A love of The Grateful Dead has come full circle for the members of Greensky Bluegrass, in more ways than one.

When guitarist Dave Bruzza, banjoist Michael Arlen Bont and mandolinist Paul Hoffman started Greensky Bluegrass in 2000, The Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia were their gateways into acoustic and bluegrass music, leading them to discover Del McCoury, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and others. The three studied these artists, mixing their rock and jam-band influences into original songs and adding fellow rockers-turned-acoustic pickers Mike Devol (bass) and Anders Beck (dobro) along the way.

The band is far from traditional bluegrass, but after 15 years of near-constant touring, the group is now doing for its audiences what The Dead did for it.

“Now it’s interesting and really kind of crazy inspiring that I’m hearing kids tell us now that they learned about — they liked us before they liked bluegrass,” Beck said during a recent tour stop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The band returns to the Domino Room on Wednesday. “We were their entrance into the music, and now they’re going back and exploring lots of the original artists, so it’s really cool to see that kind of come full circle; it’s kind of an inspiring thing, for lack of a better word.”

And in the last five years, the members of Greensky Bluegrass have gone from being Dead fanboys to friends with the legendary jam band’s surviving members. In 2010, the band shared the stage with Dead drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart at the Hoxeyville Music Festival in Michigan; and Dead bassist Phil Lesh sat in with the band for an entire set at Lesh’s Terrapin Crossroads earlier this year. Both experiences were “absolutely, ridiculously cool,” Beck said.

“To play ‘Eyes of the World’ with Phil on bass for 20 minutes is amazing, and something I didn’t really think that I would ever get to do,” Beck said. “But then, to then play that in the middle of 20 minutes of ‘Don’t Lie,’ one of our songs, where Phil is just nailing one of our tunes and playing this counter-melody stuff that sounds so much like Phil over our music, that was the part that tripped me out the most.

“When your heroes become your friends, it’s really an amazing thing, but then you realize we’re all musicians, right, and so it should be normal,” he continued. “And then it kind of becomes normal, but then you step away from it. So the next day we’re riding the bus home from California … and we’re just sitting there, and (saying), ‘What the hell just happened last night?’”

With the band still logging somewhere between 125 and 150 shows per year, its members don’t have much time for reflection. Steady touring has allowed the band to build a strong fanbase across the country — Bend included — and its fifth studio album, last year’s “If Sorrows Swim,” was its first to receive national distribution.

Fans discovering the band through the tightly composed “If Sorrows Swim” and its other albums might be surprised at the sprawling, improvisation-heavy live shows. Vocalist and songwriter Hoffman has described a “duality” between the band’s live show and its more concise albums in past interviews, and Beck reiterated this idea.

“As we get embraced more and more by the jam band fans, which, we’re lucky that those people embrace us because they’re the best music fans in the world,” he said. “As that occurs, I think those people kind of go and they listen to our studio albums and realize that while we’re doing this cool live thing of a lot of improvisation and whatnot, we also take really seriously trying to make great albums in the studio.”

As usual, the 12 songs on “If Sorrows Swim” were composed by Hoffman and Bruzza. This time out the band didn’t play most of the songs live before recording them, a change from past albums, according to Beck.

This has allowed the songs to evolve more in the live setting. The band completed touring behind “If Sorrows Swim” earlier this year, and has been stretching out with new and old material on its current tour. According to Beck, this evolution is always an ongoing process.

“There’s a song on the album called ‘The Four,’ which we played exactly like the album for the past year and a few months,” Beck said. “And then last night for the first time, we stretched it out and played it into another song, an older song called ‘Train Junkies.’ And the reason I bring that up is because for us, improvisation is sort of always like an evolutionary process. … We were just sort of writing a set list, and decided, well, maybe it’s time to see what happens if we do this, and it was pretty fun and pretty cool.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com