In 2009, John Kadlecik went from playing lead guitar in The Grateful Dead tribute band Dark Star Orchestra to playing with two members of The Grateful Dead.

Kadlecik toured extensively with Furthur, led by guitarist Bob Weir and bassist Phil Lesh, for the next five years. Along with performing songs from throughout the Dead’s career, including resurrecting some rarely performed tracks, the band wrote new songs as a group. For lead guitarist Kadlecik, who played the “Jerry Garcia” role in Dark Star since founding the band in 1997, the project gave him a chance to stretch out creatively in a way Dark Star, by design, didn’t allow.

“Dark Star was definitely a conscious choice to try and stay in character, so to speak, like maintain(ing) the British accent while performing Shakespeare,” Kadlecik said while traveling between tour stops in Oklahoma. His solo “Acousti’Lectric” tour hits 2nd Street Theater for an intimate (limited to 100 seats) show Saturday.

“But I still get to say whatever I want within the context of the story,” he continued. “I would try and still keep solos in the context of the song they were in, which I think is just part of good storytelling. But there was definitely a point where I decided to abandon the vocal impressions (of Garcia). … After 12 years of it, I had to go and do some voodoo rituals — do some all night dancing around a fire with people, burning stuff in the fire that represented obstacles to growth and stuff like that — and that was part of the transition to Furthur.”

Fans at Kadlecik’s Bend show can probably expect plenty of Dead songs alongside originals from various solo and band projects over the years, including The Mix, his collaboration with Jerry Garcia Band organist Melvin Seals in the early 2000s.

“Acousti’Lectric” refers to the modeling guitar rig Kadlecik plays through, which allows him to re-create acoustic guitar sounds, drums, bass and piano on electric guitar, similar to a keyboard. He’s able to loop tracks and jam with himself using this setup (“I have some fun where I can make just long enough a loop that I forget what I played, and it’s almost like playing with someone else,” he said).

“Trying to figure out which of those hundreds of songs to play is where I get to collaborate with the audience,” Kadlecik said. “It’s sort of like your usual soliciting requests, like, what do you want to hear? Although sometimes I’ll hear a common thread through five different requests, so to speak, whether it’s, ‘I want to hear something I know,’ or, ‘I want to hear something you do.’”

Since Weir and Lesh pulled the plug on Furthur in 2014 in order to pursue solo projects (not to mention the Fare Thee Well shows marking The Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary in 2015), Kadlecik has followed his own muse with various projects, including his eponymous band and Golden Gate Wingman. Both projects will tour this year, but between stints on the road, Kadlecik said he’s looking to record a solo album.

Although Kadlecik will probably forever be associated with The Grateful Dead — it’s not like it’s an association he’s trying to buck — he was a multi-instrumentalist when he first heard the band in high school. He studied classical violin as a kid, inspired by The Beatles’ orchestral tracks such as “Eleanor Rigby” and the “Star Wars” film series’ soundtrack. Later he would pick up bass, drums, piano and of course guitar, which opened him up to improvisation.

He discovered the Dead through its 1974 album “From the Mars Hotel.” After seeing the band live, he was hooked.

“I had also kind of been looking to launch what I thought would be a movement of new age rock ’n’ roll or Zen rock ’n’ roll or something like that,” Kadlecik said. “Then I saw the Dead and I’m like, s—, these guys have been doing it for 25 years already. Then, amongst all the other things I was doing, I set upon figuring out what they’d done already, so I could find some unexplored trails on the maps they’d carved out. And in the process of doing that, I got pretty good at playing Dead songs.”

Dark Star Orchestra still tours today, following Kadlecik’s original concept of re-creating shows from throughout the jam band’s history. In past interviews, Kadlecik has said he never sat down and tried to copy Garcia’s solos note-for-note while in that band. However, he said that such mimicry is an important tool for budding guitarists to train their ears.

When Kadlecik was learning, he was copying artists such as Rush’s Alex Lifeson or Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, he said.

“If it’s a guitarist I like, then my fingers do what my heart wants,” he said of his approach to replicating Garcia’s style. “When I’m playing a Grateful Dead song, generally, I was wishing Jerry was there, so that’s kind of what comes out.”