KIEFER SUTHERLAND

That Old Time ROCK and ROLL

words ALAN ZIELONKO shutter COURTESY OF IRONWORKS

While Kiefer was in town earlier this summer filming The Sentinel, a feature film starring opposite Michael Douglas, Kim Basinger and Eva Longoria, I was fortunate enough not only to be working on the show, but to get him to agree to an interview on the promise that I wouldn’t ask him anything about 24. And if you go online to his fan site www.kiefer-rocks.com, you’ll see why he’s sick and tired of discussing 24. Pretty well every article out there, since the hit series premiered on Fox, has had the Canadian-raised actor answer the same questions, over and over, about Jack Bauer. But outside of his passion for acting, and even his passion for the Rodeo Circuit (Kiefer won first place in the ’98 U.S. Team Roping Championships), lies perhaps his biggest love of all with music. Not very long ago, Kiefer opened a recording studio and record label, in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, with his old friend and songwriter; Jude Cole.

“... we 're gonna make 3 or 4 records a year , and we 're going to put those 3 or 4 records out with everything we've got. ” 

Ironworks Music has always been a dream of Kiefer and Jude since they first met, over 22 years ago. They had a genuine motivation to provide an avenue for the kind of rock and roll they loved to hear, but wasn’t getting supported by the rapidly evolving music industry. Over the last 10 years especially, rock and roll has been taking a back seat to pop, dance, new country, hip hop and R&B music, on the radio and on music-TV like MTV and Much Music. “For younger artists trying to come up through the ranks, it was very hard,” explains Kiefer, “because like any major company—you would know this certainly from the movie industry—there’s a conform issue…filmmakers deal with it on a daily level, where they’re trying to break out and create. If you take a look at some of the films that have been coming out of Québec, that have kind of freed themselves from the major studio process…you’re having some of the most creative work in films, certainly made in North America, coming out of Québec. And so Jude and I just kind of, theoretically we were talking about the idea of working in a freer environment musically—he being the musician and me being the fan of music.”

As Kiefer and Jude’s friendship and partnership grew, so did their families and children, eventually allowing for more free time to dedicate to their aspiration. So in the beginning of 2003, they opened the Ironworks recording studio and the label was soon under way. “We had the funds to do it,” Kiefer explains, “and more importantly, our personal stuff aside, four years ago you just watched the music industry shrink, from 10 major labels to 3. You watched Clear Channel take over the airwaves…period…across the board. We started to notice that if you were not a beautiful 21-year-old girl with an amazing voice—Pink’s a great example…I mean, I think Pink is an astonishing musician, and talented writer, but if you weren’t in that kind of milieu or a hip hop act, you were in dead trouble. I grew up on rock and roll, and I missed hearing fantastic, innovative rock and roll.”

As the grunge phenomenon from Seattle started losing its momentum by the mid-to-late ’90s, rock and roll in North America slowly began a steady decline. Being privileged to travel to so many places because of his career, Kiefer started to take notice of great local rock and roll musicians from city to city. On Grafton Street in Dublin, Ireland he watched and listened to, what he felt, hosted some of the greatest players around. From New Zealand to Newfoundland, Kiefer experienced great local bands and artists that he knew weren’t going to be getting signed anytime soon. “There’s no outlet for rock and roll. There’s no outlet for them on the radio, and without airplay, well…” he shrugs with a knowing, fated gloom of that reality. “College radio right now is the only thing out there saving this concept of rock and roll. Clear Channel specifically controls 80-some-odd-percent of the airwaves, and what they do to touring artists that aren’t with them is really not fair….” Kiefer quietly murmurs with a slight grin “that’ll probably hurt me for saying that but…we basically wanted to create a place where, we’re not going to fix the problem, but we’re gonna make 3 or 4 records a year, and we’re going to put those 3 or 4 records out with everything we’ve got. We’re going to get those bands on tour, for very selfish motives: we miss the music…we miss hearing it…we miss watching it.”

Kiefer is clear that Ironworks isn’t close-minded about signing artists from other genres of music, more specifically hip hop. In fact, through a recent program in the California penal system, Kiefer had his eyes opened to hip hop by a young artist named Booyay. “It was an incredible program,” says Kiefer with sincerity, “that would get juvenile offenders an opportunity for studio time. The program ended up failing because a lot of people took advantage of it, and were kind of silly when they went in to do it, and wrote really offensive lyrics for shock value. The program was closing down, but (Booyay) was one of the last artists, and the head of who had organized this—this outlet for juvy offenders, contacted us and asked ‘look, is there anyway you can help this kid, we think he’s just amazing.’” Kiefer shakes his head in disbelief. “I think he’s one of the most prolific writers. Hip hop is not a genre of music that I’m terribly familiar with,” he says candidly, “it’s not something that I grew up with…it’s not something I feel very hip to! But I’ve learned an incredible amount through Jude, watching him work with this young kid. I’ve learned a lot about hip hop that’s made me appreciate it”.

This should be regarded as an impressive feat, for someone so young to have such an impact on Kiefer, who’s been rock and roll, through and through, his whole life. “We believe very strongly in what we’ve done with (Booyay)…we’ve made about 10 tracks with him, but there’s four that we spent a lot of time with…but at that point, our dream goal would be to hand it off to a Dr. Dre or some other fantastic hip hop producer.” The four tracks Kiefer refers to already have that Dr. Dre/Snoop Dogg vibe and stand alone all on their own. Booyay’s natural and tuff lyrical style is very reminiscent of 50 Cent, another hip hop artist with a troubled past, and no doubt will be finding his way to the top of the hip hop charts very soon.

 “In all fairness, we’ve modeled the studio after everything that those guys did on both coasts,” says Kiefer regarding Dr. Dre and Eminem. “Literally from just going to the shows with records, selling stuff out of your trunk…everything on the internet…own everything…really grass-roots based…trying to play as many colleges as you can. It’s a huge learning curve for us. What we felt very confident about was the taste we had in music, there was an audience out there for that, and we weren’t wrong. How to actually deliver it to that audience, how to deliver it consistently, is something we’re in the process of learning”. 

Ironworks is off to a pretty good start, as Jude’s band Lifehouse, whom he discovered and currently is their executive producer, has sold over 4 million copies of their first album. Although they’re signed to Geffen, Lifehouse has provided opportunity for Ironwork’s first rising star; Rocco Deluca, whose debut album was released in late September. Rocco was on tour with Lifehouse earlier this year and played to a sold-out show at The Guvernment.

“I think he’s one of the most prolific guitar players I’ve heard,” says Kiefer with fond admiration. “He’s one of the most articulate writers in his ability to touch the estranged in all of us. He’s the one artist specifically from our label at this young time, whom I have kind of emotionally attached myself to…you know that terrible moment where you’ll see a band in a club and you go ‘if there’s any justice in the world, someone else will get to hear him or her’? That’s how I feel about Rocco.” 

Which leaves Kiefer and Jude to wrestle with the biggest challenge of all in running a record label: distribution. “The internet has been absolutely the only reason we’ve been able put the bands out,” explains Kiefer. “If we can generate enough capital off of record sales on the internet, we can put the bands out on tour. What we’ve done through Red (Distribution), and hopefully other avenues as well, we’ve managed to procure our own distribution which we pay for, and that’ll get our records into everything from Tower Records to Sam’s to K-Mart—down the line. Obviously there are huge expenses to incur from publicists to promotion…but we have unique opportunities; my success as an actor has allowed me to parley some of it—I’ll do an interview for you here if you do a thing for this band. That’s how much I believe in it…” as Kiefer pauses and lets out slowly “because I’m not very thrilled about doing interviews!”