At soundcheck last Friday afternoon, the Terrapin Family Band ran through “Uncle John’s Band” and “Playing in the Band,” two cornerstones of the Grateful Dead’s expansive canon. Grahame Lesh stood at center stage, adjusting levels on his Gibson ES-335 and listening to his bandmates—longtime collaborators Ross James, Jason Crosby and Alex Koford. Then came a looser, swaying tune: “Street People,” by Bobby Charles. It was a playful homage to Woodstock, where Charles recorded the song in 1972 with Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, and Levon Helm—three members of The Band who were longtime residents of Woodstock.
About three hours before showtime, fans began to gather outside. A cluster of vendors had set up what’s known in Deadhead lore as “Shakedown Street”—an informal marketplace of glass art, psychedelic trinkets, and patchwork tie-dye jeans.
“I like to hit ‘Shakedown’ as much as I can to help keep the culture of the lot scene going,” said Paddy Piper, a glassblower from Columbia County.
Next to him, Jack Prinz, a scarf-maker, gestured toward the venue. “It’s a close community, everybody’s family in there,” he said. “It’s timeless. My parents weren’t into it, but it came through uncles and aunts and now it’s full circle.”
“Anyone who goes to see live music is a part of our extended community,” Grahame Lesh told The Overlook. “I know I’m just one piece in a very long story. The music will outlive us all.”
Grahame’s father, Phil Lesh—the Grateful Dead’s co-founding bassist—died in October. A classically trained avant-garde musician, Lesh reimagined the role of the bass in some 2,300 concerts over 30 years, and thousands more after Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995. The Grateful Dead helped define a psychedelic-Americana sound rooted in blues, rock, folk, jazz, and country, to become something entirely unique, and Lesh’s adventurous spirit was central to that evolution. He once described the Dead’s concerts as following a two-set “waveform,” a structure that echoed the arc of a psychedelic trip—a resemblance that made sense, given the band’s origins in Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, the crucible of San Francisco’s countercultural explosion in 1965.
The culture of the Dead, and its continuing resonance, isn’t just about the music. It’s a lineage rooted in shared American consciousness—spiritual, sonic, and psychedelic.
Rhoney Stanley, a longtime former Woodstock resident and one of the many women behind the scenes of the 1960s psychedelic revolution, remembers it that way. In the ‘60s, she helped produce LSD, a psychedelic drug first synthesized by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, in clandestine labs alongside Owsley “Bear” Stanley—her former partner and the Grateful Dead’s legendary sound engineer, responsible for the Wall of Sound, an epic on-stage sound system that the band used in the 1970s. Rhoney raised their son, Starfinder, in the midst of a movement that fused music with mind-expansion, and later chronicled it in her memoir, “Owsley and Me: My LSD Family.”
“When we formed the Grateful Dead, we were changing culture, creating counterculture, and expanding consciousness,” Stanley told The Overlook this week. “Our vision included the future and taking it furthur. We expected the Grateful Dead music and the lyrics that reflect both joy and suffering to continue for generations and knew our children would gracefully carry the legacy of a community connected by music, dance, and expressions of consciousness of divine connection and evolve.”
Today, she said, that vision is being realized: “All our children are involved in some way, in spreading the ‘60s message—Starfinder, my son, directs the Owsley Stanley Foundation to release Bear’s recordings.” Rhoney points out that other children of the Dead family have followed creative paths as well. Reya Hart, daughter of drummer Mickey Hart, and Grahame, Phil Lesh’s son, are active musicians; Justin Kreutzmann, whose father Bill was an original member of the Dead and played drums, directs films—including one about his father’s life on the road. Bob Weir’s daughter, Chloe, is a rock photographer, and Cole Jackson, the son of longtime crew members Rex Jackson and Betty Cantor-Jackson, works in sound engineering. And Trixie Garcia, the daughter of Jerry Garcia and Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, heads the Garcia Family Foundation. For Stanley, these intergenerational threads reflect what the Dead helped create: a living, breathing culture that continues to express itself in new forms and new generations.
Friday’s show at Bearsville Theater was both a return and a reckoning of sorts as Grahame is still grieving the passing of his father.
“Listening to it [Grateful Dead music] wasn’t as much of a,” Lesh paused. “It didn’t hit me as hard as playing it did.”
For years, Lesh, 38, has been a quiet steward of the Dead’s lineage. Raised in a household where Garcia’s death registered when he was just a kid, he didn’t grow up chasing the shadow of a band, but living inside its branches.
“My mom wrote recently about something she and my dad used to talk about: the Grateful Dead family and community as a tree—a great big grandfather oak,” he said. “The roots go into the music that they drew from. The trunk is the band. And each branch is another band inspired by the Dead. There’s a new limb all the time.”
Bearsville is one of those limbs. In 2010, Lesh played his first “Midnight Ramble” at Levon Helm’s nearby barn with his father—an experience that helped inspire Terrapin Crossroads, the San Rafael, California, venue his parents opened the following year, that closed during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021.
“Terrapin [Crossroads] is where we grew up as a band,” Lesh said. “Terrapin was a big operation. It had a big restaurant, a 400-seat room we called the Great Room, and a park next door where we could do big outdoor shows. We weren’t able to keep that going, even though we definitely wanted to.”
That original vision—of intergenerational creativity in a homegrown venue—was itself a descendent of Helm’s own. “The Ramble started in 2006 as backyard parties formed to help Levon pay rent for his house and healthcare expenses,” said Mike DuBois, a longtime artist based in Woodstock. “One thing led to another, and he was inviting top musicians from Emmylou Harris, Elvis Costello, and Phil [Lesh] performed a few times.”
DuBois, who created artwork in the form of concert posters and various items of merchandise for the Grateful Dead starting in 1986 also helped shape the Terrapin Crossroads visual identity as house artist.
DuBois said the band’s evolution was organic, not orchestrated. “It’s not like they said, ‘you have to do this.’ Phil’s vision, especially after he battled health issues, was to have the legacy carry on through younger people.” In 1998, Phil Lesh underwent a liver transplant, and became an outspoken advocate for organ donation at his live performances.
Since Terrapin Crossroads closed, Grahame splits time between his own projects—like Midnight North and Grahame Lesh & Friends—and reunions with the Terrapin Family Band. His sound blends a modern tone with the unmistakable inflection of a Lesh.
“I can’t sound like Jerry, so I’m not going to try,” he said. “If you play it with the right intention, you’ll sound like yourself.”
Still, echoes remain.
“At a certain point, just playing this music makes you kind of sound like [my dad]. I’m not trying to—but something about playing the music correctly makes you kind of sound like them.”
That circle—or cycle—is what Dennis McNally, the Dead’s longtime publicist, has been tracking for decades.
“The Grateful Dead did two things,” McNally told The Overlook. “They created a fusion of jazz and rock that’s unique. They also created a community that was everything to the people who were part of it.”
McNally described the experience of watching Grahame Lesh grow up around the band: “It’s kind of easy when your father’s a genius. That’s silly. Actually, it’s not easy—probably harder—to follow in the footsteps of a genius.”
Peter Shapiro, who has promoted many Dead-related shows in Woodstock and now manages the Bearsville Theater, put it differently: “Grahame is the keeper of the flame for the Grateful Dead family, which obviously is a very important role.”
“The music’s going to outlive all of us,” Grahame said.
That belief—part reverence, part responsibility—was evident in the show’s pacing. There was improvisation, yes, but also careful attention, a desire to play each tune with intention.
“If you’re doing it right, you can’t help but bring yourself to it,” Grahame said.
Catskills-based harpist Mikaela Davis joined the Terrapin Family Band on April 25 at Bearsville Theater.
“It’s always a delight to collaborate with Grahame—the music of the Grateful Dead weaves through everything in my life at this point,” Davis said. “Reimagining these songs on harp has inspired me in my own songwriting and I imagine I will continue to learn more and more from this songbook whenever I perform with extended family and friends of the Dead.”
Deadheads have long accepted that part of the band’s allure lies in its unpredictability. From its earliest days, the Grateful Dead embraced inconsistency as an artistic principle—rehearsal-averse, anarchic, sometimes sublime, sometimes ragged. A show could unravel or ascend, depending on the night, the song, or the tilt of the cosmos. But that was the point: the gamble of transcendence, the shared risk between band and audience.
That spirit lingers in Grahame Lesh’s playing. He doesn’t chase note-for-note mimicry. He plays with reverence—but also with the looseness and risk that gave the Dead their pulse. At Bearsville, each solo felt like a thread tossed into the air, daring the rest of the band to catch it.
And with a final encore—“Sugar Magnolia,” harmonized by the whole band—the show at Bearsville closed on a note of unabashed continuity.
The grandfather oak still stands.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.