Remembering Phil Lesh and the community spirit of Terrapin Crossroads

I’ve felt an ache in the heart of the Marin music scene since the passing of Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead bassist who died last week at age 84.

Looking back at some of the interviews I’d done with him and the stories I’d written about him over the years, I came to appreciate how responsible he’d been for fostering a spirit of community among Marin musicians and music fans, particularly those in the universe of the Grateful Dead.

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For nearly a decade, until it closed in 2021, Lesh’s Terrapin Crossroads, the restaurant, bar and music venue he opened in San Rafael in 2012, was the catalyst for that communal spirit.

A friend of the Band’s Levon Helm, Lesh had gotten the idea for an informal place to play music close to his Marin home from the “Midnight Rambles” that Helm hosted in his barn in Woodstock, New York. After Lesh sat in at one of the Rambles along with his two sons, he came away determined to have a place like that of his own.

“It was absolute magic,” he told me once, recalling that night. “Everyone was there to experience the music, and that’s what we’re trying to get going here, to have a place where people can lose themselves in the music, where all they want is to be there with the music and with their community.”

Weary of touring for decades with the Dead and its various spinoff bands after the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995, Lesh, who was in his 70s when Terrapin opened, could now play whenever he wanted with whomever he wanted without having to be on the road all the time.

“After 45 years, I’m done with touring,” he said then. “The music is still compelling, but I can’t handle the buses, the hotels, the airplanes.”

Lesh had also been dealing for a long time with serious health problems, another reason for staying close to home. After a liver transplant in 1998, he’d survived bouts with prostate and bladder cancer.

At first, he envisioned a “music barn” in Fairfax, a town where he once lived that prides itself on its hippie heritage and jokingly calls itself “Mayberry on acid.” But when plans for the venue were scuttled by NIMBY neighbors, he and his wife, Jill, who lived nearby in Ross, had to look elsewhere, eventually taking over the Seafood Peddler restaurant and adjacent Palm Ballroom in San Rafael.

After what Lesh called “the debacle in Fairfax,” the Leshes felt nothing but good vibes this time. Not only was the place already built and established, it was in a neighborhood, the San Rafael Canal, where the Grateful Dead had a great deal of history.  At the time, he had been rereading Bob Dylan’s autobiography, “Chronicles,” and had been driving around with his wife, reminiscing about the rehearsals the Dead had with Dylan at Club Front, the band’s longtime rehearsal hall and band hangout that was just around the corner on nearby Front Street.

It felt like a good omen when they stopped in for lunch one afternoon and spotted graffiti of the Dead’s “Steal Your Face” skull and lightning bolt logo, aka “the Stealie,” along with the words “Buckle up kids” in black spray paint on a wall on the edge of the parking lot.

“When we saw that, Jill and I looked at each other and said, ‘Why not this place?’” he recalled. “The owner hadn’t been thinking of leaving, but he was in the mood to do something different. So it turned out the neighbors in Fairfax did us a favor.”

Harkening back to the Dead’s 1977 album “Terrapin Station,” Lesh named the place Terrapin Crossroads. Its logo was a couple of dancing turtles, one playing a banjo and the other a tambourine.

Over the years, top national and local bands played ticketed concerts in the 300-capacity ballroom, renamed the Grate Room. But the real action was in the bar. On any given night you could walk in and catch the likes of Bob Weir, Jackie Greene or John Mayer playing for free in impromptu jams. Lesh formed a Terrapin family band that included any number of local musicians who can now proudly say that they once shared a stage with the great Phil Lesh, a Grateful Dead icon.

I once wrote a column about a younger generation of Deadheads migrating to Marin, drawn by the magnet of Terrapin Crossroads and the Grateful Dead’s history in the county. But even casual rock fans appreciated the cool factor that Lesh created in his home county.

“In addition to being a hangout for regulars and locals, Terrapin has grown into a must-see destination for music-loving tourists from across the country,” I wrote in another piece, this one about rumors of Terrapin’s imminent closing. “With its Grateful Dead photos and memorabilia on the walls, it was a place you took visiting friends from out of town. You showed them Tam and Terrapin.”

That was when the pandemic made the always difficult business of running a complicated operation like Terrapin Crossroads nearly impossible.

“As magical as Terrapin was, there were definite challenges that came with running a brick-and-mortar location of that size,” Lesh told me in an email interview in June.

With its bar, restaurant and concert venue shut down, Terrapin stayed afloat for a while with carefully protocoled concerts and dinner shows in neighboring Beach Park, an outdoor space on three-fourths of an acre along the San Rafael Canal that had been a little-used eyesore before Lesh leased it and fixed it up with more than $200,000 in improvements.

But when Terrapin’s lease ran out, Lesh and his wife announced that Terrapin was closing. At the same time, they left the door open for it to return “in some form, somewhere down the road.”

That somewhere down the road turned out to be McNears Beach Park in San Rafael, where Lesh’s sons, Grahame, 37, and Brian, 34, stepped up to fill the void, reviving the community spirit of Terrapin with daylong Sunday Daydream festivals over the past two summers. Lesh played at the first show this year in July. I had hoped to see him at the second one in August, but he was ill with COVID and had to bow out. It wasn’t a good sign.

When I heard that he had died, I thought back to what he’d told me about the death of Levon Helm, who had been the inspiration for Terrapin Crossroads. Helm was 71 when he died of cancer in a Manhattan hospital in 2012, the year Terrapin opened. Lesh wasn’t able to visit him before he died, but he did speak with his daughter, Amy, who assured him that her father died peacefully, surrounded by family and friends.

“The most beautiful thing was that they were all going in and singing to him,” he said. “They swear they saw him smile, even in his sedated state. If I’m not mistaken, they were singing while he passed, which I hope is true. I couldn’t wish for a better farewell myself.”

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net