Free jams and ‘Forever Grateful’ with Grahame Lesh & Friends

Throw some instruments onto a truck in Golden Gate Park, invite everybody, charge nobody—and watch what happens live.

It’s a formula with a long history in San Francisco, and Grahame Lesh sees plenty of reasons to try it again.

On Mon/7, Grahame Lesh & Friends will play the Golden Gate Free Jam! at Robin Williams Meadow, a concert capping the opening weekend of Forever Grateful/Golden Gate Park, an immersive exhibition devoted to the Grateful Dead’s music, art, community, and enduring relationship with the city.

Opening Sat/5 at the County Fair Building and running through Oct. 25, the exhibition is the second chapter of Haight Street Art Center’s two-part Forever Grateful project. Its first installment opened on Haight Street in July with hundreds of works spanning the Dead’s history.

The Golden Gate Park edition expands the celebration with original artwork and memorabilia, projections, performances, interactive experiences, and some remarkable pieces of countercultural history, including Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ original Furthur bus and Jerry Garcia’s BMW.

Lesh’s concert carries the celebration outside and into the park. Grahame Lesh & Friends will perform from a flatbed truck, evoking the spontaneous free concerts that helped define San Francisco’s ’60s music scene.

“People want to have things to do, music to listen to, and people to hang out with,” Lesh says. “And if it’s free, all the better. So much is very expensive in this world.”

Lesh, the Marin County singer-songwriter, guitarist, Midnight North cofounder, and son of late Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, has made free shows something of a mission this year. He played one in the Panhandle in March, performed outside the Love on Haight store, put on another in Michigan, and recently announced an October Colorado Free Jam in Denver.

The Panhandle show, spearheaded by San Francisco drummer Danny Luehring, who will also play with Lesh on Mon/7, showed him how well the concept could still work.

“That was a wake-up call that this is a really cool thing we can do, especially with the city’s support,” says Lesh. “Just throw some instruments on the stage and see how many people show up and try to give them a good time.”

Lesh also performed at the July 4 opening of the first Forever Grateful exhibition, though his schedule prevented him from seeing much of it. He’s hoping for another chance in Golden Gate Park.

“Maybe before I play, I could sneak around,” Lesh says. “But I’m excited to see it—that’s for sure.”

The symbolism of a Lesh playing Grateful Dead music for free in a San Francisco park is impossible to miss, though the 39-year-old knows the San Francisco of the ’60s only through inherited history.

Growing up in Marin, Lesh learned about the city largely through his father. One of the memories that stuck came much later, when father and son played Stern Grove together in 2022.

“He told me free music in a park in San Francisco is what he always used to love,” Lesh recalls. “I sort of kept that idea with me that my dad, who was 82 at the time, was like, ‘Oh, this was what it was all about.’”

Grahame Lesh approaches the Grateful Dead songbook with an emphasis on keeping the music alive in the present.

“I’m trying to play it like myself,” he says. “And I think that keeps it fresh because it’s how it’s never been played, because I’m a unique human. Hopefully, all the musicians who are with me are doing the same thing.”

That approach arrives amid another period of intense interest in the Dead. Lesh credits the band’s 50th and 60th anniversaries, along with Dead & Company’s decade with John Mayer, with bringing new people into the community.

Lesh has seen the Dead’s reach extend into some unexpected places. A few months ago, he appeared on Andy Cohen’s “Watch What Happens Live,” bringing a long-running family story full circle.

Years ago, Lesh’s mother was watching bonus footage from “The Real Housewives of New York City” when she recognized a jewelry store near his parents’ former Soho apartment. Then she spotted someone else in the background: Phil Lesh.

The family later met Cohen, a longtime Deadhead, at the Dead’s 50th anniversary shows in 2015, though Lesh’s mother never got around to telling him about Phil’s accidental reality-TV cameo. When Grahame finally appeared on “Watch What Happens Live,” she insisted he share the story. Producers tracked down the obscure footage and worked it into the show.

The appearance also introduced Lesh to an audience that had little idea what he did for a living.

“I have heard from so many people since I went on Andy Cohen’s show who couldn’t care less what I do most of the time,” says Lesh. “They’re not coming to my shows. But they’re like, ‘Oh, now I know who you are and what you do.’”

For Lesh, the Dead’s continuing appeal goes well beyond pop-culture cameos. 

“In this crazy world, with an overconnection to the digital world, there’s something primal about running away and following the Dead,” Lesh says. “It’s like going to follow the circus.”

That freedom runs through the music itself, in which musicians are free to play what they want and feel.

“And that extends to the audience, and everyone is in it together,” says Lesh. “That communal feeling is really cool and special.”

The community has become especially meaningful to Lesh since his father died in 2024. A week after Phil’s death, Grahame traveled across the country to play a previously scheduled show with the encouragement of his family.

“That was a heavy night,” he says.

Music has since offered a way of maintaining a connection with those who are gone.

“The music is so joyful, and it’s almost a way to tell jokes to those who have passed and keep the conversation going,” says Lesh. “Music is such magic that it really does help heal.”

That combination of music and community brings the story back to Golden Gate Park, where Lesh hopes someone with little knowledge of the Dead might wander into Robin Williams Meadow on Mon/7 and discover what has kept people gathering around these songs for decades.

“I hope that they get a glimpse of the community I grew up in, the one I see every time I play one of these shows,” Lesh says. “The Deadhead community is really what it’s about. I know it’s an overused word, but the vibes should be good.”

A flatbed truck, a band, a park, and whoever happens to show up. For Lesh, the goal sounds a lot like the San Francisco his father remembered.

“We’re trying to have a really good time in a crazy world,” he says. “I think we, as people putting on a show, have succeeded in building a bridge between people and keeping the community alive for another day.”

GRAHAME LESH & FRIENDS HOST THE GOLDEN GATE FREE JAM! Mon/7. Robin Williams Meadow, SF. More info here.

FOREVER GRATEFUL/GOLDEN GATE PARK Sep. 5-Oct. 25. San Francisco County Fair Building, SF. More info here.

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