Hard to Handle on the panhandle

[Drunk Monk]

A free show in the Haight? Why yes, I’ll be there.

Scored a good parking space on Clayton, a block from Haight.

Got there early and paid a visit to my dear friend Michael (my former dealer) who lives next to the Dead house. He’s an invalid now, under caretakers in his home. I haven’t seen him in a year and the last time, it felt like the last time. But he’s strong - still lucid and engaged as much as he can be. It was good to reconnect.

Went down to the panhandle just in time for China Cats. They played well but not their best. Ran into friends and ended up hanging with my old Den of Geek editor who left the company last year to work on a doc on Stan Lee and his GF. We had a grand time.

It was a gorgeous day - T-shirt weather - and a kynd crowd. Happy deadheads. Only mildly obnoxious. Mostly joyous.

They played on the back of a flatbed - old skool hippie style. 

Graham Lesh’s band began with some strong bass and I was struck by how much I miss Phil and how no one even approached him but the first 2 songs were solid and reminded me. The bass was way up. Then they descended into a jug band sound - Cumberland, uncle, etc - with that bum bum bum-ba-bum bass thst came off flat. If you’re going to turn up the bass that much, it needs more dynamics. It was drowning out the keys which was where the action was - a fake Hammond = keyboard and one of those spinning subwoofers. I luv a Hammond but the fake ones just don’t have that punch. For second set, we moved to behind the stage truck in line with the keys and it was much better. The last few songs were good.

A delightful day. Well worth the trip.

[Drunk Monk]

Grahame Lesh and Friends Revive Free Panhandle Concert Tradition With Flatbed Truck Show Honoring the Grateful Dead
March 9, 2026 


Photo: Jay Blakesberg 

The Relix Channel

On Sunday, March 8, Bay Area musicians performed a concert in the spirit of the Grateful Dead. The free afternoon event took place in San Francisco’s Panhandle, where the artists involved played songs from the back of a flatbed truck equipped with the necessary instruments to induce an audience trance in the tradition of community-fueled exchange. The show honored the original band’s 1960s free concert legacy and its enduring commitment to creating a spectacle for its fans. Notably, the gig occurred on the 53rd anniversary of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan’s passing.
Billed as Hard to Handle, the event took place at Ashbury and Oak Street at the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park and the Panhandle, with featured players Grahame Lesh, Danny Luehring, Garrett Delonian, Brian Rashap, and Danny Eisenberg, as well as guests Alex Koford and Connor Kennedy. 
As expected, the contents of the event flexed each player’s affinity for the Grateful Dead songbook, and ranged from expected originals to associated covers with historic ties to the location. For the group’s initial number, they opened the show with fan favorite “Scarlet Begonias,” complete with its sister song, “Fire on the Mountain.” The initial two-part suite came before beloved covers of the John Phillips original, turned Bobby Weir-sung “Me and My Uncle,” merged with Johnny Cash’s “Big River.” 
On the other side of the proverbial water’s ledge, Koford assisted the group by leading “Cumberland Blues.” Set one included the Dead’s late ‘60s trippy track, “Alligator,” which ran into Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle.” The aforementioned cover was a staple of the band’s early live sets, 1969-1971. Eventually, they resolved into a “Franklin’s Tower” finisher, as the last piece of set one. 
Returning for the second half of the outside concert, the group played through “Truckin’,” “Bird Song,” “The Other One,” and a haunting rendition of “Wharf Rat.” “Jack Straw,” “Sugar Magnolia,” and “Morning Dew” made up the performance’s later additions. 
The event successfully honored the Grateful Dead’s 1960s legacy, delivering live concerts in their native city. Notably, the gig arrived after Grahame Lesh announced the Bandcamp release of his 2024 album Let The Mountain Be My Home. Writing about the experience, which included fellow instrumental support from Damian Calcagne, Adam Minkoff, Nathan Graham, and Justin Mazer, Lesh says: 
“We didn’t have any real plans, only that we had just worked up my dad’s song ‘Equinox’ to be performed live for potentially the first time ever, and wanted to make a studio recording of it. ‘Equinox’ was written by my dad for Jerry to sing in the 70s to go on Terrapin Station, but was too long & complex for the Dead to record and to fit on the album. There are a couple [of] rehearsal tapes of it, but that’s it.”
He continues, “In the process of working up this long-forgotten Dead song & recording it, the idea of what GLAF could become musically started to take shape. I wanted to highlight and resurface some of the more forgotten music that my family had been involved in – music by my dad, songs by my brother Brian, my own compositions, and things we’d all written together. Much in the same way that early Phil Lesh & Friends lineups brought back songs that the Grateful Dead hadn’t performed in decades (St. Stephen, or Viola Lee Blues, for example!) I wanted to bring back Phil & Friends songs that my dad maybe hadn’t played in a while, Furthur originals, and more.”
Notably, Saturday participant Alex Koford recently showcased the acquisition of Phil Lesh’s gifted material, through Robert Hunter’s lyrics that comprise the track “Mercury.” Watch a clip and experience the song here. 
Read more and order Grahame Lesh’s Let The Mountain Be My Home.

[Drunk Monk]

Grateful Dead Music on a Flatbed Truck in Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle
Article Contributed by Gabriel David Barkin
Published on 2026-03-10

Grateful Dead Music on a Flatbed Truck in Golden Gate Park’s Panhandle

Golden Gate Park | March 8, 2026 | San Francisco, CA | photos by Gabriel David Barkin

For the first time in almost 60 years, the music of the Grateful Dead was played live atop a flatbed truck in the Panhandle of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on Sunday afternoon. The smell of eucalyptus and kind weed filled the park during the four-hour extravaganza, which featured three sets of classic Dead tunes performed by two eminently worthy Bay Area bands.
Those eucalyptus trees might have been several feet shorter in 1967, and the mayor and “the establishment” at that time certainly less welcoming of the hippie invasion. But the more things change, the more they stay the same. (Well, the weed is probably stronger.) Deadheads in colorful garb, dogs both on and off leashes, and an assortment of bubbles, banners, and jugglers filled the park in the Haight-Ashbury district on a warm, sunny afternoon this weekend. The vibe was beautiful, baby.

The vibe was beautiful baby

This magical, and some might say historic, event was billed as “Hard to Handle in the Panhandle.” The headline band was a version of Danny’s Live Dead, an ensemble assembled by drummer Danny Luehring that featured both Grahame Lesh and Garrett Deloian on guitars and vocals, Danny Eisenberg on keys, and Brian Rashap on bass. Alex Koford sat in on vocals for a few tunes, as did Connor Kennedy on guitar. (Danny’s Live Dead is an ongoing project curated by Luehring with a rotating cast of A-list musicians from the Terrapin Crossroads scene and beyond.)
Santa Cruz’s China Cats opened the show, following a welcoming DJ set by DJ Gregorio. China Cats are Matt Hartle (lead guitar), Scott Cooper (rhythm guitar), Steve Sofranko (keys), Roger Sideman (bass), and Mike Owens (drums).

Danny Luehring on Drums

Official estimates* pegged the attendance at about 5,000 people. (* Full disclosure: I declared myself an “official” for this estimate. Other results may vary.) Roughly three-fourths of the crowd looked like they came specifically for the Dead thing, and the rest of the audience may have just stumbled by when they heard the music and saw the crowd, perhaps while taking their kids to the nearby playground or shopping for hippie couture two blocks away on Haight Street.

Get on the bus

If you get confused listen to the music play

The strong turnout was a pleasant surprise for the event’s producers, which include drummer Luehring along with Adam Bergeron and Joby Pritzker. This was the first time anyone has rolled a flatbed truck into the Panhandle to put on a show in decades – and the first time the city actually issued a permit for that sort of thing in this location. “There’s lessons everywhere,” Luehring said when asked about the crowd size. For one thing, he noted, “We could have used more outhouses.” (And yes, the lines were long, but the smiles remained wide.)

Flatbed for well rounded folks

The last time the Grateful Dead plugged in on the flatbed of a truck in the Panhandle was in the spring of 1967. In fact, all five Grateful Dead appearances in this stretch of the park between Oak and Fell Streets were within an eight-month period that started with the “Love Pageant Rally” on October 6, 1966. That event was produced by the creators of the San Francisco Oracle, an underground counterculture newspaper, to mark the day LSD became illegal in California.
Sad side note: Another performer who played in the Panhandle during that same era was Country Joe McDonald. McDonald died of complications from Parkinson’s disease at his Berkeley, California home just a day before the “Hard to Handle” event.

Grahame Lesh

Grahame Lesh, whose father Phil was of course, one of the musicians who played in the Panhandle all those years ago, was proud to be part of the extended legacy of free Grateful Dead music in the park. Backstage on Sunday, he waxed nostalgic when asked if the elder Lesh ever told his son stories about those legendary free performances. “Not specifically about those shows on the flatbed, but [Phil & Friends, with Grahame in the band] did the Stern Grove Festival just a few years ago, and he was like, ‘Hell yeah! Outside, for free, we love it!’”

Dannys Live Dead | The Panhandle

During their two sets, “Danny’s Live Dead” (some people were calling it “Grahame Lesh & Friends” since the poster unfortunately omitted the name of the band) stuck mostly to songs from relatively early in the Dead’s history. Other than the opening segue of “Scarlet Begonias” into “Fire on the Mountain,” every song they played was part of the Dead’s live repertoire by 1971. (“Fire,” by the way, included a fun stretch filled by the familiar double-guitar jam from the Allman Brothers’ “Blue Sky.”)

Sunday in the Park

She was into the Blues

China Cats stayed in a similar lane, with only two songs released by the Dead after 1971 (“Terrapin Station” and “The Music Never Stopped”). Perhaps to underscore the connection to those earlier Panhandle shows, The Cats opened their set with “The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion),” the first track from the Dead’s 1967 debut album.
Three songs from the “Danny’s Live Dead” set list merit annotation here:

• For “Alligator,” Deloian donned a red clown nose (Wavy Gravy was in the house in spirit), and both he and Rashap played the familiar melody on kazoos. Meanwhile, volunteers handed out clown noses and kazoos in the audience. Your humble reporter here may have been spotted sticking his head up behind Luehring on the flatbed to take some pictures while sporting one of those noses.
   
  
• It occurred to me, a Deadhead who came of age in the 1980s, that Otis Redding’s “Hard to Handle” was released (posthumously) in 1968. The Grateful Dead first played it in spring of 1969. That’s sort of akin to a band today playing a cover of a brand-new hit from late 2025. Imagine Goose covering Kendrick Lamar’s “Luther.” Just sayin’…
   
  
• During the last verse of “Wharf Rat” in the second set, the generator powering the amplifiers ran out of gas. Another generator powering the PA system was still running, so the audience could only hear Luehring’s drums and Deloian’s vocals for a few minutes. The Deadheads sang along to fill the void. No beats were missed.
  

The only question after it was all over was, “When can we do this again?”

When can we do this again

When asked a bit earlier how his day was going, Deloian said that it was “just like any other day. The sun’s going up, and the sun’s going down.” (Hmmm…where have we heard that before?) It’s not hard to imagine many of the people in the Panhandle on Sunday felt the same vibe, even if for just a few hours. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

SET LISTS

DANNY’S LIVE DEAD
Set List 1
Scarlet Begonias >
Fire on the Mountain
Me and My Uncle >
Big River
Cumberland Blues
Alligator >
Hard to Handle
Franklin’s Tower

Set List 2
Truckin’ >
Bird Song >
The Other One >
Wharf Rat >
Jack Straw
Sugar Magnolia
Morning Dew

 

CHINA CATS
Set List

The Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion)
China Cat Sunflower
I Know You Rider
Playing in the Band
Till the Morning Comes
Terrapin Station
Brown-Eyed Women
The Music Never Stopped