at the Brooklyn Bowl. [These shows will be history too by the time this interview is published.] I've got various other shows as Grahame & Friends throughout the year. I'm also playing bass with the Jerry Garcia Symphonic Celebration thing with Tom Hamilton and Melvin Seals. A bunch of those are announced already.
GDB: Bobby talked about the Dead music living for 300 years. (That wouldn’t surprise me, we're still covering Bach after 300 years!) Do you think you’ve got a couple of decades in you to keep doing this?
GL: I'm going to be playing music even if no one wants to come see. I'll be playing this music for sure for a while. I certainly hope the interest is still there, but that's not gonna change whether I'm doing it or not.
The music is for everyone – and that includes me and all the people who enjoy making it too!
This was something I kind of realized at Dead 50 in 2015. All the people who seem to come out of the woodwork, other musicians. Some of the people I went to high school with were so excited for these 50th anniversary shows. I was like, You were listening to skate punk stuff, I didn't think you had any interest in what my dad was doing. Or maybe it wasn't quite as cool. And now it is.
But it'll always be there whether it's cool or not. We're just going to keep on doing it. I hope we see people at shows. I think it's a pretty important time right now to go out and be with fellow humans and listen to some music.
TERRAPIN ROADSHOW DATES AND LINEUPS
For tickets and more information, visit https://www.terrapincrossroads.net/
Monte Rio Amphitheater, Monte Rio, CA
May 30-31
Grahame Lesh (on bass), Elliott Peck, Mookie Siegel, Jackie Greene, Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz, Jeremy Hoenig, and “The Wolfpack” featuring Brian Switzer, Adam Theis, Alex Kelly, Sheldon Brown, and Mads Tolling
Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, San Rafael, CA
July 24-26
The Terrapin Family Band ft. Nicki Bluhm, Grahame Lesh, Alex Koford, Ross James, Jason Crosby, and with special guests including Tim Bluhm, Barry Sless, Stu Allen, Reed Mathis, and Greg Loiacono
Marjorie Holzgang Concert Bowl, Grants Pass, OR
August 1-2
Grahame Lesh (on bass), Holly Bowling, Scott Law, Danny Luehring, Sunshine (Garcia) Becker, Garrett Deloian, and Kanika Moore
Salty Gebhardt Amphitheater, Truckee, CA
August 15-16
The Terrapin Ramble Band ft. Grahame Lesh, Stu Allen, Amy Helm & The Helm Family Midnight Ramble Band, Reed Mathis, Adam MacDougall, Natalie Cressman, and Jennifer Hartswick
Two Rivers Park, Glenwood Springs, CO
August 22-23
Grahame Lesh, Bill Nershi, Kyle Hollingsworth, Mark Levy, Ross James, and Elliott Peck
