By Sam Watson
Midnight North will perform at the Pickle Barrel this Thursday. The band was formed in
early 2012 by singer/songwriters Grahame Lesh, son of Phil Lesh who founded and played
with The Grateful Dead, and Elliott Peck, along with bassist Connor O’Sullivan. The band’s
current lineup was completed when drummer/banjo player Nathan Graham came aboard.
This Thursday, Jan. 25, don’t miss Midnight North at the Pickle Barrel Nightclub. I had the pleasure of speaking with co-founder Grahame Lesh (guitarist and singer-songwriter) to learn about the band. We may have spoken about his father, Phil Lesh, who you might know.
Midnight North falls in the Americana genre, but Grahame said, “We sound like a crazy amalgamation of everything we like and all the music we listen to that we like playing. We’re a little bit out of the jam band world, but we’re definitely in Americana/country rock. Sometimes we call ourselves a rock band, and sometimes we’re a jam band too. There are a lot of different worlds we’re coming out of, the main one being the sort of Grateful Dead world because my dad was in the Grateful Dead, so that’s an inescapable, not in a bad way, place that we’re definitely coming from musically, in terms of our whole vibe. We’re there to play our songs; we’re super proud of them.”Joining Grahame are Elliot Peck (guitar/singer-songwriter), Connor O’Sullivan (bass), TJ Kanczuzewski (keyboard), and Nathan Graham (drums/banjo). Grahame said, “It’s fronted by myself and Elliot. She and I are the main singers, and we founded the band fourteen years ago with Connor. Elliot and I sort of split off. The songs she writes, she leads, and vice versa.”
Back in 2011, shortly before Midnight North began, Phil Lesh and his family started Terrapin Crossroads, a live music venue in San Rafael, California. Grahame said, “My brother, Dad, and I played some shows at Levon Helm’s barn. We got to really know him, Amy (Levon’s daughter), and his family. My parents got really interested in the idea of having a place where people could come to them. That closed in 2021. For all those years, it was our community music gathering place for most of the Bay Area, at least for the Grateful Dead scene. Midnight North got to grow up as a little baby band as Terrapin did. It gave us a place to play and a chance to get our garage band started, but in front of people. It was invaluable, and a couple years later we started going out on the road, and here we are, five albums in.”
Their latest release, “Diamonds in the Zodiac,” came out in November. It was produced by Amy Helm and has some special guests on it, like Grahame’s dad Phil, brother Brian, and Jason Crosby, who Grahame said is a good friend and one of their favorite musicians. Grahame added, “He’s kind of on all of our records. The one before this one, we tracked in full and then went to Jason’s house, where he listened one-time to each song and then played through each song once, and it was perfect. He’s awesome. In this one, we were lucky. We did two, four-day sessions and brought Amy out to California to Sonoma County, a great studio called Space Camp. We rocked all these songs. The title track has a Phil and Friends connection, where my dad sort of worked with Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead’s lyricist, to write all this material in the mid-2000’s, which they never got around to writing. It’s called ‘Jupiter,’ so I finally put music to it. That one was especially important to me to have my dad play on. Things like that—we’re lucky to have the family and friends around that we do to help us complete the vision.”
This tour is focusing on that record, but they have five, so they have plenty of material to choose from. Grahame said, “Our set list will definitely skew towards the new one, for sure.”
Grahame said his brother Brian is one of his favorite songwriters and a great player and singer. He was involved in the early days of Terrapin but stepped back musically because he didn’t want to do the touring part. Grahame: “He filled in for our last tour in California, around the time we released this album. He played guitar and mandolin for us because Elliot hurt her hand, so she was just singing for those shows. It was really special to play live with him again. When we get him, we’re really happy about that.” He wrote “Old Country,” one of the tracks on the album. Grahame added, “Obviously we had to have him play on that.”
I spoke with Grahame about his “famous dad,” and he said, “My parents built Phil and Friends into probably the most successful, until Dead and Co., post-Jerry spin-offs of the band. They would do The Dead and the Other Ones with Bob and the drummers too, but I grew up with Phil and Friends, so it was kind of this niche thing. When I’m growing up, your parents are never cool. Even if they’re the coolest people in the world, they’re not because they’re your parents. We had as normal a Bay Area upbringing as you could have with one of your parents being in a band like that. I was eight when Jerry passed, so the super crazy Grateful Dead stadiums thing was not as big a part of my immediate upbringing until I was older. I was in my twenties when the Fare Thee Well shows happened.” I attended those in June 2015 in San Francisco, which were the first Dead and Co. shows.
Grahame started on the piano and was encouraged to play music. He said, “My folks said you’re going to play an instrument. You’re going to learn music like you would any subject in school, like math or something. My brother and I took piano lessons, and then I switched to guitar lessons when I was 12. Eventually, I stopped taking lessons and just started playing for fun, and that’s when I really started playing. I was a young teenager. I had bands in high school and college, but it wasn’t until Terrapin started that it became more of a living. I was playing all the time.”
Terrapin Crossroads had free music every night, and Grahame said, “It was amazing music.” There was a bar/restaurant side and a 400-seat, ticketed venue. Midnight North plays almost every Sunday in the bar. He added, “That bar scene was where a lot of us sort of grew up as musicians. The place was super unique.”
Grahame has musical influences that others have, but not only did he get to see them play live, but he knew them as well. He said, “For me on guitar, most of my influences were the other guitar players in Phil and Friends. I earned a lot on guitar and singing from the Q, the Phil Lesh Quintet, which was the Phil and Friends Band with Warren Haynes, Jimmy Herring, John Molo, and Rob Barraco. I was just picking up the guitar at that point and having my mind blown by those players. These days, for songwriters, I’m super into Brandi Carlisle and Jason Isbell. Those are some folks I haven’t been lucky enough to meet or play with, but it’s a little different when it’s friends, but I’m very influenced by all my musician friends, obviously Amy and our friend Allison Russell, who I met through Amy, Luther Dickinson, and the guys from Dawes, Hiss Golden Messenger, and Mihali. These are all people I look up to, in all kinds of different ways.”
Grahame said making music is such a cool, spiritual experience and added, “Getting to do it with your friends in front of people who came and spent their hard-earned money to come see you is a really special thing. It’s kind of a different, specific moment each time you’re up there. I just love doing it.”
You can check them out at midnightnorth.com, and from there, you can get links to all their social and music sites.
