There has always been an emphasis on family at the center of FX's gritty biker drama, Sons of Anarchy. Whether it be through protagonist Jax Teller's constant troubles with parental figures both alive and deceased, or the sense of brotherhood that's created by riding down a windy stretch of California highway mere feet from your clubmate's motorcycle, the bonds and relationships in the show run deep.
The whole series, after all, begins with Jax and his mission to learn more about his father, John, who founded the club and introduced the young biker to a life of service. Like most people, Jax experienced his first bits of life through his parents and what they did. SOA's supervisor of tunes, Bob Thiele Jr., who puts together the show's now-signature closing montages, has been in different aspects of the music industry for most of his life.
It's completely understandable after the upbringing he had.
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Thiele's father, also named Bob, was a music producer and head of Impulse! Records for much of the '60s. Jazz legends like Duke Ellington and John Coltrane worked with the elder Thiele, who's credited as a co-writer on the Louis Armstrong classic "What a Wonderful World."
"Coltrane was probably the most significant artist who had the most impact on me, not so much musically, but maybe creatively, spiritually," Thiele says. "His artistry was profound."
Being around artists like Coltrane and Gil Scott-Heron as he got older and witnessing their creative processes was not only "crazy," as Thiele puts it, but also influential. While his father was more of an executive and business type, the Los Angeles-based musician and songwriter strayed down the creative path. He learned how to play guitar as a teenager and started writing songs, eventually holding down jobs as an A&R man and producer before earning his keep as a songwriter. Bonnie Raitt, Ray Charles and Pop and Mavis Staples have all sung tracks written by Thiele.
Thiele received publishing deals as his skills became more in-demand with some of the major record companies like Warner and Universal as a staff writer. A younger crop of artists began showing up at meetings as time went on - Thiele also has songwriting credits for hit tracks by Jennifer Love Hewitt and British pop group BBMak. The songwriter even got an Emmy nomination in 2006 for the theme song he penned for Disney's The Buzz on Maggie titled "Just the Way I Am."
"I started to see that to earn a living as a songwriter, it was no longer about writing songs for your idols or things that you felt akin to," he says.
"When you got into the new millennium, to really earn as a songwriter, you had to kind of pay attention as to what was happening with younger artists, and pop music had changed considerably - there were boy bands and teen stars and those were the people who were really selling records."
The songwriter began feeling a lack of connection with the artists and his craft as most of his musical heroes started taking a backseat to the overexposed sugar pop of the early 2000s.
"So I'd find myself in a room with a young artist and co-writing a song and being like, 'What the fuck am I doing here? I have nothing in common with them and I'm just not feeling it,'" he says. "There was definitely a formulaic approach to songwriting that was just so contrary to my own kind of experience, and I just wasn't happy. So I was looking to get out."
Thiele remembers being miserable and even thinking that perhaps his professional music life was over. Fortunately, he was offered a composing gig for HBO's 2007 film Bernard and Doris. The movie's jazz score earned Thiele yet another Emmy nod.
There was more opportunity in the world of film and television for the musician to be creative, at least in his mind. He saw music supervision and composing for other mediums as a sideways move to get him out of the record business.
Thiele's pre-SOA credits in TV include shows like Boston Public, The O.C., and The West Wing. He was even one of the musicians who played on the theme song for The Office (they appear in the "Booze Cruise" episode of season two as The Scrantones).
Suffice it to say that Thiele's net of friends and colleagues runs deep and famous, having worked in both music and television. It just so happens that in the '90s, those worlds collided on a project that would eventually lead to what Thiele calls a "perfect job" for him as the music supervisor for Sons.
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Actress/singer Katey Sagal, best known at the time to most TV enthusiasts as Peggy Bundy from Married...with Children, released her first solo album in 1994 titled Well..., which featured Thiele as a musician and producer.
"The first time we met, we wrote a song that was pivotal and groundbreaking for her," he recalls. "We happened to hit it off and we became very close after that."
Sagal went on to appear in a variety of TV shows before marrying a behind the scenes guy named Kurt Sutter, who would eventually become the mastermind behind SOA and cast his wife as Jax's psychotic mother, Gemma.
"When Sons came along, Kurt, who's also a friend, said to me, 'Hey, I'm doing this show, do you want to be the music supervisor? And I was like, 'I don't know what that means," Thiele says with a laugh.
Sutter was determined not to have his new TV show scored by a composer, which was the case on his last series, The Shield. The showrunner enlisted Thiele to help create an environment through music - something that the musician had seen years earlier with his father while scouting talent in San Francisco.
"It's interesting because it goes back to my early, profound experience of being 12 years old at The Fillmore in 1967," he says, noting that the scene was full of members from the notorious biker gang, Hell's Angels. "So when he told me what the story was, I already had a fascination with that culture and certainly that music - The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver, Steve Miller Band."
"By the end of season one, it was like, 'Okay, we can really use music as a way to tell our story,'" he adds. "Music is a character on the show. Music is just one more aspect of storytelling. If I sat down and listened to all of the major montages, I'd probably leave five or six out because we do so many of them."
Thiele and the show's house band, The Forest Rangers, have transformed some of the most iconic songs in music history into show-stopping epics that have informed the environment of fictional Charming almost as much as the leather-clad bikers and non-stop violence.
There's the seething "John the Revelator" that came for season one's finale. The group dusted off "Gimme Shelter" by The Rolling Stones the following season. Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Someday Never Comes" and Sly Stone's "Everyday People" have all been, as Thiele puts it, "Forest Ranger-ized."
The season four premiere included a closing montage that showed 10 murders and still ended on a tender note while The Forest Rangers played the elder Thiele's song, "What a Wonderful World."
"That was another one that was like, how do you reinvent that song without the whole world going like, 'How dare you.'" he says. "But I had the license because my father wrote it."
The group's skills have been tested time and time again by Sutter, and it all culminated earlier this season with a brilliant rendition of the Queen classic "Bohemian Rhapsody."
"Kurt's the one who's sitting there in his writing office and writes, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' plays. It's not my idea. In fact, when he says to me, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' I'm like, 'Oh, shit! That's not going to be four chords and a different beat. We're going to have to fucking really arrange the shit out of this to make it ours,'" he says. "I worked on that for close to three months."
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Thiele's currently working on another project that hasn't strayed too far from the friends he's made over the past seven years. The Forest Rangers are putting together their first album of original material with a variety of vocalists who worked on SOA tunes like Alison Mosshart, Billy Valentine and Sagal. Fans can contribute to the cause and learn more on the band's Pledge Music page.
He's also finishing up the last few episodes of the series. The finale airs Dec. 9, and fans of the drama are anxious to see what happens in the end. At this point, again like Jax, much about the music supervisor's future is unknown...but people are watching.
"I realize that I've had this great experience, so why not just go out on a good note rather than worry about where the next job is," he says. "I'm just super grateful and lucky to have had this experience. We'll see where it goes from here."
