Pod Insights The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe 429: Gary Sinise—The Importance of Showing Up About this episode The multi-award-winning actor, chronic philanthropist, and all-around outstanding human drops by to talk about his son, Mac Sinise, who sadly passed away January 5, 2024. Gary shares Mac's story and the musical compositions he left behind, all of which can be found on Resurrection & Revival parts 1 and 2, which are available on vinyl here https://store.garysinisefoundation.org/. The three music videos mentioned during the episode are Arctic Circles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCCPGtbQ5Pc by Mac Sinise, Shenandoah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_93pPbgGPa0 (author unknown), and The Rise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-jp1CasjU4 by Mac Sinise.
Transcript 12,604 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Mike Rowe? Well Chuck, that one's gonna stick with me for a while.
0:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, me too, me too. It was emotional.
0:10 Mike Rowe? Yeah, powerful. You know, it's funny, Gary Sinise, I consider him a friend. And I realize I always have.
0:20 Speaker 01 Like even before he was a friend?
0:22 Mike Rowe? Like long before I met him, and even after I met him. It's not like we hang out.
0:26 Speaker 01 Right.
0:27 Mike Rowe? It's not like I've been to his home, it's not like we play softball or poker together. I've only met him in person two or three times. I've interviewed him before. But we've stayed in touch, a lot of texting and just a lot of triangulating over the years. Our foundations occupy a certain amount of Venn diagram space, I suppose. Mostly I just admire the guy so much.
0:52 Speaker 01 Like, he's one of those people who is better than you.
0:55 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
0:55 Speaker 01 Better than me, better than you, better than anybody. He's just a really good guy. Who introduced you to Gary Sinise, by the way?
1:00 Mike Rowe? Oh, was it you?
1:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, it might have been.
1:04 Mike Rowe? Well, thanks. Thanks for that. Cause he's so much more interesting than you. And he's so much more important.
1:09 Speaker 01 Oh, definitely. I do get that a lot. Yeah, for sure.
1:13 Mike Rowe? The thing about Gary is, he always shows up. Which is why this episode is called "The Importance of Showing Up." About a year ago, he lost his son, Mac, who is a brilliant musician. And I didn't even know Mac was sick, with a horrible form of rare cancer. But he was. He was still composing, he was still being a musician. And what happened shortly after his death was the release of some music. And before his death too, but it didn't really get on my radar until after he had died. And we're gonna share some music with you over the course of the next hour that Mac composed.
1:55 Mike Rowe? And you know, I make the point, hopefully a bit more elegantly than it felt like in the moment, but... I knew I was gonna have Gary on and I knew I was gonna talk about this music before I had heard it.
2:07 Speaker 01 Hmm, right, that's right.
2:09 Mike Rowe? And it didn't matter to me how good it was or wasn't, but
2:13 Speaker 01 But.
2:15 Mike Rowe? Good grief, folks.
2:17 Speaker 01 Good.
2:17 Mike Rowe? It's good music.
2:18 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:19 Mike Rowe? It's really powerful and beautiful. And so we talk a bit about, you know, Gary's commitment to service, in particular to the vets. But what he's going through now is a father's worst nightmare. And the way he's doing it with the elegance and the grace and the affection and the reverence, not just for his son, but for his son's work.
2:42 Speaker 01 Well, you know, the apple didn't fall far from the tree, Mike, because Mac apparently, you know, he wound up working for Gary's foundation and in fact, the proceeds, the first album, when Mac was still alive, the proceeds go to the Gary Sinise Foundation.
2:58 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
2:58 Speaker 01 And Gary is just finishing that by putting out another album because he found more music that his son wrote.
3:04 Mike Rowe? Yeah, oh God, we get into this, spoiler alert, but the stuff his son left for him to find.
3:11 Speaker 01 Hmm.
3:12 Mike Rowe? You know what? Enough. Just listen. Listen to Gary. You know who he is, you know his resume, but you might not know what he's up to right now. It's inspirational, it's transformational, and it's impressive in every way. He's such a nice man.
3:27 Speaker 01 Totally.
3:28 Mike Rowe? Damn it. It's troubling. And he sure does know how to show up. We'll prove it right after this.
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5:22 Mike Rowe? We're in Santa Monica. We've come in to talk in some depth about your son and his music, but it's impossible to be in Santa Monica and just smell the air and look around and not think of first responders and not be touched by what's happened here. What were you doing this morning?
5:39 Speaker 02 So, I flew in yesterday, Mike, and I'm going out on a band trip. I'm going up to Hunter Liggett, up near King City in California, training base up there. I'm playing there on Friday night.
5:52 Mike Rowe? Lieutenant Dan Band?
5:53 Speaker 02 Lieutenant Dan Band, go up, play at Hunter Liggett. Then we fly down to San Diego. And I do, for every year for a dozen years now, I've done these things we call invincible spirit festivals outside military hospitals. So, we set up outside, we bring food in, we bring moon bounces and rock climbing walls for the kids. Everybody, you know, because you have... Veterans who are going through multiple surgeries and rehabilitation over and over and over for a long period of time, the families kind of pick up and kind of regroup and settle in at the hospital and just endure these long, you know, recoveries. And so, somebody like me coming in with the food and the music and all of that can
6:38 Speaker 02 really change things and lift spirits. So, we started doing this about 2012. And my buddy, Robert Irvine, he helps with the food at Naval Medical Center. That's where we are in San Diego. I set up a stage outside. I'll be down there on Saturday and I'll take the band there. We'll do that. And then, we fly to Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico for a concert there on Sunday. So, I wanted to get here and do a little rehearsal with my band, which we're doing tonight. I'll leave here in a little while and go rehearse with my band a little bit. But, I knew I was coming here, Mike, and with everything that's happened with this firestorm that came through and just destroyed everything.
7:22 Speaker 02 You know, I live in Nashville now, but I lived here for 37 years. Yeah. Raised all our kids here. They were all born here. They all went to school here. And that's part of the city? Yeah. Well, we were up in, the last place we had was right on the border with Ventura County and LA County. But, we lived in Sherman Oaks, Tarzana, Encino, Pasadena. We lived in Malibu. So, fires, you know, there's fires every year. But, this one's from afar. This was the first really big one we were watching from afar, not living here, knowing all the areas that it was hitting and everything. It was just very hard to watch that. And we're constantly in touch with the LA Fire Department Foundation.
8:05 Speaker 02 We're doing things with them all the time and the LAPD. It started years ago when I was here and started the foundation. So, we continue to do all that work. And so, we were in touch with them and we were, you know, sending support, lots of support out. And then, when I knew I was coming here to rehearse, I said to the team, "Let's make sure we can set up something where I can go out." And we do this program called Serving Heroes. And we've served over 1.2 million meals all across the country. Police departments, fire departments, military bases, military hospitals, that kind of thing. So I wanted to do one of our serving heroes here. So we set up on the beach, Will Rogers Beach over here, where they have a big command center. The National Guard's over there.
8:49 Speaker 02 Big command center of fire department people, police officers, everybody's over there. Cause there's so much going on in the Palisades area with regards to what happened. So we set up and we served about 600 meals. I dish out the beans. My buddy Joe Montegna came.
9:05 Mike Rowe? Oh, that's great.
9:05 Speaker 02 He's an ambassador for my foundation. Another good buddy of mine, John Androsik, who has the band Five for Fighting.
9:11 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
9:12 Speaker 02 John's a very good friend, so I invited them to come and we were all dishing out the beans. Yeah, they're great.
9:17 Mike Rowe? They're amazing.
9:18 Speaker 02 John's amazing. And we put on the aprons, we dished out the food. That was a very good thing. Today, I'm kind of busy doing things like being here right now, but in just about an hour, we're doing another one of those. My team is over at the LAPD downtown and they're serving some more food down there. And we do these things all over the place, but then they put me in the fire truck. And they took me up. Yeah. So they took me up to see what was going on. And I don't know if you, have you been up there? Have you been through there, Mike? It's just hard to fathom, you know?
9:55 Mike Rowe? Yeah, I'm trying to figure out the best way to tell you this story, but I don't, I don't want to gloss over what you just shared though. You know, what do you reckon is more nourishing? Is it the food? Or is it for those guys who are beyond exhausted, by the way? And somewhere between demoralized and a, and a fugue state, right? To see that level of devastation day after day after day after day after day after day. And to have a familiar face like yours show up and start shoveling beans onto their, onto their paper plate. What matters more, you think?
10:30 Speaker 02 For me, that particular program at the foundation has always been more about the message. Than the meal. Because you can, you can get food, you know, I mean, they're gonna get fed and they're gonna have food. But we show up and, and to me, it's more about the message of remembrance and appreciation and gratitude and that we don't forget what they're going through and that we take these types of incidents seriously and we understand what they're going through, what their families are going through and how difficult that can be and, and showing up and delivering that message. I think that's, that to me is the most important part of what that program does is just, you know, tries to give something back to them and make sure they know how much we appreciate what they do.
11:13 Mike Rowe? I think it's important too because it's relatable in a way that, I mean, most people might look at your work and they might look at you and they might look at the Lieutenant Dan Band and go, "Well, yeah, I guess maybe if I were an international movie star with a resume the size of a telephone book, I might spend some time singing in a band," and that's just not me. I can't, no one can really relate to your specific curriculum vitae. But I met a woman called Ginger Passarelli about five years ago. Started a modest little organization called The Soup Ladies. And we gave her a big trailer because we loved what she was doing so much. But her team of women, they were there in Vegas after the shooting. They were at, I don't even know how many fires, how many earthquakes.
11:58 Mike Rowe? They just show up and they serve soup. Really good soup. Like the grandmom everybody wishes they had, just serving you soup. And Gary, you see these men, hard men, you know, who've seen tough things, just weeping to be holding a bowl that's filled with soup. And that's from somebody they've never seen before. So somebody like you shows up to spend a moment, that will stick with them till the end of days.
12:29 Speaker 02 I've seen that, you know, and it's not about the soup. It's about the remembrance. It's about the acknowledgement. It's about the, the gift of love and support, you know, and, and that what they're doing is important and recognized. That can mean more than, than anything. We try to do that as much as we can at the Gary Sinise Foundation.
12:48 Mike Rowe? You do it all of the time. How many bases have you played at, at this point?
12:53 Speaker 02 How many have I played at?
12:55 Mike Rowe? Yeah, how many have you, well, first of all, how many have you visited around the world?
13:00 Speaker 02 It's roughly 180 different bases. That's not the, that's not the number of visits because there are multiple visits to different bases all, you know, I've been to some of them 10 times, you know, or whatever. So it's, it's hundreds and hundreds of trips and that. The band has played probably 600 shows for the military, you know, it's crazy.
13:23 Mike Rowe? If you're keeping track at home, 600 shows, it's a lot. That's gotta be two and a half decades of playing, basically?
13:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, there were some years, I was shooting CSI New York and every weekend I was like going out and playing on a base and then come home and shoot the show.
13:40 Mike Rowe? It's the last time I saw you in person. I was on a soundstage doing something and I walked over and watched you do a scene and you said, yeah, I gotta finish this up and then I'm off to play.
13:50 Speaker 02 We're going to play some concerts, yeah. You know, it's uplifting to be able to do something to help, you know, and that's what it's all about.
13:58 Mike Rowe? Let me tell you what happened to me this morning while you were doing the thing on the beach.
14:03 Speaker 02 That was yesterday.
14:04 Mike Rowe? That was yesterday, okay. Well, this morning, I landed here a couple of weeks ago, about 40 minutes after the fire started. I won't drag the listeners through it again, but it was an odyssey for me because I was over at the Huntley looking north the whole time and that hotel turned into the, basically the Pacific Palisades Refugee Camp. And I'm surrounded by people who are watching their lives go up in flames. It's impossible to articulate. You just had to kind of be there with them, you know? Well, this is the first chance I've had to get up early and it was beautiful morning and I just started walking. I ran into the checkpoint down on PCH.
14:44 Mike Rowe? The guardsmen knew me and let me through and then I wandered up Chautauqua and the Channel and, and more checkpoints and I made my way into what I guess was the worst of it. And I had what, I told Chuck, I called him, I said, dude, I think I just had a quasi-religious experience because I put my headphones in and I listened to Arctic Circles as I walked down a cul-de-sac.
15:15 Mike Rowe? And it was just a stunning combination of Dresden, after the worst of it, juxtaposed with other parts of the street that were totally untouched. I'll show you a video later where if you're looking this way, it looks like it has for 40 years. And if you turn 180 degrees, it's a hellscape. And as I'm walking through this, I'm listening to what I think is, well, you'll tell me, but certainly one of your son's most inspired works. It's so beautiful and mournful and hopeful. The video that we're looking at right now is on YouTube,
15:57 Mike Rowe? and I think this captured the day it was recorded.
16:03 Speaker 02 Yes, you're right, Mike. This is the recording session at Sunset Sound.
16:09 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
16:11 Speaker 02 In Hollywood. So many, I mean, it's an amazing studio. So many just great, great artists have recorded in there. Next thing, in a second, you'll see me come in with Mac to the members of the orchestra that are sitting there getting ready to play his piece. And I had no idea, there he is. I had no idea what I was going to hear that day because he was keeping it a secret. He didn't share any of it with me of what he was working on.
16:41 Mike Rowe? Chuck, pause this a quick sec. Just so the viewer understands, your son is, at this point, where are we in real time? Or in recorded time?
16:50 Speaker 02 So this is July of 2023. He died January 5th, 2024. So this is just, you know, five or six months before he passed away.
17:02 Mike Rowe? And he's dealing with a very rare form of cancer, like 300, 400 people get it a year?
17:08 Speaker 02 It's called cordoma, yeah. Maybe 300 people in the US per year are diagnosed with it. It starts in the spine.
17:17 Speaker 02 About seventy percent of the time, they'll take that tumor out, either up here or at the base of the spine. And they'll be able to remove it and they get it all. It's cured. Thirty percent of the time, it metastasizes and spreads. And that's what happened to Mac. And when it does that, you're talking about maybe ninety people per year that are dealing with what he had. So of course, there's no pharmaceutical companies that are focused on, you know, developing drugs that are going to fight that kind of thing. So you're really just trying different cancer drugs and you're trying radiation at that point and all of that. And that's what we did for about five and a half years.
17:58 Mike Rowe? So music's his life. He's always been writing and you have no idea what you're walking into. Chuck, can you scrub forward to when it starts?
18:06 Speaker 02 Yeah. That's Mac. So you'll see him there in the wheelchair. The cancer disabled him. You know, he's paralyzed kind of from the chest down. He couldn't move his arms. Couldn't move his fingers on his right hand. He had a tumor over here on his left shoulder that fractured his shoulder. But he could move his arm up and down. He could use these fingers. So.
18:30 Mike Rowe? Now, is this Oliver?
18:32 Speaker 02 That's Oliver Schnee, Mac's buddy from college. And they teamed up and Oliver helped Mac finish the piece. It was Arctic Circles or something he wrote over ten years ago in college. And he never finished it. And so they teamed up and Oliver helped him finish it. And they went to work on it. And we're in the studio July seventeenth, 2023. And this is the piece here.
20:43 Mike Rowe? I think maybe the sensible thing to do is encourage people to go and really just take five minutes and let it wash over you, you know. I don't even, I'm not even sure what to ask you about primarily because the music itself speaks for itself. But in this video, we're seeing a dad watch, watch his son's work brought to life in front of him for the first time. Gary, it's impossibly cinematic and it's impossibly poignant.
21:17 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's emotional. You're seeing me hear this for the first time. He was quietly working on it with his buddy. And then we were in the studio all of a sudden and I'm listening to this magnificent piece.
21:39 Speaker 02 This is something my son wrote, you know, in college, you know, and it's coming to life all of a sudden and it led to an entire album of music that he wanted to do that he was able to finish before he died.
21:53 Speaker 02 And that's where the album Resurrection and Revival comes from.
21:58 Mike Rowe? Okay.
21:59 Speaker 02 And this is on his YouTube channel, Max and East YouTube.
22:41 Mike Rowe? Do you hear this in your head now, more or less, all of the time?
22:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:47 Mike Rowe? It's a, it's crazy, isn't it? The way music, the way we have soundtracks in our own life and where they come from and, and how they linger, what informs them, you know?
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24:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I can't listen to that one without, you know, just reflecting and reliving that moment in the studio and, and just thinking about him. And it's emotional to do it.
25:02 Mike Rowe? I don't know where I heard this, but I, I'm sure that after he died, you got into his phone and into his devices and found, and found these compositions, or some, anyway, more that you didn't know even existed. What in the world was that? I mean, I, it's like a sea chest of, you know, it's like finding buried treasure, almost, it would seem.
25:30 Speaker 02 It was. I mean, it was.
25:35 Speaker 02 I mean, I found so much music after he died in his files that he'd written and tucked away. And you just wanna say, you know, I just wanted to, like, why, why didn't I hear this before? There are a few pieces that I'd heard, because there were some pieces that he wrote for my foundation. But then there were all these other compositions that he wrote, and charts as well. I mean, I found things that were recorded, that he wrote on his computer. I mean, he would do this for the foundation. We couldn't afford to have a big orchestra record the music for some of our videos. But I wanted him to write the music for some of the videos that we made. And so he went in, all his samples and everything, on his computer, he's got his little keyboards
26:18 Speaker 02 and everything, like, created all the music. While he's about as incapacitated... Not this stuff. This stuff was when he wrote this before he was diagnosed. So he started working for the foundation in 2017. And one of the things he was doing was writing some of these music for some of the videos that we made. So I found those pieces. And I was familiar with some of those. But then I found other things that he'd written for the foundation that I'd never heard before. And then I found all this other stuff. And then I found charts, you know, charts he'd written of things that never got recorded, that he was hoping to record someday and stuff. So finding all this, like you say, it's like, I've found all this treasure.
27:01 Speaker 02 I mean, there was a lot of music. And so, not wanting to just let it, you know, disappear on his laptop, never to be heard, I, I decided, there was so much music, and so much good music... Yeah. That I had to do another record for him. And that's where Part Two of Resurrection and Revival came from. There's so much music, it's a double vinyl album, so there's 19 compositions on Part Two. And stuff that goes back to college, I found college recordings, I found... One of his buddies found a class project that he was writing for a music theory class. And it was just this beautiful, beautiful melody.
27:46 Speaker 02 He wrote it for the class, probably turned it in, and then that was it. Nothing happened to it. And this, one of his buddies had another buddy who had that recording, sent it to him, and he sent it to me. And I was just like, oh my gosh, this is like a beautiful jazz ballad. And so, because it was just Mac playing the piano, and it was, all it said was "Theory Project." So I titled it "Mac Theory." And I got my piano player from my band, Ben Lewis, great, great keyboard player, great arranger. I said, "Ben, please do an arrangement for jazz quartet of this song." So that's one of the tunes that's on part two. We went in the studio last summer, recorded that, along with a Big Band tune that Mac had written.
28:31 Mike Rowe? So his taste is all over the map. I mean, it's very eclectic.
28:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:34 Mike Rowe? I mean, that, what we just listened to was totally cinematic. When I listened to him on the harmonica, Shenandoah, I mean, it's just so Americana.
28:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:44 Mike Rowe? And now you're saying, he said jazz charts?
28:47 Speaker 02 They're jazz charts, yeah, yeah. I found one chart, all it was called was "Piano Tune Number One." That was it. But at the top of it, it said, "Allah, Heaven Can Wait." And he loved the Dave Groson score for the Warren Beatty movie Heaven Can Wait.
29:04 Mike Rowe? Right.
29:05 Speaker 02 He loved that score, and it said, "Allah, Heaven Can Wait." That's all, and so we just riffed on that. So I got Oliver involved with the second record to come in and help kind of flesh these things out, do an arrangement for some of these things, because the chart was there. The keyboard stuff was there. But now we wanted to lay an arrangement over it, and we wanted to kind of take that direction that Mac gave us of "Allah, Heaven Can Wait." So Piano Tune Number One is on Side B with all the other jazz stuff.
29:33 Mike Rowe? You know, it occurs to me as you talk, it's kind of like, like a good musician with that kind of varied taste is not unlike an actor who takes a lot of different roles. You play bad guys, you play good guys, you've been all over the map. Why is it surprising then for a musician to have tastes that span the same breadth? Right?
29:54 Speaker 02 Yeah. Well, you know, I think college did that to him. He went to USC Music School, the Thornton School of Music at USC. And he went in as a drummer. Max started playing drums when he was nine years old. I got him his first set, put him on the drums. The first day he could play. I mean, he could figure out what to do with his hands and his feet. So he played drums all the way through high school and rock bands and everything. And he went into USC. He did a video, you know, showing how he could play and everything. And he got into USC Music School. But then, once he got into USC Music School, he just started, his whole musical thing just started to change. He didn't want to just be a drummer, you know?
30:38 Speaker 02 And he was an excellent drummer, but he wanted to compose. He wanted to songwrite. He wanted to sing. He wanted to do, conduct, all these different things. So he started composing. One of the compositions that he wrote that is, that he actually wrote before Arctic Circles in college is called Waltz for Attics. And they made an animated short film out of it in college. But he wrote this piece, beautiful haunting melody. It's on part two of Resurrection and Revival. And he wrote that, and I heard it, and I was just knocked out by it. And I heard that back in his college days, but I didn't hear what he was writing after that, which was Arctic Circles. He was working on Arctic Circles and all these other pieces that ended up on part two
31:23 Speaker 02 of the record. Side A is all the orchestral stuff. Side B is kind of the jazz stuff. Side C is more rock stuff. Side D is stuff that goes back to his college days, of things that he recorded in college that we put on the record.
31:38 Mike Rowe? It's just another overwhelming homage to the, the impact of influence, right? I mean, you can probably think of a performance you saw years ago. Maybe on stage.
31:50 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
31:51 Mike Rowe? In the wake of that, for the first time, you said to yourself, "I wonder if I could do that," or, "You know what? I can do that." Or, "I never thought about doing it like that. Maybe I should." And then off you go. What was that for you? Do you even remember?
32:05 Speaker 02 Well, and I know a couple of those, like, composers that would have been that for Mac. I'll mention those in a minute. But for me, I was influenced probably more by movie guys, movie actors. I kind of grew up in a suburb of Chicago. It's called Highland Park. It's about 25, 30 miles north of Chicago. And we had a great theater department there, and I loved doing theater and everything. But I would only rarely see a play somewhere, because you had to go downtown to see the show or something like that. But you could see movies every day if you wanted. So, and at that time, this is the early 70s. So, think about who was, like, really rocking it back then. It was Hackman,
32:48 Speaker 02 and it was Pacino, and it was Dustin Hoffman, De Niro, and Robert Duvall, and-
32:54 Mike Rowe? Mitchum was still in the game, kind of?
32:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, John Voight, Cassavetes, Gina Rollins, all these fantastic-
33:00 Mike Rowe? Peter Falk?
33:01 Speaker 02 Peter Falk, yeah, absolutely. Remember Husbands, that movie?
33:05 Mike Rowe? What? That was Cassavetes?
33:07 Speaker 02 Cassavetes' Husbands, yeah. And Ben Gazzaro was in that, the three of them. Gina Rollins in The Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes' movie. I was just influenced by a lot of that. There's a, there's a great movie that Jerry Schatzberg directed back then called, with Pacino and Hackman. It's a little-scene film, but it it really impacted me. It's called Scarecrow. And the two of them in it together, they were kind of a little bit like George and Lenny, you know?
33:33 Mike Rowe? Yeah, yeah.
33:34 Speaker 02 And in fact, when I directed the movie of Of Mice and Men, I hired Horton Foote. Remember Horton Foote? Wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, Tedder Mercies, and some great, great screenplays. I asked Horton to do the screenplay, and he said, you know, Of Mice and Men's already been a film, and, you know, why do you want to do that again? And I said, "Have you ever seen Scarecrow?" You know, and he said, no, I said, let me send it to you. I just want to make a movie kind of like that about two guys roaming around. And he watched Scarecrow and he said, oh, I get it. Okay, okay. I get it. And so that's a great movie. And I was, I was just really influenced by a lot of those guys and what they were doing back there.
34:16 Speaker 02 Because if you look at all their work, Hackman, Pacino, all those guys, they were doing some of their best stuff back in when they were in their 30s and early 40s.
34:24 Mike Rowe? It's funny though, because you don't, you don't know it when you're in it. You know, you don't know it when it's happening necessarily.
34:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, you don't know. And so I've found that when I meet some of those guys, and I tell them those stories about, oh, gosh, when I mean, you know, when, when I was a kid, you blah, blah, blah. And I was watching you do that. They kind of nod their, you know, they kind of nod their heads, you know. I did do one movie with Gene Hackman. And there was, it's a movie called The Quick and the Dead.
34:51 Mike Rowe? Oh, sure.
34:52 Speaker 02 Sam Raimi directed it. Leonardo DiCaprio was in it, and Russell Crowe, and Sharon Stone.
34:59 Mike Rowe? A western of sorts, as I recall.
35:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a western, yeah. And I had one little part, I played in a flashback where I was Sharon Stone's dad. And Gene Hackman's the evil sheriff, you know.
35:09 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
35:10 Speaker 02 And I got to spend two days with Hackman on the set. It was right, and just a little bit later, I was doing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest onstage in Chicago. And then we, we moved it to Broadway. And I think it was Esquire Magazine or something, asked a group of character actors, like William H. Macy, and me, and some other people, who was your sort of guy to, you looked to when you were younger and everything like that? So I picked Gene Hackman. And they said, we're going to set up a photo shoot and a little, do a little interview with you two guys. And so I spent another day with Gene Hackman in Chicago, when I was shooting my show, he came to do the photo shoot.
35:52 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
35:53 Speaker 02 And then he came to the show that night. So I got to spend a little bit of time with Gene Hackman. And that was, he was always very, very nice when I would talk to him about his old stuff and everything, you know. The Conversation, you remember the Conversation? I mean, there's so many great things.
36:09 Mike Rowe? French Connection.
36:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, French Connection. So much good stuff. And Nicholson was another one, you know. I watched all his stuff. You know, I look back, you know, at what they were doing back then and how they inspired a whole generation of young actors like me. And, you know, you mentioned, now there's younger actors that are maybe wondering, you know, maybe saw me on stage or something like that. Occasionally, I'll see somebody like that.
36:38 Mike Rowe? Well, you think of, I mean, who have we had on this podcast? Scott Mann, right?
36:43 Speaker 02 Yeah.
36:43 Mike Rowe? So you're Scott Mann.
36:44 Speaker 02 Didn't I hook you guys up with Scott?
36:47 Mike Rowe? Yeah, you hooked us up, man.
36:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, you did.
36:49 Mike Rowe? And then...
36:49 Speaker 02 He's a good man. Scott Mann's a good man. He's been on twice.
36:53 Mike Rowe? He's been on twice. And the second time, he was sitting right where you're sitting, and the son of a gun really put the arm on me and talked me in, like bullied me into writing the foreword for his book. Which I did. I was happy to do.
37:06 Speaker 02 That was good.
37:07 Mike Rowe? But as it was all happening, I realized, you son of a bitch, you really got me with this. There's no way I can get out of this. Not that I really wanted to. But ultimately, I thought, well, how did this happen? And really, I blame you. This is all your fault. You did it. You wound up going to his play. You saw a thing. You encouraged him in a way that changed his life. It just changed his life. And you didn't really do it through acting or through music. You did it by showing up, like you did yesterday for the firefighters. You're at a point in your life, Gary, and it's really the thing that I'm most interested in talking to you about. It's just the power of showing up and what you can do with your
37:47 Mike Rowe? presence. I didn't really say anything. What a, um, privilege, responsibility, burden, blessing. What is it to walk around knowing that people are... I'm not just blowing sunshine. I mean this. You, for me, when I got really lucky years ago and Dirty Jobs became a thing, I knew I ought to do something outside of the show and myself. And you're the benchmark.
38:19 Mike Rowe? No, no. Anybody who's ever had any level of celebrity or good fortune, who feels like they would like to give something back, has to look at you. They have to. And Audrey Hepburn. But you guys are it. Everything else is a variation on that theme. You have to know that, you know? And great musicians do that too. And great work demands it. But then, this idea, this reality of you just showing up again and again, 600 concerts, 180 bases, slopping beans onto cardboard plates, early in the morning, just because. You don't get paid to do Lieutenant Dan. In fact, you pay your band out of your own pocket.
39:04 Mike Rowe? And I'm saying that because you won't. But, when you set a benchmark like that, it's just a hell of a thing to watch. It makes me feel good to share the species with you.
39:16 Speaker 02 Thank you. Thank you, Mike. There's so many things that have happened over the years that kind of motivated all the service work and whatnot. Got involved with Vietnam veterans in the 80s and really started supporting them. Having Vietnam veterans on my wife's side of the family and feeling, you know, very badly for what happened to them when they came home. And then, after I played Lieutenant Dan and Forrest Gump, I was approached by the DAV, Disabled American Veterans.
39:48 Mike Rowe? They've been on here too, by the way.
39:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
39:50 Mike Rowe? Dan Claire. Dan, yeah.
39:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, Danny Claire, yeah.
39:55 Speaker 02 Good pal. They approached me, gosh, in 94. And I started supporting them back then. I do their convention every year. My band plays, all that, for years now. And everything. And, you know, that led me to kind of... Dealing with our wounded a lot more because of the DAV. And then September 11th, of course, was a turning point for me. And in fact, in my book, Grateful American, that's the chapter. It's the turning point chapter, which is, it was like the 80s and 90s were seeds being planted for what would kind of grow out of that. And September 11th really was a catalyst for a lot more stuff. So I just started volunteering. And then I could see, you know, the impact, like you say.
40:40 Speaker 02 Showing up makes a difference. You know, going to the war zones and shaking hands and doing all that stuff can make a difference. And I could see that that was, that was the case. So it just made me want to kind of go do it again and then go do it again. And all of that turned into just a lot of support for a lot of other military and veteran and first responder nonprofits. And then it was just clear, like, I'm in this game now. It's, you know, the best thing I could do is start my own foundation.
41:07 Mike Rowe? You must be this tall to get on the ride, and you are.
41:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to keep at it. So starting the Gary Senees Foundation was the next step. And now we're almost at our 15 year anniversary now.
41:23 Mike Rowe? Ever since Chapter started advertising on this podcast, I've been getting letters and emails from satisfied customers all over the country. Last week, I got one from Joseph, a retired veterinarian in Texas, who just learned his Medicare plan was shutting down. I can't tell you Joseph's last name because his medical history is complicated and personal, but his situation is not uncommon at all. Given his medical history, Joseph was unable to find a local provider that would include the doctors he'd come to rely on. Happily, Joseph listens to this podcast, and Joseph heard me talking about Chapter just last week. And Chapter exists for one reason, to help people on Medicare find the plan that's right for them.
42:09 Mike Rowe? It's a free service. Anyhow, Joseph called Chapter. He connected with an advisor named Heidi. And Heidi caught something that most people miss. Because his current plan was about to close. Joseph had a limited window to continue with his current coverage through a new plan, without any additional medical underwriting. In other words, Heidi found a way to get Joseph the coverage he needed with the doctors he preferred. Then, she found great coverage for his wife, too. Moral of the story? Medicare plans are constantly evolving. You are too. Call Chapter. Make sure you're on the best plan for you.
42:48 Mike Rowe? Also, people who switch plans after calling Chapter save an average of $1,100 a year. 804-Chapter. That's the number. Call it today, it's free. Whole thing takes about 20 minutes. 804-Chapter. But now, this other thing is happening. And there's a corollary to it. The philanthropy is over here, and everything you've done under, call it the umbrella of service, speaks for itself. But now, like many millions of other Americans, you're dealing with a level of grief that I think would cripple a lot of people. And you're doing it publicly. And you're sharing it. And you're sharing it through music.
43:33 Mike Rowe? And that is a, requires a measure of elegance and grace, really. That is something else, I believe, people. I'm excited to have you on to talk about this, because I know people are listening who have, as Robert Frost said, been acquainted with the night. They know. And they're looking to you, and the way you're remembering your son. And it's just ripe with hope.
44:04 Speaker 02 Thank you, Mike. You know...
44:07 Speaker 02 A lot of what I've tried to do over the years, recognizing that a lot of our veterans and first responders are dealing with a lot of difficult things, they're containing their grief, they're containing their stress and all that stuff, they're keeping it in, they're not sharing it, they're imploding in ways. And so, we go out there, we try, you know, I want to hear what they have to say. So, I try to talk to them about it. I encourage them to share it. That's a path to healing. And Scott does that with his storytelling workshops and everything, trying to teach veterans how to get it out, don't keep it in, share it, let people know what you've been through and how you're dealing with it.
44:48 Speaker 02 Sharing that story can help one heal. It's certainly done that. I've been trying to get veterans to do that for years. So, I would be kind of a hypocrite if I just kept everything in, didn't share. I'm going through a lot of emotional stuff. Our whole family is. I mean, you know, a drop of a hat, I'll just get all choked up and all of that. And anyone who's going through a very, very close loss, especially, I guess, the loss of a child like that, you know, that can be very, very hard. And so, you know, as I've encouraged others to kind of, don't keep that in, you know, share it, share those things. We don't want people doing bad things to themselves because they didn't talk about what they
45:31 Speaker 02 were going through. I know it's been helpful for me to share the story of our son, to talk about Mac. He was a wonderful guy and to share some of the gifts that he left us. That has been super helpful for me. I mean, I'll tell you, after he died, finding that music on his iPad and his Dropbox file and his phone and all that stuff, just discovering this stuff. And I was just poring through his phone, just text messages. I'm just looking for, you know, and I found messages that he wrote. I found letters that he wrote to us. And just tucked away for later. Things that he wanted us to have if something happened to him.
46:16 Speaker 02 Things he wanted you to find. Yeah. Had he wanted to give them to you, he would have given them to you. He wanted you to find them. He did. He knew you were gonna go looking. And videos that he made, you know, talking into the camera. And these are things that he was doing in his hospital bed. In the quiet of the night, you know, he would be, his hours were like, you know, he'd be up till midnight or one in the morning and, you know, after we go to bed, he's up for another two or three hours and that was his sort of quiet time to play his harmonica, to read his Bible, to make videos, to write, all that, to make music. And he was doing all that. And then I discovered a lot of these things
46:59 Speaker 02 that I know he put down because he wanted us to have. I'm not sure about the music. I think some of the music, he just, he had written it so long ago that he kind of forgot about it and he never shared it. But finding it, I mean, now my band is doing a song that he wrote as a sophomore in college. And it's such a beautiful piece that features violin. It's an instrumental. It's called "Angel's Theme." And I found it and he wrote it for a class and tucked it away. And it's a beautiful, beautiful piece. I gave it to my band. I said, "We're learning this song." And now we do it. And I kind of tell the story of Mac. Share the message of the album. "Angel's Theme" is actually on part two.
47:41 Speaker 02 And the last song he wrote, so "Angel's Theme" is one of the first ones I found that he wrote. The last song he wrote is a song, you know, it's quasi, right? When you say qua- but Mac, Mac liked to say quasi. And so he wrote this song called "Quasi Love." And he wrote all the lyrics. He wrote the melody, all that stuff. And he started teaming up with one of my band members, Dan Myers, who plays violin for my band, one of my singers. And they were pals and Dan was helping him flesh it out. And I found it after he died. And I said to Dan, "Dan, what is this?" "Oh yeah, we were working on this one little thing." I said, "We're gonna finish that.
48:22 Speaker 02 We're gonna finish it and put it on the record." So now it's this rockin' tune and my band is doing that. My band is doing that, too. That's unscriptable. It's amazing. We're doing the first song that I can remember Mac writing. In college and the last song he wrote, Quasi-Love.
48:39 Mike Rowe? I got a confession for you. I've known you for a while, certainly admired you a bunch and I, and I knew what your son was going through. And when he died, I, my heart broke for you. And then when the album came out.
48:54 Mike Rowe? If I'm being honest, I thought to myself, you know what? It doesn't matter how good it is or how good it isn't. C minus, C plus. It doesn't matter because it's all so real and beautiful.
49:12 Mike Rowe? I was so stunned to hear how good it actually is. And forgive me for just saying it like that, but I know there's so many ways to manage expectations.
49:25 Speaker 02 I know what you're saying.
49:26 Mike Rowe? There's so many ways.
49:27 Speaker 02 Is this a father who just, you know?
49:29 Mike Rowe? Right. And is this, is this my friend Gary, who I admire so much that I'm not even going to be able to listen to his son's work objectively? I'm going to say I love it no matter what there.
49:40 Speaker 02 Right.
49:41 Mike Rowe? But brother, walking through the Palisades and listening to this. I'm not emotional, but the combination of those sights. It was cinematic and breathtaking, listening to that and looking at that. The moisture flew out of my face. It actually touched me. It was, it's wonderful music, period.
50:08 Speaker 02 I'm so touched that you, you did that, Mike. I mean, that that was a piece of music you were listening to when you went up there to see that for the first time.
50:17 Mike Rowe? It wasn't my plan. I went there because I felt like I needed to see it. And then I knew you were coming in, so I thought, well, I should listen to something. I'd literally have to sit down on the curb as I listened to that, staring into this devastation. But right behind me are all those homes that are still standing. So there's the hope. And it's like two sides of the same coin. Those are difficult ideas to articulate. That's why we have music. Like the right song, the right tune, the right time, the right composition. It can just, it can change your, your whole deal.
50:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, and stay with you forever. I mean, how many songs are in your, they're just in your memory bank, you know, and it takes you, you hear it and you're right back at that moment where you first heard it.
51:09 Mike Rowe? Think about the tunes you guys play, right? You're an audience band, you're a cover band. You play music that immediately transports people to probably the place first time they heard, fill in the blank. You play what people want to hear.
51:25 Speaker 02 We do. It's a variety show, for sure. You know, I, I always, I didn't start the band to be a songwriter or anything like that. I play bass with this band when we play and the only time I play it is if I have to learn something that we're gonna, we're gonna do. So I don't pick up the bass. It's not something I do for a living. It's for the mission. It's to see the faces of the people kind of light up and have a good time. And so we play nothing but hits. It's a killer show. I mean, it's really a lot of great songs. The band is really, really great. Uh, and we played now, gosh, the first military base we played on, uh, at was Great Lakes Naval Base
52:06 Speaker 02 in North Chicago, November 2003. So, uh, oh four, we went on our first USO tour. I've done like a hundred USO tours or something like that since then, but that was our first. We went to Diego Garcia, way down in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It's hard to get to. And then we went over to Singapore. We did a show at the Navy Base there and then we went to Korea for three shows. And that was our first overseas tour. Now we've done, like I said, I mean, hundreds of shows, many, many trips. We're going on a, on a three show trip and we, we get to play Max's songs. I mean, we're playing both, both those songs.
52:48 Mike Rowe? Incredible. I wonder who's getting more out of this. You or the audience?
52:54 Speaker 02 Well, I get a lot out of it because it's part of the mission. I'm not like taking jobs at, you know, club jobs or stuff like that. The band is there for the mission of supporting the men and women who serve our country. I do fundraisers with it and go to military bases, military hospitals, all that kind of stuff. And I get a lot out of that, just seeing what the, what joy can bring. And I love playing and it's kind of, it's my release these days. It's the way I kind of relax and.
53:30 Mike Rowe? Well, there's no better word to put after mission than accomplished. And you've been accomplishing the mission. Every time you do it, you just put another bow on it. I want to ask you something I, I wonder if anybody's asked you before. I want to ask you about Oliver. Oliver Schnee. And, um, you know, his name pops up a lot in sometimes kind of a tertiary way, but it just, when you mentioned him before, it just made me think about the importance and the, and the power of, of friendship and a friend who reaches back over a few years to, you know, reconnect the dots in some way.
54:12 Mike Rowe? Tell me about Oliver and his, his relationship with your son.
54:16 Speaker 02 You know, I think there was kind of a God thing going on in 2023 because Mac in February of 23, he said to me, as much as you don't want to admit it, I could see that Mac was not getting better, right? We tried 20, 25 different drugs. He'd had multiple surgeries. He was paralyzed from the chest down. You could see tumors on his nose, on his chest and everything. They're not getting smaller. You know, we're trying a drug. The doctor asked me, how are those visuals? Does it look smaller? No, doesn't. So we could see and I'm, I'm, and Mac was, he was very realistic, you know, and very
55:00 Speaker 02 practical and very kind of accepting. He was just an amazing, gracious, kind of courage under fire kind of guy and.
55:12 Speaker 02 You never heard him complaining about what was going on, if he was in pain. That was the hard time, or feeling sick from treatment or something like that. But otherwise, he was just smiling through it and just... All that summer, when they recorded Arctic Circles, he was watching the Cubs. I mean, I grew up in Chicago, I'm a big Cub fan. So Mac and my wife, who's kind of disabled herself and has had multiple spine surgeries, they were just in there. My 90-year-old mom was in there watching the Cubs. I mean, they were enjoying themselves, and Mac was enjoying himself. But at the beginning of 2023, which ended up being his final year,
55:56 Speaker 02 he just, all of a sudden, he wasn't playing music, wasn't doing any of that because he couldn't. You know, he's fighting cancer and he was disabled. He said, "Dad, there's a piece of music that I wrote in college, and I think I'd like to finish it. Do you think Dan, my buddy from my band, would help me flesh it out?" And I said, "Yeah." He contacted Dan. We had a gig in California, right near our house. So Dan came out a day early, they started working on it together. Then he got together with my keyboard player. And Mac would send him all the music, and then he'd play it and record it and send it back to Mac, and he'd make notes.
56:37 Speaker 02 And then, out of the blue, probably about April or so of 2023, Mac gets a text from his old college buddy, Oliver Schnee. And Oliver had tried to send him some texts here and there over the years, but he never heard back. But this time, this time Mac wrote back to him. And Oliver said, "Great, you know, let's get together." They were buddies in college, they went to Disneyland, and you know, they did all kinds of stuff together. They weren't in the same sort of classes because Oliver was working kind of on composing and orchestral stuff. Mac was in the pop program, so he was doing a lot of drumming and rock music and stuff.
57:21 Speaker 02 But Mac was always very eager to... You know, visit other things. Him and Oliver really hit it off. And so they reconnected and Oliver said, great, why don't we meet at this restaurant? And Mac said, well, I guess you don't know, I'm, you know, I can't walk and I'm kind of confined. Can you come over here to the house? So Oliver came over. They reconnected and everything. Oliver said, what about music? Tell me what you're doing. And Mac said, well, you know, actually, there's a piece I wrote in college that I'm trying to flesh out again. And Oliver said, great, can I hear it?
58:01 Speaker 02 I think Mac gave him one of the tapes that my piano player had recorded for Mac. Oliver called up Mac and said, this is fantastic. Can I help you finish it? And so they went to work on it. And this is probably June, you know, May, June of 2023. By July 17th, they were in the studio with an orchestra, Mac financing the whole thing out of his pocket. He asked me, Dad, do you think I should do this? And I said, absolutely. You've got, you've got the money. He'd had a savings and it was just building up, you know, resources. So he had the money and he produced the whole thing, financed the whole thing.
58:44 Speaker 02 Oliver produced the record with Mac doing Arctic Circles. And then Mac had picked up harmonica and he was starting to futz around with harmonica. And I suggested he listen to my buddy Sammy Davis. He's a Medal of Honor recipient who plays Shenandoah on the harmonica. And Sammy tells a story about being in Vietnam and getting the harmonica and playing it over there and stuff. And so I gave him a recording of Sammy. He listened to it. He learned Shenandoah himself and he played it for me. I said, you know what?
59:21 Speaker 02 You're gonna be in the studio for Arctic Circles, you're gonna have the orchestra there. You know, show this to Oliver and ask him to do an arrangement of, you know, to back you up with the strings behind you playing Shenandoah. And that's where Shenandoah came from. Oliver did the arrangement, they went into the studio together. And they loved it so much, Mac said, "You know what? I wanna do a whole album. I've got all these other ideas, I've got some more original things, I wanna play harmonica on some things." So on Resurrection, and that's where Resurrection and Revival comes from. One of the things that Mac was doing at the foundation was kind of refurbishing things
1:00:02 Speaker 02 that were in my archive, you know, taking old pictures and making them new again and everything. So on the cover of Resurrection and Revival, you'll see my grandfather, Mac's great-grandfather, there were a series of old black and white photographs from World War I that Mac kind of, you know, lightened them up and he brought them back to life and everything. That's the picture right there.
1:00:24 Mike Rowe? That's your granddad?
1:00:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's my grandfather, that's Mac's great-grandfather, Daniel Sinise, in World War I. He's training to go to World War I, right there. And Mac had refurbished that picture. And now he's resurrecting this old piece of music. So, he's reviving the pictures, he's resurrecting the music, that's where Resurrection and Revival comes from. So he decided to take old things and kind of make them new again. So you'll hear him playing harmonica on Amazing Grace. You'll hear him playing harmonica on an old Irish song called "Tura Lura Lura." Yeah. So that was a song that his mother sang to him when he was a little kid.
1:01:10 Speaker 02 She used to sing that and another one called Red River Valley, you know, the old, Red River Valley. So Mac learned harmonica to all those songs. Oliver did arrangements for all of them, they went back into the studio and did all that.
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1:02:51 Speaker 02 We had a wonderful day with my band at, now this, which one is this? Shenandoah. Oh, Shenandoah, yeah.
1:02:59 Mike Rowe? Oh, yeah.
1:03:00 Speaker 02 So this is, this is a beautiful, beautiful piece.
1:03:03 Mike Rowe? Who gave him the harmonica?
1:03:05 Speaker 02 His mom suggested he get it because he couldn't play drums. And she said, you know, you can hold, you can hold the harmonica and lay in his bed and play it. So he learned how to do that.
1:03:18 Mike Rowe? Is there a simpler instrument with a more mournful sound?
1:03:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, I, I don't know. Probably not.
1:03:42 Mike Rowe? Oh, jeez.
1:03:49 Speaker 02 That's Oliver's, at the mixing board, that's Bill Schnee. He's a very, very well-known, highly-regarded, highly-respected mixer, sound mixer and producer.
1:04:06 Speaker 02 That's my mom.
1:04:07 Mike Rowe? Oh, my gosh. Oh, come on.
1:04:13 Speaker 02 That's something.
1:04:59 Mike Rowe? Is it Stephen Foster? Who wrote that? Who wrote the original, do we know?
1:05:04 Speaker 02 Janodoh, I know.
1:05:06 Mike Rowe? It might have been Foster. It's impossibly haunting, and beautiful, and poignant, and all of it. Wow, maybe you're missing an "R." Maybe it's resurrection, revival. There's certainly reverence in it.
1:05:23 Mike Rowe? And, you know, I'm thinking of Oliver still, man. The guy revived a friendship. Out of the blue, not knowing the deal your son had drawn. Just reaches out, "Hey, man..." Imagine reaching out, just casually, to see what's up. And learning that this guy you haven't talked to in nearly a decade is in a chair. And then dropping what you're doing and coming to see him. Showing up.
1:05:53 Mike Rowe? Oliver showed up, man.
1:05:56 Speaker 02 Well, they were pals. They just, they just hadn't seen each other for quite a while. Oliver was aware that Mac was going through a cancer thing, but not to the extent that it had disabled Mac the way it had, you know, so that was news. And then they, you know, that's why I say there's a God thing here, because, I mean, the timing, you know, had Oliver, you know, waited another five months to reach out or something like that, this whole project would have not happened. But the timing was amazing because Mac had just started to get back into this piece of music. And then out of the blue, his old buddy contacted
1:06:37 Speaker 02 him, and it was just a beautiful, beautiful thing. And the days in the studios were just wonderful. And the days that Mac was in the studios, you can see him just, just really, I mean, he's in his element again, you know, he's back doing his music. And he's seeing some of these orchestral pieces come to life, you know, in a way that he'd envisioned maybe years ago, but never had fully realized until that moment.
1:07:06 Mike Rowe? I guess maybe really the way to land the plane is to say that maybe you're not a movie star, maybe you're not a musician, maybe you don't have a podcast, maybe you don't pop up on the TV, but I bet you remember somebody from the old days who you were close to, you haven't talked to in a while. Give them a call. Send them a text. See what's up. See where it leads. See what happens when you show up.
1:07:38 Speaker 02 You never know. Yeah.
1:07:40 Mike Rowe? Well, from a guy who's been showing up his whole life, man, I'm so glad you came by and spent some time. I'm impressed as always and just grateful to have found your boy's music. Last question. What's the most important thing you learned from him?
1:08:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, just, it's cliche, but I guess. But don't take those precious moments for granted, you know? And we all do, because we're just living our lives and going through, and then next thing you know, you realize you can't talk to somebody anymore. I remember those final days in the hospital. I spent many, many, many, many hours with Mac in the hospital, sleeping on the chair next to him. You know, we had to take him to the hospital. Can I tell one story about that final week? There were some videos from the record.
1:08:46 Speaker 02 Those videos were done, that you just showed, those were done at Sunset Sound in Hollywood. But then we moved to Nashville in September of 2023, and Mac was back in the studio with Oliver and my band and an orchestra back in November of 2023. Doing the other music, you know, as I mentioned, Red River Valley and some Amazing Grace, some other originals, one called Cloud Surfing, another one called Penguin Dance. Those are all on the first record. We're back in the studio, and in December, toward the end of December, the videos from
1:09:28 Speaker 02 those sessions, the November sessions, were all ready. And so, I think it was November 28th, or December 28th, right after Christmas, Oliver and his mom and dad came over, some of the other people that had worked on the record, and we had a viewing party. We had food, and we brought Mac out. He was going through some pain, he was starting to struggle a bit more. But we all watched the new videos. This is on December 28th. On December 30th, I had to call the ambulance. So he saw all the music, the music is going to press, now we're gonna make the vinyls.
1:10:11 Speaker 02 Mac said, "Let's make a hundred vinyls, Dad, and if we ever sell any, they can, the proceeds can go to the foundation." He just wanted to have something to give to people.
1:10:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:10:22 Speaker 02 And he goes in the hospital, December 30th. I'm in the hospital with him, I'm staying with him. Things were getting harder.
1:10:33 Speaker 02 And then all of a sudden, I couldn't talk to him.
1:10:43 Speaker 02 Because
1:10:47 Speaker 02 he wasn't able to talk anymore. He was,
1:10:52 Speaker 02 you know, he was not, he was, he was going. And
1:11:02 Speaker 02 I was with him in the hospital through that whole time, those, that whole time. My wife was having some issues. So she couldn't come and stay with him all the time. And I was staying with him.
1:11:14 Speaker 02 You know, you realize,
1:11:18 Speaker 02 gosh, yesterday, I, if I would only asked him this, you know, if I would only talk to him about that, or asked him what he was thinking of, was he afraid? Was he scared? Because it was getting harder to breathe. So they put a BiPap Max mask on, and that shoots air into his lungs because he, he wasn't able to get his air, and it's getting harder. And now, all of a sudden, he can't talk.
1:11:46 Speaker 02 And then you just reflect a lot, Mike, you know, you reflect a lot about, I should have asked this thing, I should have, should have told him this, you know?
1:12:00 Speaker 02 And so you, you kind of have those moments of reflection and, and a little bit, bit of regret. But you also,
1:12:11 Speaker 02 you also learn a bit. And Mac taught us a lot. You know, even in his final hours, you know, he taught us a lot. And we have our two daughters and grandchildren. And I look at them and just hold them tighter and, you know, love them more and think about what can I do for them? You know, I'm doing all these other things, you know? What can I do for them? You know, what would I have done for Mac if I had the chance, you know? And so through them, you know, Mac knows I'm looking out for him and...
1:12:56 Speaker 02 He's, I think he's, he's proud of that and happy about that. And, and I learned a lot from him about that, you know, just acceptance and he was a faithful guy, you know, and I think he accepted what was happening to him. That's why he left some of those messages that, that I found and discovered.
1:13:18 Mike Rowe? You don't have much choice, whether you're gifted, you get a gift, you don't get a gift, but the choice to share it, that's conscious. You made it, he made it, and millions will benefit from the choice.
1:13:40 Speaker 02 I hope so, Mike, you know, I hope more people go and listen to this music and support the foundation and, and all of that. He wanted that and he would be getting such a kick out of the fact that his old man had this project after he was gone and I poured myself into it. And now he's got another record. He'd never imagined that, you know, in a million years, that all that stuff that he had on his laptop would end up on an album and now you can download it and, and it's making money for the foundation and helping us with our mission. He never, never imagined that.
1:14:15 Mike Rowe? It's a miraculous time that we're living in, that all of that can happen technically.
1:14:21 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:14:22 Mike Rowe? Uh, where do people go to watch, listen and buy?
1:14:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, Maxine's YouTube is where you can see the videos. At some point, we'll probably have, there you go, we'll probably have some other videos up. And then to purchase the vinyl record, which, I mean, it's kind of amazing, the first vinyl record has sold almost 5,000 copies of the vinyl record.
1:14:47 Mike Rowe? That's terrific.
1:14:48 Speaker 02 The first one, and the second one is over a thousand right now and we just put it on sale. So you can get those vinyl records, if you've got a record player. Even if you don't, they're great collector's items. There's a bunch of stuff I wrote in them and there's stuff that some of the other musicians that are on the record wrote. You can get that at garysinisefoundation.org. You can see the stories about Mac right there on the homepage. And then you can download on iTunes, Spotify, all those things. Resurrection and Revival, Max and his resurrection and revival. And also resurrection and revival part two.
1:15:23 Mike Rowe? Also on your site is a piece. You sent me the piece, actually. You wrote this thing and you sent me a copy of it. I guess it was maybe a year ago. And it's on the site now.
1:15:35 Speaker 02 You're right, Mike. About six weeks after Mac died.
1:15:39 Mike Rowe? Yeah.
1:15:39 Speaker 02 I just, you know, people didn't really know. I mean, people didn't know that we were going through this.
1:15:43 Mike Rowe? No.
1:15:44 Speaker 02 We didn't talk about it publicly or anything. It was only family, friends, close associates that really knew what we were dealing with in the past six years. But we have a lot of loyal donors at the Gary Sinise Foundation. Luckily, there is a foundation that's dedicated to finding a cure for Chordoma called the Chordoma Foundation. And we had raised some money there. So we had some donors at the Chordoma Foundation. Yeah, that's the piece right there. It's on the homepage of the Gary Sinise Foundation. I just decided because there were so many people that had been so supportive. It was just time to tell people what we'd been going through at home. You know, I was continuing the mission and going on trips and, you know, then I'd come
1:16:28 Speaker 02 home and I'd call Mac from the trip or send him a video or something from some concert or whatever. So I kept doing the mission, you know, and the mission work was helpful and healing for me to be able to go out there and continue that. He wanted me to do that. So I decided. There's a lot of people that love us, love our family, that don't know what's going on. And I'm gonna share it and tell them, and that's the story there. That's one of the campaigns that we started at the Cordoma Foundation website. And we started that particular campaign, Mike, because, and it wasn't a public campaign. I didn't go out there and say, "Hey, everybody go there." But it was for the people that knew about what we were going through.
1:17:09 Mike Rowe? Sure.
1:17:10 Speaker 02 And were asking, "How can we help? What can we do?" So at that website, you can, you can go there and you can donate. But you can also, you know, people left really supportive messages throughout our fight. And that was as, equally as important as the donations.
1:17:26 Mike Rowe? Sure.
1:17:27 Speaker 02 And then, at the end of that story, scroll down, check a little bit more. That's my wife on the right. That's his two sisters there, Ella and Sophie. But if you go down, you'll see, um, these are messages that some of us put. But if you scroll down more, there are thousands of messages here of people that wrote in, supportive, loving, kind, sympathetic, you know, empathetic words, over and over and over. I mean, literally, there's thousands. It just keeps going.
1:18:03 Mike Rowe? Good grief.
1:18:04 Speaker 02 Yeah. That support that we received throughout this, this whole thing, after losing Mac, was, I can't put a price on it, you know, I can't undervalue it at all. It's hard to contemplate. I mean, it, it just keeps going. And people are still writing in and sending messages there.
1:18:26 Mike Rowe? Isn't it something?
1:18:27 Speaker 02 It's beautiful.
1:18:28 Mike Rowe? Maybe it's a movie, maybe it's a play, maybe it's a composition, maybe it's just the story of your life, if you're willing to share it, you know? It's an inspirational story. It's transformative music. I don't care what you think of Gary Sinise as an actor. Go listen to the music. It's so good. It's so good, and I'm so glad you came by. I owe you one.
1:18:51 Speaker 02 Oh, God bless you, Mike.
1:18:53 Mike Rowe? Thanks, Bob.
1:18:54 Speaker 02 Thank you.
1:18:54 Mike Rowe? Of course.
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