A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
The hit TV show “Sons of Anarchy” was a favorite not only for its gritty storyline that followed the operatic lives of a fictional biker gang, but also for its music.
Thanks to music supervisor and composer Bob Thiele, and the show's creator, Kurt Sutter, “Sons of Anarchy” had album-length soundtracks that accompanied each season. Not your typical TV soundtrack, Thiele pooled the talents of artists such as Leonard Cohen, Alison Mosshart of the band The Kills and several in-demand studio musicians.
Even though the “Sons of Anarchy” show is no more, the music plays on. Thiele "got the band back together," as it were, to form a group called The Forest Rangers. Their first album, “Land, Ho!” was released July 10.
Bob Thiele recently came into The Frame's studios and spoke with John Horn.
How did The Forest Rangers come about?
It was happenstance. We really didn’t have a clue where this was going. We didn’t set out to have a band in the beginning. I think towards the end of the first season, we had a couple of episodes where songs became very important to the narrative. It was completely unexpected and it was really Kurt's vision where we could play a song for five minutes without any dialogue and that it could carry the story. And I think it was after that first season we said, You know, there should be a band. We could call ourselves The Forest Rangers. Actually, it was my friend Dave Kushner, who’s in Velvet Revolver — we wrote the theme song together — who came up with the band name The Forest Rangers and that’s how it kind of evolved.
The Forest Rangers seems like an idea you could have dreamed up over beers later at night. How does that What if...? question actually come together into the dedication it takes to write and record and produce a record?
I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. I always liken The Forest Rangers to almost like a Wednesday night poker game with really good friends. You’ve been playing this game for years, we all get together, but we’re not playing poker. We’re just sort of saying, Hey, what are we going to do now? We’re just all throwing ideas out. And I remember one time we were recording "House of the Rising Sun" and I thought, My God, this might have been the first song any of us learned when we were 11 years old, and here we are recording it so many years later in a garage... So there we were, a garage band, playing a song that was probably our first ever learned. You know, A minor to C. And we were able to just be together, enjoying it, without any real agenda.
The album has several guest musicians. How did Audra Mae come to be on the album?
Audra is a great story because she really was the first artist. She did the [Bob Dylan] "Forever Young" cover in season one. Kurt said, "We want something to begin the episode with a sort of lullaby." So I had heard Audra, she was signed to Warner Chappell, and she was pretty much unknown. Audra came in, she sang "Forever Young." It was so powerful that we ended up closing the episode with the same song, but just her voice... This was back in the day of MySpace. And she would get like 25, 30 hits on MySpace. The Wednesday after the show aired, she was getting 10, 15, 20,000 hits a day.
Your father, Bob Thiele, Sr., was a prominent jazz producer and a label owner who worked with John Coltrane. And one of the guest artists on “Land, Ho!” is his son, Ravi Coltrane. I suppose that’s not an accident?
I had never met Ravi. I was in New York, my kid was going to college and I happened to be there and I [thought], I’m gonna call Ravi and just say, "Hey man, you got any time today?" Eight hours later we were in a studio and he was playing the horn.
You are a second-generation musician and your son, Owen, is a musician as well. What’s the best advice that your father gave you, or that you can give to your son, about the music business?
My father... he was a guy who never made any money in the music business. Which is really kind of amazing. It was towards the very end of his life that "What a Wonderful World" became a hit. He had [co-]written it in 1968, but it wasn’t until 1988 that the song really grew into the copyright that it is today. And that was because of "Good Morning, Vietnam." My dad was always kind of like, I just want to make records. I just want to be around music. I love it. He made bad, bad business deals all the way through. He left a legacy that’s, wow — I’m not sure that if the eyes were on the money he would have had that same thing. Now that the music business is — God knows what it is — I’d say, Let’s do what we love. You know, there have been a couple of times where I’ve made decisions based on the job and money, and I can tell you that they were the worst decisions I ever made.