It’s July 3 and the surviving members of the Grateful Dead have just finished the first of their three Fare Thee Well shows at Chicago’s Soldier Field. A herd of over 70,000 Deadheads is attempting to make its way out of the venue— many to one of the countless after-parties happening across the city. By simply surveying the weekend’s late-night offerings, which range from bluegrass and funk to rock, boasting some of the Dead’s closest collaborators, one can see a pretty clear map of the current jam and festival scenes. But the after-party at City Winery features a slightly different billing than the rest—a selection of today’s top indie, folk and experimental artists, from Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo to Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan to Jenny Lewis, performing a set of Grateful Dead chestnuts with Alex Bleeker & the Freaks. As Kaplan and Ranaldo duel on a version of “Dark Star,” backed by the Freaks, with synth mastermind M. Geddes Gengras piping in cosmic effects through the boards, it’s apparent to everyone in the room that something new and unique is happening here—something vital, in the vein of the Dead’s original vision.

In a sense, it’s akin to the scene where Phish cut their teeth, too. Earlier on, the Vermont quartet would perform in the basement of the University of Vermont, where local free-form radio host Anne LaBrusciano would create sound collages during the band’s sets—Bleeker’s performances also take elements from both the improv and the avant-garde worlds. Both Kaplan and Ranaldo are pioneers of the indie-rock sound and experimental guitar movement; Gengras recently released a collaborative album with LA uber weirdo Sun Araw and Jamaican cult reggae legends The Congos. If nothing else, then Bleeker has managed to bridge a gap between the jam scene and the underground that has existed for years—and he’s a willing and welcome ambassador for both.

“I like to zone in on, ‘What is that visceral feeling you get?’” Bleeker says while sitting in the kitchen of the West Marin cabin he started renting this past summer. “What is the intangible energy of the Grateful Dead that draws everyone in? It’s not just that Jerry can play a sick solo— that’s not what it is. What is it about the Dead that makes it sacred to people? There’s something that you can’t quite pin down that they have. It’s this intangible element, which is more interesting to the Freaks, as opposed to the more wanky, noodle-y stuff.”

While jambands have traditionally been shunned by the kind of folks who work behind record store counters, the guests on the City Winery bill are the very artists that those record store workers tend to adore. “Bleeker is the kind of guy that you can instantly become friends with, and we just musically relate to each other,” says Jeremy Earl of Brooklyn freak-folk band Woods, who serve as godfathers of the neu-jam scene. “It’s really easy to jam or have him sit in. We’re on the same page, musically.”

Ryley Walker, who joined the Freaks at City Winery in Chicago for faithful renditions of songs like “Peggy-O,” expresses a similar sentiment. “Alex and crew are a great example of a band carrying on a great tradition in jam-based rock tunes. They came from the underground and work really hard. It’s encouraging and flattering to be in their world.”

The term “indie-jam” has been thrown around with increased regularity over the past six years, whether that brings to mind images of members of Vampire Weekend donning Phish shirts or bands like The War on Drugs covering “Touch Of Grey.” But, there’s a line between simply being a Deadhead or Phish fan that plays in a hipster band and actually playing music that, in one way or another, evokes that scene’s spirit.

While technical ability and a penchant for high-brow virtuosic noodling have come to reign supreme as the criteria for jambands in today’s world—something seemingly more inspired by Frank Zappa and Phish than the Dead—a different sort of sound has taken form in recent years. It is a sonic blueprint inspired by the spirit of the Grateful Dead and their willingness to explore extended, transcendent improvisation, but less focused on rigid technicality. It’s a sound that also incorporates elements of other improvisational pioneers, like John Fahey or the German experimental Krautrock innovators Can. In that way, Alex Bleeker & the Freaks, along with others like Walker, Woods, Steve Gunn and Little Wings, are largely redefining what it means to be a jamband.

“You don’t have to be super skilled to jam,” says Bleeker. “It’s something that we can learn from The Velvet Underground as much as the Grateful Dead. If you have all of the tools, it can help, but there’s this intangible vibe element that the Freaks are tapping into more than the technical side, which is what a lot of the jamband community has been zoning in on for a long time. The Dead weren’t insanely intricate musicians in the beginning, but they eventually became that way. Their technicality came from an actual musical curiosity in exploring new music.”

That’s not to say that these musicians are unskilled—both Bleeker and Walker have highly proficient, jazz-trained players in their lineups—it’s more that technical jamming is not the central criterion for the music here. “They all can play rings around me,” Bleeker admits. “That’s the secret— I just surround myself with shredders.”

The Grateful Dead, a group that is both the embodiment of and an outlier from the jamband community due to their ability to also straddle the line between technical proficiency and improvisation, have left a spate of musicians in their wake who have sprung directly from that outlier side— artists inspired by the more emotional, primal aspect of their music. However, the common bond shared between the two scenes is the idea of community.

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The Freaks originally formed as a fun side-project for Bleeker and a group of suburban New Jersey friends with ties to the alternative music scene to indulge their urges to jam. After graduating from Vermont’s Bennington College in 2008, Bleeker returned to the New York area and formed the indie-rock group Real Estate with his childhood friends and bandmates Martin Courtney and Matt Mondanile. Though Bleeker and Mondanile both contributed to Real Estate’s sound and occasionally provided lead vocals, in many ways, the band served as a vehicle for Courtney’s songs. Real Estate started playing the DIY club circuit and quickly gained traction, thanks, in part, to their ability to mold their gentle pop songs with dreamy, psychedelic grooves.

From the start, Real Estate had the vibe of a collective—with both Bleeker and Mondanile writing for their own projects as well as for their shared band—and, around the time Earl’s Woodsist Records released Real Estate’s 2009 self-titled debut, Bleeker recruited his Real Estate bandmates, along with a few other musicians, to flesh out a batch of songs that didn’t quite fit into his other band’s ethos. (Real Estate did play a few of Bleeker’s Freaks songs at their first few shows.) They camped out in the basement of guitarist Julian Lynch’s childhood home in Ridgewood, N.J., to record a series of rough, lo-fi tunes. The result of that session is the Freaks’ 2009 debut LP, which features a song titled “Dead On,” a jam on the “Dark Star” vamp and a blatant tribute to the Grateful Dead. A video from that same time shows Bleeker and his Freaks gleefully jamming at a pool party at a suburban New Jersey home. Courtney is wearing a tie-dye Steal Your Face shirt while Bleeker, backed by the rest of his Real Estate bandmates, powers through a loose country ballad that sounds like the Dead channeling Neil Young & Crazy Horse.

“The thing I like most about the Dead is the sense of community around the music,” says Bleeker. “That’s the most appealing thing for a lot of people—to go to a show and have fun. It’s as simple as that. That’s the goal in any band that I play in, and anyone can learn a lot from [the jam] world. Bringing in that aspect of the culture is something that I really latch onto—that fandom and making it a safe space for people to actually listen to the music and dance to the music and have a good time, and just experience the music.”

In the following years, as Real Estate continued to grow in popularity, Alex Bleeker & the Freaks gradually grew from a side-project between tours to something more solidified. While Courtney started a family and wrote new Real Estate material, and Mondanile focused on his Ducktails project, Bleeker began taking the Freaks more seriously and assembled a more permanent lineup of like-minded musicians who shared his penchant for extended improv sessions.

“In the beginning, the band was very much as the name suggests—just me and whomever could play with me—a bunch of freaks. Over time, I found the right players and the Freaks began to form into a more cohesive whole,” he says.

In the same spirit as Real Estate, Bleeker recruited a group of his childhood friends to fill out the band, along with fellow Deadhead Dylan Shumaker from the Denver jammy-psych band Woodsman. “When Dylan joined the band, it felt right. I remember there was a time when we were all at a Ducktails show at [the now-defunct Brooklyn art space] Glasslands, and we realized that we were all there and this was the new band. We just sort of looked at each other and we felt it—some kind of power-locking thing happened.”

The Freaks grew into a stable unit consisting of Bleeker, Shumaker, guitarist Alex Steinberg, bassist Nick Lenchner and keyboardist Jacob Wolf, but remained on the back burner as Real Estate continued to build momentum. When Bleeker was able to find time off the road to record, he would head into the studio with Woods’ Jarvis Taveniere and the two of them would track songs. Even though the live band had taken form, Bleeker still saw the project as a solo endeavor when he went into the studio to work on his 2013 album How Far Away.

“The second album was so disjointed,” he says. “I did it with Jarvis; it was just me and him and we’d bring in people to play whenever I could get off Real Estate tour. I thought, ‘Man, I gotta make this album! I have one album already and I have these songs.’ It just feels kind of forced. As a whole, it just doesn’t feel cohesive to me. How Far Away is the ‘lost album’ in my mind.”

When Real Estate finished touring behind their 2014 release, Atlas, Bleeker returned to Brooklyn and found that much of the Williamsburg scene had fallen victim to gentrification. Many of his friends and fellow musicians had moved to Los Angeles. As Courtney holed up at home to work on new material and raise a family, and Mondanile relocated to LA, Bleeker started looking for a dramatic change of his own.

Ready to record a new batch of songs, he began searching for a studio to lay down the tracks with the full Freaks band. After an opportunity in LA proved too costly, a stroke of inspiration connected a series of dots that seemed to have been calling his name for some time. “It’s easy with a place like [Stinson Beach] that’s so beautiful and impregnated with rock-and-roll history and Grateful Dead stuff to be like, ‘It all happened for a reason,’ and that ‘It came to me,’” Bleeker admits. “But it really does feel that way.”

He first heard about Panoramic House, a studio located in a mansion on California’s storied Stinson Beach, from a fan in Buenos Aires on Real Estate tour. Soon after, Jim James professed the beauty of the very same studio when Bleeker had a chance encounter with the My Morning Jacket frontman in an airport. Finally, when producer Jesse Lauter brought Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye to Bleeker’s rehearsal space during their Brooklyn is Dead concert preparations, it all came together: Alex Bleeker & the Freaks were destined to record their next album at Panoramic House.

“It was probably because I had just filled out my Dead envelope to Stinson Beach,” says Bleeker of his decision to book time in the space on Lauter’s recommendation. (Fare Thee Well mail order tickets were sent to a post office box in Stinson Beach.) He wasted little time making arrangements to fly his band out at the first opportunity. “I just thought, ‘Oh, it’s this amazing, beautiful studio.’ Then, I got out here and somebody said, ‘Jerry and Mountain Girl used to live down the street.’”

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Over the course of a week this past spring, inspired by the pastoral, coastal surroundings, the band recorded the Freaks’ third album, Country Agenda. It’s, by far, the Freaks’ finest and most actualized work to date. Sonically, the band has come a long way from the early, lo-fi basement recordings, and, in terms of songwriting, it’s far more cohesive than their “lost” second album. While the Freaks’ debut had a certain novelty that came through in the sheer, heartfelt passion of the playing, Country Agenda— which Sinderlyn released in October—is the first set of Freaks recordings to go beyond Bleeker’s sole vision for the project. For the first time, the Freaks feel like a band mining a West Coast country sound with an indie-rock approach. In a lot of ways, it’s reminiscent of one of New Jersey’s other seminal indie-rock bands, The Feelies, who the Freaks recently opened for at New Windsor, N.Y.’s Storm King Arts Center. The record also owes a fair bit to Bleeker’s extended family band, Woods.

“We are more in the country bag,” says Earl. “Real Estate and Ducktails are city music, whereas Woods and the Freaks are coming more from a rural, rock vibe. Our approach to jamming is super primal. It’s almost like, ‘Don’t think about it—just let it happen in the moment.’ It’s not a technical thing—it’s more just about a feeling. It’s coming from a different place than people who, say, grew up listening to Phish.”

But even as the Freaks wrapped up the recording for Country Agenda, and Bleeker’s vision for the band finally came together, something was missing. He was still living a stone’s throw away from the town where he grew up, and still living in the shadow of his other band. As the urge to make a dramatic change caught up with him after his return to New York, he remembered something that he’d heard about a cabin near the studio and decided to inquire.

“I was stagnating in a way. I’ve been living in New York for six years and I was doing this thing where, everywhere that I went on tour, I was like, ‘Why do I live in New York when I’m going to all these other beautiful places?’ I love New York, but I needed to get out and change my perspective.”

Another run of good fortune led him to a rural cabin in a remote village, 20 or so miles outside San Francisco in West Marin County, where he’s been living for the past several months. (The same fan who suggested the Stinson Beach studio wound up serving as his Marin County landlord.) “Devendra Banhart made a record in this house before [my friend] owned it,” he says. “The main dude from Vetiver was just here. That’s his van [outside] that he’s leaving here for the month.” Instead of following the herd from Williamsburg to Silver Lake, Bleeker decided to cut his own path.

He is finding his way within a small coastal community of artists and musicians, where the spirit of the Dead is still very much alive. “I’m so not used to being the new guy, but it’s really fun and invigorating. They call me Alex here.” It was also in California that Bleeker, or rather Alex, recently lived out a lifelong dream when Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann joined the Freaks on a pair of tunes during their set at San Francisco’s Outside Lands festival.

This fall, Bleeker will head back to the East Coast to meet up with his bandmates for a run of tour dates promoting their new album. There’s little doubt that he’ll come back out West, where, at least for now, it seems he’s made a happy home.

“Yesterday, I was driving through this little town and there’s a long road that goes down to the ocean,” he says. “I saw this woman hitchhiking on the long road and I just knew that she was trying to go downtown or something. I was playing ‘Easy Wind’ when she got in the car and she was like, ‘Aw, Pigpen!’ Then she goes, ‘My family moved to Sausalito when I was 14 and I ran away from home and I started hanging out with The Warlocks.’ I was just like, ‘Damn!’”

Perhaps moving to California was the missing piece Bleeker was searching for all along—what was holding him back from taking the Freaks to the level they seem to now be reaching. Similar to Woods’ Jeremy Earl, who moved from Brooklyn to his childhood hometown of Warwick, N.Y., to escape the noise, Bleeker needed to leave the city and the pack in order to truly find himself and his sound.

“There’s a scene here of maybe 50 people who chill all the time, who make music and art all the time and are involved,” says Bleeker. “I know people here who are putting out records that I’m really into, and it’s more of just like a close-knit, tight, country community. But it’s also artistic and it’s beautiful. So when I got a whiff of what was going on here, I knew this is where I wanted to be.”