There are certain laws of physics that can't be denied. "In the beginning God created..." and God created in unchanging ways. God created water to exist in 3 forms - liquid, gas and solid. That's a great thing. Because of it we can pour Kool-ade into ice trays, freeze it and have koolickles.

Cold is the absense of heat - dark is the absence of light - always was, always will be. That last physical law awes me. An area can be totally dark but as soon as a light's turned on darkness is dispelled or defeated or overcome - however ya wanna say it. Happens every time... try it. My Bible tells me, "God is Light" - God's the Light of the world. There's also a prince of darkness who just doesn't get it. Light wins - dark loses - every time. To not understand that is to be dim-witted; yet darkness rages against the Light just like any dim-witted criminal rages.

Raging against Light is often demonstrated in ministry projects and goes by the name of "Murphy's Law". This happens every time we set out on a project. A CD that should take no more than 4 months to complete and release runs into all sorts of attacks. Prior to our newest release, we made the mistake of trying to help a brother out who was having financial troubles. In Christian music that's nothing unusual. We pre-paid him for mastering and production and in return we got put on his back burner. What should've taken 2 weeks took over 9 months. We still call that project "our baby" because the gestation period was about the same.

With our newest project, "Dance of Innocence" we discovered that darkness resides in small town Tennessee and disguises itself as a squirrel. We were ecstatic with our new state of the art 32 track studio board (with limitless virtual tracks) and basking in new technology. What the sales rep never told us was that there was a design flaw - if there was a power outage during formatting it would fry the power card. A very remote potentiality - but there. It's easily solved by adding a battery back-up unit (which we've done) but at the time we didn't know we needed it.

We complete weeks of work and now we're done. Time to format the CD. It's formatting - it's formatting - BOOM!!! An explosion rocks the studio... we look out the window and floating down from the electrical transformer (smoking from every hair) are the remnants of an exploding squirrel. My old hound dog even got up off the porch and had himself a grand ole time - rarely does he enjoy fresh cooked food. That squirrel took out the whole town including our formatting board.

To make a long story short... the board was so new that nobody in "Music City USA" would touch it. They had no experience with the make and model. We finally found a feller 6 hours away in the mountains of east Tennessee that weren't afraid-a nothin'! We went there. He diagnosed the problem but found that there were no parts available because the machine hadn't been in circulation long enough to require maintenance. The home office in NYC said we were the first (we finally went #1 at something). The part had to be ordered from the manufacturer in China. Beloved... we now understand the meaning of "a slow boat to China". It took 6 months to get the board repaired with our entire project sitting in it and un-down-loadable. If you can help us think of a pet name for a project with a 12 month gestation period please pass it on.

The project's in production now and we'll release it in a few days (Lord willing). We didn't lose any tunes, the studio's back up and we're starting on our next CD. The hound dog's got a smile on his face. Savoring this fleeting moment we share in Robert Browning's word of 1841... "The year's at the spring, And day's at the morn; Morning's at seven; The hill-side's dew-pearled; The lark's on the wing; The snail's on the thorn; God's in His Heaven -- All's right with the world." Light wins again.

We pulled up to Philips-Robinson Funeral Home in east Nashville and knew we were in the right spot. Out front stood long hairs, babes in bomb black dresses, dudes sporting cool vintage clothing, smoking and engrossed in pockets of conversation - "MUSICIAN" may as well have been stamped on foreheads. It was a gathering in Nashville not seen unless one of our own crosses the Great Divide or some award's being given.

We hadn't been with Randy for many years since we were kids. Not little kids but at this time in my life, I class late teens & early 20's as "kids". Randy was a drummer. There was a talent pool among the music scene in Hendersonville, Tennessee then that was extraordinary. We played - we laughed - we loved - we lived. If we'd had a motto it'd have been the classic... "Sex, Drugs & Rock-N-Roll!" We lived like we invented it.

Now, nothing on Earth remains of Randy but ashes in a green marble box. We didn't know what had killed him, he was just 52. Beyond the recent scare for guitarist Raskuvanitch Pa-Newton's (now a college professor) double by-pass surgery, Randy's the first of our gang to go. I looked up his band web site "Horse" and found it... cancer. Posted, was an article from "The Nashville Scene" in which he was dicussing living with and fighting that dread malady. Like Mellencamp's lyrical fight with "the law", Randy's fight with cancer came to the same end.

Scattered upon the tables on either side of that green marble box were pictures and momentos encapsulating Randy's brief life. We met up with Pete from back in the day (a phenominal guitarist who edits music videos now) and together the memories started flooding in. As always, we recalled the fun and funny, leaving the bleak and hung-over trapped somewhere in the furthest recesses of our minds.

We left early. We had a 2 hour drive ahead and we'd had about as much as we could handle anyway. This gave Dabo and me a chance to ponder our own lives. Most of our buddies have lived what people consider fast paced, exciting lives. Lives filled with wine, women and song... in many cases that translates to booze, divorce and road burn-out. I wish we could tell you that Randy's drumming in a Heavenly angel band now but we honestly don't know.

We chose a different path many years ago. Perhaps it's more apt to say a different path chose us. It alienated us from friends of our youth... friends forever in our eyes of love. They know our stand for Christ and it doesn't fit into the partying lifestyle so da KAZKILL boyz ain't on too many "Who's Who" lists of party invitations. We still love those forever friends and we miss just being with them... we'll miss Randy dearly.

In the end, for us at least, it can best be said in an old poem by Rhea Miller, set to music and made popular by George Beverly Shea...

"I'd rather have Jesus than men's applause; I'd rather be faithful to His dear cause; I'd rather have Jesus than world-wide fame; I'd rather be true to His holy name: Than to be the king of a vast domain or be held in sin's dread sway! I'd rather have Jesus than anything this world affords today."

Never do those lyrics reach deeper into the soul than when standing before the green marble box.