Grahame Lesh Is Passing the Grateful Dead Songbook Around

In May, several thousand Deadheads gathered among the redwoods in Monte Rio, California, for the Terrapin Roadshow. Phil Lesh’s son Grahame was onstage, but not as the newly appointed keeper of a family franchise. He had brought the songs and a cast designed to keep changing.

The Grateful Dead’s surviving members carried the repertoire for three decades after Jerry Garcia died in 1995. That direct line has thinned sharply: Phil Lesh, Donna Jean Godchaux and Bob Weir have all died in recent years, while drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart have kept a low profile. The useful question is no longer whether the songs continue. It is who gets to play them next.

Grahame Lesh’s answer is deliberately decentralised. The Roadshow invites musicians into the band, then sends them back to their own groups and audiences. He points out that almost every American city already has a Dead cover band. A stadium-sized successor may never appear; hundreds of local stages are harder to switch off.

The method belongs to the music’s history. The Dead allowed audiences to tape shows, and those recordings travelled hand to hand long before file sharing acquired a progress bar. At Monte Rio, only one taper stood in the crowd. John Chandler said the present performances still had to be captured and shared, even as fewer people turn up with microphones.

Phil Lesh used to describe the band as an oak: jazz, blues and bluegrass in the roots, the musicians in the trunk, everybody they inspired out on the branches. His son has not inherited that tree by himself. That may be precisely why the songs, already alive for thirty years without their original band, have a chance of outliving another one.