Since this is my last column of 2024, it’s time for my annual look back at some of the people, places and things I’ve written about on the Marin music scene over the past year.

The year began on a celebratory note when Marin’s own Zakir Hussain, the peerless tabla master who helped bring Indian classical music to a global audience, took home three Grammys at the 66th annual awards show in Los Angeles in February. There was no way of knowing at the time that it would be a final industry tribute to a virtuoso the Kennedy Center hailed as “one of the greatest musicians of our time.” Sadly, the longtime San Anselmo resident died Dec. 15 of a lung disease at age 73.

After the Grammys, Hussain spoke to me by phone as he drove to the airport to resume a tour of his native India, where he was a beloved superstar. In his typical humble fashion, he was more excited about being in the presence of his fellow musicians at the Grammys than in any personal glory.

“Just being there, the electricity in the house and meeting all these musicians you rarely get to see, to shake their hands and hang out,” he told me when I asked him about his big night. “The after-party was running into one guy you played with and another guy you admire and another guy you want to play with. And so on and so forth. It was great.”

Lesh’s final interview

In October, we lost Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. Four months before he died at age 84, he gave me what was likely his final interview. Via email, I asked him how important music and performing had been for him as he faced the challenges of aging.

“I would have to say that music and performing are as essential as food and drink to me, but even more so as I get older,” he said. “While it can sometimes be more of a challenge physically than it was when I was a young whippersnapper, I’ve found that age brings wisdom, and with that comes musical experience and knowledge that I didn’t have when I was younger.”

The spirit of Terrapin Crossroads

Phil Lesh’s sons Brian and Grahame kept alive the Deadhead community spirit of their dad’s Terrapin Crossroads, the restaurant, bar and music venue that closed in 2021 after a decade run in San Rafael, with a second summer of Sunday Daydream festivals in July and August at McNears Beach Park in San Rafael. Phil Lesh played at the first one but was too ill to make the second.

“Every time we got the community back together, people said, ‘Oh, this feels like Terrapin. This is amazing. Let’s do this more often,’” Grahame Lesh said. “So here we are, doing it more often.”

The last album

I don’t think I was alone in being inspired by local musician John Cross, who was determined to finish his final album before he died of ALS. With the help of Ari Rios at Laughing Tiger Recording Studios in San Rafael, he released his last record just weeks before he died at age 72.Giving the album the playful title “Cucamonga” after the jazz instrumental that opens the record, he clearly didn’t embark on this last creative journey to elicit sympathy. His only acknowledgment of his plight was on his musical farewell, a poignant acoustic ballad he called “It’s Okay,” the album’s final track.

“The last song is for my family,” he told me. “It’s my message to them.”

The first album

Ninety-year-old Herb Franklin of Novato realized a lifelong dream in 2024: finishing his debut album of original songs. After three months of work at Sausalito’s Studio D, with studio owner Joel Jaffe producing, Franklin sang the finishing vocals on “Silent Voices,” a collection of 10 soulful songs of Al Green-inspired R&B.

“That day in Studio D,” his son, Vincent Franklin, recalled, “was the happiest I’d seen him in a long time.”

The right buyer

Lucy Mercer put her Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley up for sale in 2024 — to the right buyer, someone who will continue the theater’s mission as the Marin County cultural treasure it’s been for the past 25 years. The good news is that the theater is in negotiation with that potential right buyer, a philanthropic family with Mill Valley roots.

“I’m optimistic that something will come of it shortly,” said Realtor Erich Reichenbach, who hopes to have the deal done by early in the new year.

Bread & Roses celebrated 50 years

Bread & Roses, the nonprofit founded by folk singer Mimi Fariña in 1974 to bring live music and entertainment to people shut away in institutions, celebrated its 50th anniversary in May with “The Golden Jam,” a fundraising evening hosted by her sister, Joan Baez, and rock journalist Ben Fong-Torres at the Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley.

Bread & Roses produces an astounding 600 shows a year at 125 Bay Area institutions — jails, hospitals, senior homes, juvenile detention centers — anyplace where she and her fellow musicians could go in, sing and play and brighten the lives of those who need it most. Since 1974, the organization has served more than 1 million institutionalized people at more than 20,000 shows with the help of nearly 3,000 volunteers. What a legacy.

“It always feels different when you know you’re doing something for somebody else,” Baez said. “For Mimi, that was the whole incentive, having real empathy for people who live without the roses.”

DiGiovine’s legacy

The worlds of music and food lost one of their most quietly charismatic characters in July when Greg DiGiovine died of brain cancer at age 72. He died at his Larkspur home with Lynn, his wife of 44 years, by his side.

As Carlos Santana’s manager, DiGiovine was instrumental in the revival of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitarist’s career, playing a major role in the deal that led to Santana’s 1999 blockbuster album “Supernatural,” one of the bestselling records of all time and the winner of eight Grammy awards.

After more than 30 years in the music business, which included managing Grammy-winning Marin record producer Narada Michael Walden and the late jazz drummer Tony Williams, DiGiovine reinvented himself as Tony Tutto, the gregarious proprietor of a popular vegetarian pizzeria — first in Mill Valley and later in Ross — that one reviewer hailed as “a much-beloved neighborhood institution.”

Record Plant rocked again

After being shuttered for 16 years, the Record Plant, the iconic Sausalito studio where many of the greatest hits of the 1970s and ’80s were recorded, including Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life” and “Sports” by Huey Lewis and the News, rocked back to life as a nonprofit, beginning a new chapter in its storied history.

Restored and preserved in all the glory of the classic rock era, the 52-year-old redwood-clad landmark at 2200 Bridgeway was updated with new technology designed to return it to its original heyday as a high-end, professional recording studio.

“For me, it’s not a money-making option, it’s about preserving the heritage and the culture that the Record Plant has brought to the San Francisco Bay Area music scene,” said co-owner Chris Skarakis, who’s looking for local investors and supporters to help fulfill its new mission under the name 2200 Studios. (Go to 2200studios.com.)

“All the revenues we can bring in as a professional, high-end recording studio go right back into the business, go right back into community outreach, go right back into the educational aspects of it and toward the preservation of the building and its heritage.”

Site studio sold

Another legendary but far less visible studio was in the news when it was put up for sale in 2024. In the 1980s and ’90s, some of the biggest stars in rock, pop and country found their way to Marin County to record at the Site, a clandestine studio tucked away in the forested hills of Nicasio. It operated so quietly and so under the radar that hardly anyone knew where it was or who was working there.

And that was exactly the point. Secrecy and privacy were among its selling points.

The studio’s log reads like a musical who’s who of that era: Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Tracy Chapman, Joe Satriani, Night Ranger, Hootie and the Blowfish, Third Eye Blind, Aaron Neville, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam. The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards liked the place so much that he wrote a letter extolling its virtues that was once posted proudly on a wall in the plush living quarters.

A private residence for the past couple of decades, the gated property still radiates an aura of faded rock star opulence with its swimming pool and spa, sauna, lanai, solarium, basketball court and capacious high-ceilinged studio with picture windows that overlook a green wooded valley.

While it was on the market, lots of music business folks came to see it, says Realtor Susan Cox, but ultimately this little-known piece of Marin County music history was sold to an artistic San Francisco couple for $2.25 million.

‘The Song Mount Tamalpais Sings’

Whenever award-winning digital artist Gary Yost leaves his hillside Mill Valley home to ramble around on Mount Tamalpais, he religiously recites “The Song Mount Tamalpais Sings,” a poem by the late Beat poet Lew Welch.

Yost, who’s known for his elegiac videos of Mt. Tam, had never been able to find a recording of the poet himself reciting it, thinking that one may not exist.

Then, searching on the University of Pennsylvania’s website, he came upon a scratchy recording of Welch doing a dramatic reading of the poem that Yost, a computer whiz, cleaned up digitally and matched with dramatic footage of the mountain. The video is now the first in a new series of 38 music videos Yost calls “Songs from the Last Place,” the title taken from a line in the poem. The videos feature him playing his original compositions on a handpan, a steel drum-type instrument, over videos he shot of scenic places on Mt. Tam and environs.

“Gary Yost has embodied the spirit of Mount Tamalpais for some time,” says actor Peter Coyote, who knew Welch and narrated one of Yost’s videos. “His latest video, where Lew Welch recites his famous poem from ‘the other side,’ is simultaneously thrilling and chilling.”

‘Sanctuaries’

After the presidential election, Grammy-nominated kirtan musician Jai Uttal and writer and humorist Anne Lamott got together for a night of music and stories, appropriately called “Sanctuaries,” at Marin Center’s Showcase Theater in San Rafael.

Many of us on the losing side were devastated by the election result, but Lamott managed to find hope and inspiration in a cartoon character.

“The point is that it might not look like anything is going to save us,” she told me. “But it’s like Mr. Magoo on the top of a skyscraper. He’s about to step off and a girder appears. And somehow these girders keep appearing just when we think all hope is lost. And the girders always spring from love somehow.”

‘That’s the blues’

I didn’t intend for this to be an in-memoriam column, but I’d like to acknowledge the passing, in September, at age 85, of one of my favorite bluesmen, the legendary Nick Gravenites, who wrote “Born in Chicago” for the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, “Buried Alive in the Blues” for Janis Joplin and helped form the short-lived band Electric Flag during the psychedelic explosion in San Francisco in the 1960s. I was fortunate to be there for what would be his final performance, sitting in with Los Lobos at Rancho Nicasio, earning a standing ovation.

The year before he died, I interviewed him at his woodsy home in Sonoma County. After reminiscing for an hour about his life and career, he admitted that it’s hard to look back sometimes, remembering all the friends and fellow musicians he’d outlived, like Joplin and the famed guitarists Michael Bloomfield and John Cipollina. Still, he told me with a shrug, “That’s the blues.”

Bonnie’s back

After a decade as chair of the songwriting department at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Bonnie Hayes, who struck songwriting gold in 1989 with the hits “Have a Heart” and “Love Letter” for Bonnie Raitt, returned to Marin, her longtime home, with the satisfaction of knowing that she helped nurture some of the best of the new generation of pop songwriters.

Her star student was Amy Allen, who wrote the number No. 1 summer hits “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” for Sabrina Carpenter.

“I loved being connected to these really talented young people and seeing things in them when nobody else did,” she said. “It was super fun to be that helping hand when they needed it.”

‘Perfect sidekick’

David Nelson, once described as Jerry Garcia’s “perfect sidekick,” was honored at the March opening of the Garcia exhibit at the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Owensboro, Kentucky.

In the early 1960s, Nelson and the Grateful Dead icon played together in two of the first Bay Area bluegrass groups, the Wildwood Boys and the Black Mountain Boys. They became bandmates again in the ’70s with the country rock group the New Riders of the Purple Sage.

With his own David Nelson band, he celebrated his 81st birthday and his band’s 30th anniversary with a show in June at HopMonk Tavern in Novato.

Asked how he felt about as being a rock ‘n’ roll octogenarian, he didn’t spare the superlatives, saying, “Incredible, unbelievable, wonderful, excellent, fantastic.”

Name dropping

Lots of other talented, creative folks shared their stories with me this year.

Here are some of them:

Drummer Mick Hellman of the Wreckless Strangers band, which celebrated its new six-song EP, “Blue Sky Fantasy,” with a record release show at the Sweetwater Music Hall this month.

Grammy-winning producer and drummer Narada Michael Walden, subject of the new book “Narada Michael Walden: Drumming, Spirit and Music.”

Rock journalist and photographer Michael Goldberg, whose photo book “Jukebox” gave us a glimpse into the early days of Marin rock.

Sunshine (Garcia) Becker, lead singer of the all-female Grateful Dead tribute band China Dolls that performed at the Sweetwater Music Hall in August.

Singer-songwriters Monroe and April Grisman, who celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary in April with a show at Rancho Nicasio.

Taj Farrant, a 14-year-old Australian guitar prodigy heralded as the second coming of the late Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, brought his anti-bullying tour to HopMonk Tavern in Novato in March.

Concert posters by Marin’s Donna Wallace-Cohen, Coralie Russo and Maggie Catfish were among those featured in “Women of Rock Art: 1965 — 2023” at the Haight Street Art Center.

In January, fingerstyle guitarist Teja Gerken released his first solo album in nearly two decades, “Test of Time.”

Wishing a safe and happy new year to all my friends and readers and to all the hardworking local musicians who tirelessly perform in our bars and clubs and venues during the year, bringing the joy of music to grateful music fans.

See you all on the flipside in 2025.

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net