429: Gary Sinise—The Importance of Showing Up

Well, Chuck, that one's going to stick with me for a while.

Yeah, me too.

Me too.

It was emotional.

Yeah, a powerful.

You know, it's funny, Gary Sinise, I consider him a friend.

And I realize I always have.

Even before he was a friend?

Like, long before I met him.

And even after I met him.

It's not like we hang out.

Right.

It's not like I've been to his home.

It's not like we play 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.

Like, he's one of those people who is better than you.

Yeah.

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?

Oh,

was it you?

Yeah, it might have been.

Well, thanks.

Thanks for that.

Because he's so much more interesting than you, and he's so much more important.

Oh, definitely.

I do get that a lot.

Yeah, for sure.

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 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 going to share some music with you over the course of the next hour that Mac composed.

And, you know, I make the point, hopefully a bit more elegantly than it felt like in the moment, but

I knew I was going to have Gary on and I knew I was going to talk about this music before I had heard it.

Right.

That's right.

And it didn't matter to me how good it was or wasn't.

But.

Good grief, folks.

Good.

It's good music.

Yeah.

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 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.

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.

Yeah.

And Gary is just finishing that by putting out another album because he found more music that his son wrote.

Yeah.

Oh, God, we get into this spoiler alert, but the stuff his son left for him to find.

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, totally.

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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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?

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.

Lieutenant Danban.

Lieutenant Danban 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 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.

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 this part of the city?

Yeah.

Well, we were up in the last place we had was right on the border with Ventura County and L.A.

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 and not living here, knowing all the areas that it was hitting and everything.

And it was just very very hard to watch that.

And we're constantly in touch with the LA Fire Department Foundation.

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 Guards over there, big command center of fire department people, police officers, everybody's over there because there's so much going on in the Palisades area with regards to what happened.

so we set up we served about 600 meals i'd dish out the beans my buddy joe montaigna came he's a great he's an ambassador for my foundation another good buddy of mine john androssic who has the band five for fighting yeah john's a very good friend so i invited them to come and we were all dishing out the beans yeah they're good they're amazing 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.

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.

Yeah.

I'm trying to figure out the best way to tell you this story, but

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 in 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?

For me, that particular program at the foundation has always been more about the message than the meal.

Because you can get food, you know, I mean, they're going to get fed and they're going to have food.

But we show up, 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 showing up and delivering that message, I think 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.

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 via Tay.

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.

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

I've seen that, you know.

It's not about the soup.

It's about the remembrance.

It's about the acknowledgement.

It's about the gift of love and support, you know, and that what they're doing is important and recognized.

That can mean more than anything.

We try to do that as much as we can at the Gary Sinise Foundation.

You do it all of the time.

How many bases have you played at at this point?

How many have I played at?

Yeah, how many of you...

Well, first of all, how many have you visited around the world?

It's roughly 180 different bases.

That's not the number of visits because there are multiple visits to different bases.

You know, I've been to some of them 10 times, you know, or whatever.

So it's hundreds and hundreds of trips and that.

The band has played probably 600

shows for the military.

It's crazy.

If you're keeping track at home, 600 shows, it's a lot.

That's got to be two and a half decades of playing, basically.

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 bass, and I'd come home and shoot the show.

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 got to finish this up, and then I'm off to play.

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.

Let me tell you you what happened to me this morning while you were doing the thing on the beach.

That was yesterday.

That was yesterday.

Okay.

Well, this morning, I landed here a couple 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 a beautiful morning, and I just started walking.

I ran into the checkpoint down on PCH.

The guardsman knew me and let me through.

And then I wandered up Chautauqua and the channel and

more checkpoints.

And

I made my way into what I guess was 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

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, and I think this captured the day

it was recorded.

Yes, you're right, Mike.

This is the recording session at

Sunset Sound

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 or what he was working on.

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?

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.

And he's dealing with a very rare form of cancer.

Like 300, 400 people get it.

It's called chordoma, yeah.

Maybe 300 people in the U.S.

per year are diagnosed with it.

It starts in the spine.

It's about 70% 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.

30% of the time it

metastasizes and spreads and that's what happened to Mac.

And when it does that, you're talking about maybe 90 people per year that are dealing with what he had.

So of course there's no pharmaceutical companies that are focused on

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.

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 to?

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 could 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.

No, is this Oliver?

That's Oliver Schnee, Mac's buddy from college.

And they teamed up, and Oliver helped Mac finish the piece.

It was Arctic Circles, it was something he wrote over 10 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 were in the studio July 17th, 2023.

And this is the piece here.

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 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.

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.

This is something my son wrote in college,

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.

And that's where the album Resurrection and Revival comes from.

Okay, and this is on his YouTube channel, Max Sinise YouTube.

Do you hear this in your head now, more or less all of the time?

Yeah.

It's uh it's crazy, isn't it?

The way music, the way we have soundtracks in our own life and where they come from and how they linger,

what informs them, you know.

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Yeah, I can't listen to that one without, you know, just reflecting and reliving that moment in the studio and

just thinking about him.

And it's emotional to do it.

I don't know where I heard this, but

I'm sure that

after he died, you got into his phone and into his devices and

found these compositions, or some, anyway.

more that you didn't know even existed.

What in the world was that?

I mean,

it's like a sea chest of, you know, it's like finding buried treasure almost, it would seem.

It was.

I mean, it was.

I mean, I found so much music after he died in his files that he'd written and tucked away.

And you just want to 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 and everything,

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 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 found all this treasure.

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 decided there was so much music and so much good music

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.

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.

So his text is all over the map.

I mean, it's very effective.

Yeah.

I mean, what we just listened to was totally cinematic.

When I listened to him on the harmonica, Shannon Doah, I mean, it's just so

Americana.

Yeah.

And now you're saying you said jazz charts?

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 Grusen score for the Warren Beatty movie, Heaven Can Wait.

Right.

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 to lay an arrangement over it and we wanted to kind of take that direction that Matt gave us of a la heaven can wait.

So, piano tune number one is on side B with all the other jazz stuff.

You know, it occurs to me as you talk, it's kind of 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?

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, 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, and he was an excellent drummer, but he wanted to compose.

He wanted to songwrite.

He wanted to sing.

He wanted to 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 Addicts.

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 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.

It's just another overwhelming homage to the

impact of influence, right?

I mean, you can probably think of a performance you saw years ago,

maybe on stage.

Oh, yeah.

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?

Well, and I know a couple of those 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

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, and it was Pacino, and it was Dustin Hoffman,

De Niro, and Robert Duvall, and

still in the game, kind of?

John Voigt, Cassavettes, Gina Rowlands, all these fantastic movies.

Peter Falk.

Peter Falk, yeah, absolutely.

Remember Husbands, that movie?

What Casavet?

That was Casavetti's.

Cassavetti's Husbands, yeah.

And Ben Gazaro was in that, the three of them.

Yeah.

Gina Rollins in the Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes movie.

I was just influenced by a lot of that.

There's a great movie that Jerry Schatzberg directed back then called With Pacino and Hackman.

It's a little scene film, but 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.

In fact,

when I directed the movie of Of Mice and Men,

I hired Horton Foote.

Remember Horton Foote?

Wrote To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies and some great, great screenplays.

I asked Horton to do the screenplay.

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.

So that's a great movie.

And I was just really influenced by a lot of those guys and what they were doing back there.

Because if you look at all their work, Hackman, Pacino, all those guys, they were doing some of their best stuff back when they were in their 30s and early 40s.

It's funny, though, because

you don't know it when you're in it.

You don't know it when it's happening necessarily.

Yeah, you don't know.

And I've found that when I meet some of those guys and I tell them those stories about, oh, gosh,

when I was a kid, you blah, blah, blah, and I was watching you do that.

They kind of nod their heads.

They kind of nod their heads.

I did do one movie with Gene Hackman, and there was, it's a movie called The Quick and the Dead.

Oh, sure.

Sam Raimi directed it.

Leonardo DiCabrio was in it.

And Russell Crowe.

And Sharon Stone.

Yeah, it's a Western.

And I had one little part.

I played it in a flashback where I was Sharon Stone's dad.

And Gene Hackman's the evil sheriff, you know.

And I got to spend two days with Hackman on the set.

It was right just a little bit later.

I was doing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on stage in Chicago, and then 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 that

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 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.

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.

The conversation.

Remember the conversation?

I mean, there's so many great things.

French Connection.

Yeah, French Connection.

So much good stuff.

And Nicholson was another one.

You know, I watched all his stuff.

And,

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.

Well, you think of, I mean, who have we had on this podcast?

Scott Mann, right?

Yeah.

So here's Scott Mann.

I think I, didn't I hug you guys?

Yeah, with Scott, you know.

You had Scott Mann.

Yeah, you did.

And then.

He's a good man.

Scott Mann's a good man.

He's been on twice 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 that

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 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: just the power of showing up and what you can do with your presence.

You don't have to really say anything.

What a

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.

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 Hepper.

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 basses,

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.

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.

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.

They've been on here too, by the way.

Yeah.

Dan Clare.

Dan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Danny Clare.

Yeah.

Good pal.

They approached me, gosh, in 94.

And I started supporting them back then.

I do their convention every year, and 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.

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, showing up makes a difference.

You know, going to the war zones and shaking hands and doing all that stuff, it 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 non-profits.

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.

You're all to get on the ride.

And you are.

I'm not going anywhere.

I'm going to keep at it.

So starting the Gary Sinise Foundation was the next step.

And now we're almost at our 15-year anniversary now.

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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.

And that

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 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.

Thank you, Mike.

You know,

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.

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 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, in his Dropbox file, in his phone, and all that stuff, just discovering this stuff.

And I was just pouring 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.

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 going to 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 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.

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 quasi, 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 going to finish that.

We're going to finish it and put it on the record.

So now it's this rocking 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.

I got a confession for you.

I've known you for a while, certainly admired you a bunch, and I knew what your son was going through.

And when he died,

my heart broke for you.

And then when the album came out,

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.

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.

I know what you're saying.

There's so many ways.

Is this a father who just, you know,

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.

Right.

But, brother, walking through the Palisades and listening to this,

I am 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.

I'm so touched that 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.

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 literally have to sit down on the curb as I listen 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 whole deal.

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.

Think about the tunes you guys play.

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.

We do.

It's a variety show, for sure.

You know, 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 going to 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, there's really a lot of great songs.

The band is really, really great.

And we played now.

Gosh, the first military base we played on at was Great Lakes Naval Base in North Chicago.

November 2003.

So

2004, we went on our first USO tour.

I've done like 100 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.

And now we've done, like I said, I mean, hundreds of shows, many, many trips.

We're going on a three-show trip.

And we get to play Mac songs.

I mean, we're playing both those songs.

Incredible.

I wonder who's getting more out of this.

You or the audience?

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.

I go to military bases, military hospitals, all that kind kind of stuff.

And I get a lot out of that just seeing 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.

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 wonder if anybody's asked you before.

I want to ask you about Oliver.

Oliver Schnee.

And,

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 power of friendship and a friend who reaches back over a few years to, you know, reconnect the dots in some way.

Tell me about Oliver and his relationship with your son.

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 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 doctor asked me uh 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 practical and

uh very

kind of accepting he was just an amazing gracious kind of courage under fire kind of guy and

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,

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.

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, 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's doing a lot of drumming and rock music and stuff.

But Mac was always very eager to

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 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.

He said, 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?

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 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.

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?

You're going to be in the studio for Arctic Circles.

You're going to 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.

Max said, you know what?

I want to do a whole album.

I've got all these other ideas.

I've got some more original things.

I want to 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 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.

That's your

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.

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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We had a wonderful day with my band

at now this.

Which one is this?

Shenandoah.

Oh, Shenandoah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So this is a beautiful, beautiful piece.

Who gave him the harmonica?

His mom suggested he get it

because he couldn't play drums.

And she said, you know, you can hold you can hold a harmonica and lay in his bed and play it so he learned how to do that

is there a simpler instrument with a more

mournful sound yeah I I don't know

probably

not

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.

That's my mom.

Oh, my gosh.

Oh, come on.

That's something.

Is it Stephen Foster?

Who wrote that?

Who wrote the original?

Do we know?

Jenondo, I don't know.

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.

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.

Oliver showed up, man.

Well, they were pals.

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 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

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.

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.

You never know.

Yeah.

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 um 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?

Yeah, just

it's cliche, but uh I guess

But

don't take those precious moments for granted.

And we all do, because we're just living our lives and going through.

And then the 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.

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 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 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 going to make the vinyls.

Max said, Let's make a hundred vinyls, Dad.

And if we ever sell any,

the proceeds can go to the foundation.

He just wanted to have something to give to people.

Yeah.

And he goes in the hospital December 30th.

I'm in the hospital with him.

I'm staying with him.

Things were getting harder.

And then all of a sudden, I couldn't talk to him.

Because

he wasn't able to talk anymore.

He was,

you know,

he was

not,

he was going.

And

I was with him in the hospital through that whole time.

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.

You know,

you realize,

gosh,

yesterday,

if I would have only asked him this, you know,

if I would have only talked 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 wasn't able to get his air.

and it's getting harder.

And now, all of a sudden, he can't talk.

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.

And so you kind of have those

moments of reflection and a little bit of regret, but 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

he's, I think he's proud of that and happy about that.

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

I found and discovered.

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.

I hope so, Mike.

I hope more people go and listen to this music and support the foundation 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 never imagined that.

In a million years, all that stuff that he had on his laptop would end up on an album, and now you can download it and it's making money for the foundation and helping us with our mission.

We never

imagined that.

It's a miraculous time that we're living in, that all of that can happen technically.

Where do people go to watch, listen, and buy?

Yeah, Maxinese 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.

That's true.

The first one.

And the second one is over 1,000 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 collectors' 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, Mac Sinise Resurrection and Revival, and also Resurrection and Revival Part 2.

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.

You're right, Mike.

About six weeks after Mac died,

you know, people didn't really really know.

I mean, people didn't know that we were going through this.

No.

We didn't talk about it publicly or anything.

It was only family, friends, close associates that really knew what we were dealing with 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 Cordoma called the Cordoma Foundation.

And we had raised some money there.

So we had some donors at the Cordoma 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 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 going to 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.

Sure.

And we're asking, how can we help?

What can we do?

So at that website,

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 equally as important as the donations.

Sure.

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

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.

Good grief.

Yeah.

That support that we received throughout this

whole

after losing Mac was, I can't put a price on it.

I can't undervalue it at all.

It's hard to contemplate.

I mean,

it just keeps going.

And people are still writing in and sending messages there.

Isn't that something?

That's beautiful.

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 Sinice 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 know you wanted.

God bless you, Mike.

Thanks, Bob.

Thank you.

Of course.