Independent's Day Radio

Gerry Spehar's story is unlike many others'. The first part is pretty standard for a young, aspiring musician; he started out on a Stella guitar given to him by a kindly uncle, honed his chops and hit the road. There was some success - he bummed around Europe, playing anywhere that would have him, and he then returned home and formed The Spehar Brothers with his brother George. They worked hard, earned fans and opened for artists like Boz Scaggs and Townes Van Zandt - but Spehar hadn't built the kind of career that prevented him from leaving the popular duo not long after he and his wife Sue learned that they had a second child on the way. Spehar's selfless, courageous choice brought him another kind of success, this time in the banking world, thus providing a stable, financially secure life for his family and affording him the ability to buy a home as well as a nice guitar. He never stopped tinkering with songs, however, and when their kids were grown, Spehar and Sue began to write songs together, filling th

Michael Ubaldini is a maverick. Stylistically, he could be called a number of things, rocker, traditionalist, punk sympathizer, rockabilly aficionado, renegade country artist - along with a dozen others. Over the course of his multiple-decade career, he has shared stages with some heavy hitters - Lucinda Williams, Brian Setzer, Leon Russell, Jerry Lee Lewis, Southside Johnny, John Hammond Jr., Peter Case, Billy Zoom, John Doe, The Stray Cats, John Waite, Johnny Rivers, The Cramps, and Dave Alvin among them. Often clad in a classic black leather jacket, Ubaldini is a bit of a geographical anomaly; he looks like he just stepped off the stage at New York's legendary and much-missed CBGB, but he makes his home in Orange County, California - Los Angeles' bucolic neighbor to the south. Ulbadini's take on Americana and roots music assuredly is more New York attitude than midwestern college rock, but the sunshine and palm trees haven't mellowed Ubaldini's attitude one single sneer. He's as prolific as he's ever been,

Dan Janisch is an affable enigma. He has been around the block, and he's still at it - writing solid songs and playing shows - beholden to no one. He has always operated a bit apart from the mainstream, so much so that he has built a career out of being an outsider. He comprises one third of the songwriting team of the Los Angeles local supergroup, Jolenes, and he has albums of his own. But it's Janisch's Renaissance man lifestyle that helps to paint the legend of his maverick status. He's not content to simply crank out great songs or play solid guitar parts. He is a natural craftsman and a tinkerer who is not afraid to deconstruct things to see how they work, so when Janisch plays those great songs, he might just be doing so with a guitar he built or an amplifier he assembled. Janisch wears his influences on his sleeve, which leads to inevitable comparisons to a number of other artists, and at this stage in his career his voice is eerily reminiscent of an alt-country Neil Diamond - and that's not a bad thin

Most musicians can readily tell you about their influences, but the best musicians can tell you who it was that influenced their influences; they're always going a step farther back in time and they know full well that all of us here in the current age are standing on the shoulders of the shoulders of giants. The genre of classic rock casts a long shadow, and six decades on from Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and Elvis Presley, teenagers of the new millennium are just as apt to want a turntable and a laptop as an electric guitar, but many songs from the heyday of rock and roll have found a second life in video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, as well as in beer commercials. Eli Wulfmeier grew up in Michigan, but he sounds like an apple that fell directly off the Allman Brothers' tree. On guitar, Wulfmeier's trick bag is full of tried and true rock and roll licks and he executes them with a smooth flair and tasteful approach that can at times lean toward the incendiary. Vocally, he shows an affinity for the ampe

Soon after modern pop music supplanted jazz and classical styles as the predominant music for the masses, musicians were arranging pop standards with classical instrumentation. The quality and musical merits of these reverse-engineered explorations ranged from dubious - think elevator music - to the avant-garde. But at its best, the genre both exposes people otherwise not predisposed to like classical music to a new art form as well as illuminates the musical legitimacy of a style derided in highbrow circles as merely 'pop' music. Los Angeles' Vitamin String Quartet started out nearly 20 years ago as a sort of side project for a record label. Although it features long-running members, it isn't a fixed ensemble; it's more like a sports franchise that plays games with a rotating cast of players. But the quality of the VSQ performers remains high, and the ensemble has evolved from its more musically open origins to taking on the unique challenge of arranging, rock, pop, metal, punk, techo, country and hip-hop so

Sam Morrow's take on Americana mines the rich depths of the lineage of Southern Rock and renegade Country with his meaty voice front and center. Morrow's delivery is powerful and gritty - the kind of voice that could sing the phonebook and make it sound like an anthem. Stylistically, there are shades of Cash, Waylon and Merle on both his albums to date, and Morrow's early struggles with substance abuse have given him a hard-won perspective on the demons that haunt frail and fallible human souls that he shares with his idols. But along with shades of the Mount Rushmore faces of roots rock, Morrow also includes influences and colors that show his age; he's still young and he grew up in a mashup world without record store bins to keep artists in a stylistic boxes. He's not afraid to throw a Radiohead cover up on YouTube. Morrow's vocal command reflects hints of a sort of backwoods Jeff Buckley, and his instrumentation and arrangements have a groove that is definitely more Memphis than Nashville or Austin. There

Eric Kufs got his start in a New York indie-folk trio called Common Rotation. He and his bandmates - Adam Busch and Jordan Katz - were childhood friends who had come of age together, started a band, forged an original sound and established themselves with relentless tours and several albums. Before long, their hard work had paid off and they'd collaborated with the likes of They Might Be Giants, Indigo Girls and Dan Bern. When Busch's acting career picked up speed in California, the trio decided to uproot the entire ensemble and Kufs and Katz relocated to Los Angeles with Busch. The saturated scene in LA prompted Kufs to find new ways to make a living at music. Sometimes, necessity is the mother of reinvention. Kufs started playing hours-long busking gigs on Santa Monica's highly trafficked 3rd Street Promenade shopping and dining district. The gigs were not theater shows where a captive audience sat and listened politely in their seats, but the transient nature of the steady stream of passersby provided Kufs

Chicago's Dorian Taj has indie rock bonafides for which a lot of artists would trade their black Converse hi-tops; he got his start in a hardcore punk band, has worked with Bob Mould, released records on Steve Albini's imprint over the course of his several-album career and he knows his way around an Econoline, but he's more than just a pretty face grimacing at a low-slung guitar. Taj also has a way with a song, and he serves up just the right amount of crafty writing to elevate his music above the noisy fray. His vocals are delivered in a Dylan-meets-Westerberg sneer and he has always made the smart play by surrounding himself with solid players. He's that rare artist that hits all the right career notes seemingly without trying. And all of this would be moot without witnessing the dervish of energy that is a Dorian Taj show. Bands of all styles the world over could learn a thing or two from the manner in which Taj can captivate an audience.

There really isn't such a thing as precociousness in the music business. One only needs to consider that the Beatles averaged about twenty-two and a half years of age and were already seasoned pros in England when they played their American debut on Ed Sullivan in 1964. Enter California's Matt Jaffe. Jaffe is young - on the cusp of twenty-two - but he's talented, motivated and he's more than willing to put in the work necessary to make a name for himself. Jaffe started on violin at age five and had picked up the guitar and started to write his own songs by the time he was ten. A scant few years later, before he was finished with high school, Jaffe's repertoire featured no fewer than fifty of his own compositions and he'd already started amassing songwriting and performing awards in his Bay Area home. After graduation, Jaffe flipped coasts and started college at Yale University - but soon found that his true calling lay in music, so he dropped out after three semesters and applied his usual unstoppable focus a

As a youngster, Dan Phelps grew up in the shadow of the music business - quite literally. Phelps' father was the founder of the Full Sail Recording Workshop, which has since grown into Full Sail University, a technical school that has taught thousands of people how to make a living in the music, film and television industries. With that much gear and talent around, it is no surprise that the younger Phelps took to music at a young age. He started with drums and eventually switched to guitar, developing an avant-garde and experimental style that has been a trademark for his entire career. Phelps has maintained a true artist's path, lending his talents as a composer, producer, guitarist, audio engineer and performer to a wide range of artists and situations - with the common thread being his collaborators' willingness to be open-minded in their approach to making music. The last few years have found Phelps diving deeper into his explorations of improvisational composition. His custom-made guitar and laptop-base

A precocious Susan Tunney was stuffed into a corset and practicing her dialect for a period piece in her college's theater program when she had an epiphany. A voice in her head said something akin to, "What am I doing up here pretending to be somebody else?" That moment of artistic clarity found her leaving school and heading back to her native Chicago where she had the good fortune to land in middle of the heyday of the city's fertile 90s music scene. She formed a band called Adamjack with her best friend Sophie Lee and they set about doing what bands do: writing songs, playing shows and making albums. In short order, they'd built a solid following both locally and on the road and the band was selling out top tier venues in Chicago. After Lee quit the band to attend to a family health crisis, Tunney moved to New York City and eventually back to Chicago, releasing music under her own name all the while. But a life in music can be hard on one's constitution and years of the grind prompted Tunney to step away f

David Luning and his band are earning their accolades in the best way possible - simply by being good at what they do and by working hard. After high school, Luning left his hometown in Northern California and set out to study film scoring at Boston's prestigious Berklee College of Music. Things were going just fine until he happened to hear a John Prine record at a college party. Prine's seemingly effortless, enigmatic and elegantly simple songwriting style was a personal epiphany for Luning, and it set him on an entirely new tack. After convincing his parents that he needed to drop out of school to pursue this new career, Luning leaned hard into the craft of writing and performing. It wasn't long before he'd assembled a band, released an album and hit the road. That self-released first record, Just Drop On By, put him on the radar of listeners and music supervisors alike, and Luning's music began to land placements in movies and TV shows. All the while, Luning and his stalwart band were logging miles playin

Emily Zuzik's career in the performing arts is a study in diversification. At varying times, she can call herself a singer, songwriter, guitarist, actress and model - and she has had success at each of these related-but-distinct pursuits. Zuzik has released several records of her own music that range in style from a Sheryl Crow-esque rootsy-rock vibe to a hip-hopping blend of Aimee Mann, Alanis Morissette and Beck. Her vocals have been heard on NBC, WB Interactive and she has collaborated with Moby and sung with Blue Man Group. Her newest project is an EP of electronic music called Angelenos created with Tim Lefebvre that is reminiscent of Sarah McLachlan-fronted Massive Attack. No matter the genre, it's Zuzik's dynamic voice that ties it all together, ranging from a sweet melody to a sultry sneer in a matter of beats. Zuzik somehow even found her way onto a book cover; you can see her likeness wearing a bikini and wielding a spear gun on the cover of a now-out-of-print Penguin Paperback edition of James Bond

A dictionary definition of the word 'revival' goes something like: 'restoration to life, consciousness, vigor, strength, etc.' - and this isn't too far from the truth when describing the Los Angeles-based band, Mad Revival. The former half of their name is derived from the ethos of their frontman, Australian-born Nic Capelle, whose stage persona is an oddly pleasing blend of a field-hollering bluesman and a sanguine carnival barker. Which leaves the revival half, and its associated images of a kind of traveling tent celebration designed to conjure the spirit. Put them together and you have Mad Revival's amped up blues, the gospel of which they preach with a willingness to blend genres into an nearly indescribable mashup. Sometimes they sound like Howlin' Wolf fronting the Beastie Boys, and other times their twin guitar riffing pays homage to Led Zeppelin by way of James Brown. Aside from their originality, it's Mad Revival's work ethic that is their greatest asset. They work hard on their music, and the dedic

If you want to know what a life well lived in the music business sounds like, give a listen to Tony Gilkyson. Graced with both innate talent and a supportive musical family, Gilkyson has served the muse well - from his own compositions to backing up Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, K.D. Lang, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Dave Alvin and countless others. Gilkyson is perhaps best known for a facile, country-tinged style on the guitar, but he also spent a decade playing punk music in the band X, exemplifying the fact that the best musicians spend less time differentiating between musical styles and instead let their playing do the talking. Fans of The Big Lebowski, the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line and All the King's Men have heard Gilkyson's guitar contributions as accompaniment on the big screen, and artists like Eleni Mandell and Chuck E. Weiss have tapped him as a producer. In conversation, Gilkyson is soft-spoken, and he measures his words like a taciturn southern father whose wisdom is parsed out in economical ge

Supergroups come in all sizes, at least that's the convention behind Los Angeles' Jolenes. The three songwriters that form the heart of the band each have their own outfit; Grant Langston's stalwart band is called the Supermodels, David Serby fronts The Latest Scam, Dan Janisch has a group that plays under his own name and the fourth member, drummer Dale Daniel, is a veteran of the Los Angeles music scene - and their collective resume features a dozen or more albums and countless shows between them. So what brought these busy guys together and inspired them to add yet another responsibility to their schedules? The answer is friendship and an undying love for country music. The Jolenes' communal songwriting arrangement allows these three writers and bandleaders to abdicate the responsibility of being the boss by sharing that load with other artists who they call their friends. Rather than simply playing different arrangements of songs from their respective catalogs or leaning on covers, the Jolenes sit in a ro

Musician AJ Hobbs plays a sort of neo-traditionalist country music that reflects his origins in the desert east of Los Angeles. Hobbs' childhood home in Riverside County, California was a dusty, back-road tumbleweed junction long before the area grew up to be knows as Southern California's conservative 'Inland Empire' - an area which seemed a world away from the more laid-back coastal towns just over the western horizon. Hobbs learned firsthand just how disparate the two towns were when his mother packed up the family - sans dad - and moved to Orange County near the ocean. Hobbs didn't fit in with the surfer crowd, and he found solace in a couple of habits picked up from his wayward, hard-drinking father. The first of these inherited traits was music; after hearing country icons like Waylon, Willie, old school R&B and gospel at home, Hobbs picked up the guitar and began to write songs. But along with this musical inspiration came his father's penchant for drinking and other associated bad behavior. Hobbs work

Singer-songwriter Peter Himmelman has parlayed his successful career in music into a cottage industry. He got his start in the mid-1980s, long before the Internet revolutionized how people make, distribute and listen to music, and he has continued to evolve by constantly finding new ways to tap into the creative well. Himmelman is prolific, but he has been able to maintain a high level of craftsmanship in his songs by balancing quality and quantity, and through his highly improvisatory live performances - at which he has been known to regularly make up new songs on the fly. His impeccable work ethic has been paying dividends for years; he has been nominated for an Emmy, a Grammy and numerous other awards. He has scored music for television and movies and released dozens of songs through his Himmelvaults project. But Himmelman is far from all-business. Along with his diversified creative endeavors he wisely has kept his priorities in check by making the logical sacrifices necessary to maintain a healthy family

Stumpwaller is a Los Angeles-based band fronted by a native Alabamian with a penchant for preaching the gospel of rock and roll and outlaw country in the style of a raucous tent revival. Singer Myk Watford's affinity for Civil War-era murder ballads and southern mythology might seem out of place in Southern California, but the rest of the band ably amps up the volume and tempos so that Watford can allow the spirit to move through him and flat out refuse to let a jaded audience remain so. In an era in which wooly beards and retro clothing are the standard-issue uniform for many indie bands who flirt with the ghost of Johnny Cash, Stumpwaller's suit vests always have a pocket for a flask. Because they know that the eternal truth about the balance between Saturday night and Sunday morning is that it reflects the eternal struggle between good and evil - as well as how humanity is at once stuck in the balance and careening its way to its next church pew or juke joint. Stumpwaller has a new record on the way, and t

Lasers Lasers Birmingham is the sort of thing that happens when an experienced musician tests positive for country after years of slogging it out as a sideman in indie bands from the hills of Missouri to the deserts of Arizona. Alex Owen is Lasers Lasers Birmingham, and after recording his first cassette-only demo on his own - including playing all the instruments himself - Owen decided that his new batch of songs that would become the new EP Royal Blue necessitated third-person musical colors. Fortunately, a cadre of seasoned L.A. players was eager to pick up the phone when Owen called. Royal Blue is a quick tour of Lasers Lasers Birmingham's musical universe, and over the course of its four songs, gently strummed acoustic guitar, Hammond organ, barroom piano, pedal steel guitar, brushed snare drum, and burning Telecaster licks all have ample space to shine. But this isn't Nashville country, nor is it Austin country, Midwestern punk country, or even neo-traditionalist L.A./Bakersfield country. Lasers Lasers