May 24, 2025 - Epoch Times
06:12
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Mac was an incredible guy. | |
| He celebrated his 33rd birthday in the recording studio, recording an album in 2023 that he envisioned doing. | |
| And he was very disabled by this awful, rare cancer that took his life called chordoma. | |
| And he fought it for about five and a half, six years. | |
| He probably had it for many, many more years than that. | |
| But it's a very slow-growing tumor that starts in the spine. | |
| We discovered it because he was having trouble sitting down. | |
| It was in the base of his spine, and he was having all kinds of pain and all kinds of trouble. | |
| We discovered there was an orange-sized tumor. | |
| And that tumor very well could have been growing there since birth. | |
| It's a slow, slow-growing tumor. | |
| You can take it out. | |
| And it can be cured if you get it all, if there are no cells that escape. | |
| And there's only maybe 300 people per year in the U.S. that are diagnosed with this particular cancer. | |
| So 70% of the time they go in, they take it off the spine, and they get it all. | |
| 30% of the time it comes back, and that's what happened to Mac. | |
| And when it comes back, it starts to spread, and there are no drugs. | |
| Being developed for a cancer that maybe 90 people a year have. | |
| So you're just up to trying whatever drug you can. | |
| And as time went on, it disabled him more and more. | |
| He was an excellent drummer. | |
| He was my number two drummer. | |
| If my drummer couldn't make a show or something, I would ask Mac to do it. | |
| He loved my band. | |
| He went to USC music school. | |
| He was a songwriter, a composer, a drummer, excellent musician. | |
| He wrote a lot of music. | |
| And during this period of time when he was fighting cancer, the cancer was so difficult to deal with that he just didn't think about music that much. | |
| until 2023, and he said to me that there was a And so he teamed up with two of my band members to help him sort of work on it. | |
| And then a buddy, out of the blue, a buddy of his from college, a composer pal, contacted him and came to see him. | |
| And they started talking about music and Mac played him some of the recordings that he'd been working on. | |
| With some of my band members of this piece. | |
| And so his buddy, Oliver Schnee, said, "I'll work on it. | |
| Let's finish it." And that's exactly what Mack wanted to do, get it finished. | |
| And so they went to work on it together in June of 2003. | |
| And by July 17th, they were in the studio recording this beautiful, amazing piece called "Arctic Circles" To an entire album's worth of music that he finished by the end of the year. | |
| piano plays softly And he designed the album cover. | |
| The album is called Resurrection and Revival. | |
| He wanted to make some vinyls to give to people. | |
| Vinyl records. | |
| And he said, Dad, if we ever sell any, you know, the money could go to the foundation. | |
| Well, he never saw the record. | |
| He never got to hold it, because it went to press the week that he died. | |
| But he finished it, and he got to hear it all. | |
| And I decided to... | |
| I decided to make 500. | |
| Mac worked for the Foundation. | |
| He loved the Foundation. | |
| He had started a podcast for the Foundation. | |
| He was devoted to the Foundation. | |
| But as the cancer took over, he couldn't do it anymore. | |
| So I wanted people to know that we lost him. | |
| And I had never talked about it publicly. | |
| Interviews or something like that. | |
| I never talked about it. | |
| So people were kind of stunned by it. | |
| And we also put... | |
| And I had ordered 500 and within a day we had a thousand orders for the record. | |
| It was incredible, the outpouring of love and support and people acknowledging that they were saddened by It was beautiful. | |
| And after he died, I found all this other music that he wrote in his Dropbox file that I'd never heard, and so I went to work. | |
| I called Oliver up and said we're going to do another record and I produced, you know, funded part two and Oliver produced and arranged and helped me, you know, get it all organized and part two is out there as well. | |
| Now the vinyls have sold almost 7,000 copies between the two of them and it continues to sell. |
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