You’d be hard pressed to find a more unlikely Grateful Dead insider than Ross James.

The 30-year-old musician has been a jack-of-all-trades at Terrapin Crossroads since Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh opened the restaurant and concert venue in San Rafael in 2012.

He’s handled sound and production, booked bands for the bar and the Grate Room concert hall, and served as road manager for the nationally known Phil & Friends band. During the five epic Fare Thee Well concerts in Santa Clara and Chicago, the swan songs for the four surviving members of the Grateful Dead, James took care of all of Lesh’s needs and logistics, walking the hall of fame bassist to the stage each night.

With his long black hair and beard, James looks like he could be a second-generation Deadhead, especially since his late mother was a fan of the hippie-era icons. But he grew up in a suburb of Detroit digging harder-edge rock without much regard for the Dead or the tie-dye-saturated social scene around the band.

“I thought of it as a bunch of hippies getting together and taking drugs, and mindless noodling happening on stage, which is so far from the truth,” he says one afternoon in a backstage lounge at Terrapin. “But I didn’t really give the music a chance. I was more into the Stones, punk rock and old country music. I had no idea how deep the Grateful Dead’s songs are. Every night, playing those tunes, a different line will hit me. There’s so much there.”

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Working for Lesh during the Fare Thee Well shows was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “It was a great opportunity, but it definitely got in the way of me pursuing my interests, my music. It seemed too much like a job, to tell you the truth.”

Cutting back on his Terrapin duties for most of the past 10 months, James, who lives with his girlfriend in Fairfax, has been able to concentrate on just being a musician again.

“I haven’t really been happier,” he says. “I feel more focused than I have in a long time.”

WITH THE BAND

These days, his main gig is as a guitarist and singer with Lesh and the Terrapin Family Band, a group that features the bassist’s eldest son, Grahame, and serves as the house band, backing up many of the local and national musicians who play in the Terrapin bar.

“Playing so much music with someone in so many different configurations, like we do almost every week at Terrapin, lets you learn and bond and become really close musically and personally with that person quickly, and I’m lucky that I have that with Ross,” Grahame Lesh says.

Realizing a long-held dream, James has just released his debut album, “Freak Farm,” an eight-song, double-vinyl package recorded at Panoramic Studios in Stinson Beach with a cast of top local musicians, including Nicki Bluhm, Isaiah Mitchell, Dave Zirbel and Jason Crosby. Phil Lesh plays bass on a couple of tracks.

“Ross very quickly created similar musical bonds and connections with so many of the great musicians living near us, and I think he made a really amazing album from that,” Grahame Lesh says. “On his album his songs and his sound are uniquely his, but he brought all those musician friends out to hang and record this album with him so it sounds like a living document of our musical community.”

With Scott Law, his partner in a side-project called Cosmic Twang, James is producing a monthly residency at the Chapel in San Francisco. The next one will be on March 2 with keyboardist Holly Bowling, the Alchemist Liquid Light Show and a rising folk duo called Mapache.

“At the Chapel, it’s about making an environment, making a scene,” James explains. “It’s a little harder edge than Terrapin. You never now what you’re going to get at these shows.”

LIFE CHANGE

Seven years ago, before Terrapin Crossroads existed, James was working 9-to-5 for an audio production company in Sacramento and playing in the Bathtub Gins, a country cover band. His life changed when he answered a Craigslist ad that said: “Looking for a guitar and pedal steel player aged 18 to 24 who likes David Rawlings and Larry Campbell.”

“It was like it was written for me,” he remembers. “I was 23 at the time, the only one in my age group who responded to the ad.”

It turned out to be from a group called Blue Light River, a band formed by Lesh’s youngest son, Brian. James drove to Marin for his audition at the Lesh home in Ross, one of Marin’s wealthiest enclaves. It was a pretty eye-popping address for a struggling young musician who grew up with a single-mother in Detroit.

“I’m not from here and I had never been to Marin County before,” he says. “So it was a bit of a shock just to be in that neighborhood.”

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After being led into a downstairs studio furnished with a grand piano, James knew he wasn’t auditioning for your average garage band.

“I had never seen a grand piano in anyone’s house before that,” he says.

And then there were the photos on the walls of Lesh on stage with stars like Government Mule’s Warren Haynes, Phish’s Trey Anastasio and the late Jerry Garcia.

“I was wondering, where the hell am I?” he recalls. “What’s going on?”

James got the job with Blue Light River and was impressed that Lesh, ever the supportive father, came to all his son’s band’s gigs, sitting in now and then.

‘BRIAN’S DAD’

“I’m aware now of who Phil is and all his success, but he’s not like some rock star dude in my mind,” James says. “He’s Brian’s dad.”

At Terrapin’s “soft opening” in March 2012, James had to learn dozens of Grateful Dead songs while simultaneously operating the sound system from the stage, playing guitar alongside Lesh, his Grateful Dead bandmate Bob Weir and singer-guitarist Jackie Greene.

“I had never heard most of the songs, and had never played them,” he remembers. “There was no infrastructure here then. We were figuring it out as we went along. It was wild, and it snowballed into what it’s become now.”

Early on, James remembers getting into a heated discussion with Lesh at a Christmas party about the Velvet Underground, James’ favorite band growing up. The only thing they could agree on was that the Dead, on the West Coast, and the Velvet Underground, on the East Coast, were both originally named the Warlocks.

“Phil hated the Velvet Underground,” James says with a smile. “He was like dogging on the Velvet Underground. I was getting upset. I thought, how can you not like the Velvet Underground?”

Showing how musically open-minded he is, though, Lesh’s favorite song to play with James these days is ‘Sweet Jane’ by (you guessed it) the Velvet Underground.

“Phil is very open to what excites us younger musicians,” James says.

From the start six years ago, when Lesh and his wife, Jill, were turning a former seafood restaurant on the San Rafael Canal into Terrapin Crossroads, a Deadhead mecca and Marin County version of the kind of family-oriented venue the Band’s Levon Helm created in Woodstock, James knew that it was something totally unexpected that he wanted to be involved in, offering to do whatever he could to help get the fledgling venture off the ground. He took an entry-level job as a production assistant under longtime Lesh roadie Robbie Taylor, beginning a tenure that would see him take on more and more responsibilities, becoming a key member of the original Terrapin team, both as a technician and as a musician.

“When changes would happen and somebody would need to step into a position, I would never say no,” he recalls. “I wanted to help. I’ve been around and close with people here since this place opened. It was so great to get all this experience, and it’s such a special environment to do it in. It means so much to people, and to be part of that is a really special thing. This is my home base and I love it. It really is like a family”

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Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net

If you go

What: Cosmic Twang with Ross James and Scott Law

When: 9 p.m. March 2

Where: The Chapel, 777 Valencia St., San Francisco

Admission: $18 to $20

Information: info@thechapelsf.com