You can't get a vanilla shake or cheeseburger at Joe's Grille, but if you're an independent musician looking for exposure on a strict no-major label music diet, joe's has plenty to offer. Through its website Web Site, www.joesgrille.com, joe's has become a major, if not revolutionary force in the Indie world, giving self-released artist the chance to manufacture and/or distribute their music at a fair price and receive a fair return. The site also offers audio previews and select MP3 downloads of many of its artists. Last year, joe's began "joe's Blue Plate Special," a syndicated radio show of music and interviews that is distributed to more than 600 college and public radio stations around the country. With recent sponsorship from Dr. Marten's, the Blue Plate Special is looking to go weekly. After a mastering session for a recent radio show that lasted until 4am, joe's main hostess, Wendy Rubin, still had the verve to plug away in support of independent musicians.

So, you got no sleep because you were re-editing the latest radio show? Yeah, we were going to send the masters out yesterday and I went and listened to them and there was an error I couldn't live with.

The radio show seems like a logical extension of what you do on the site. Yes, as a company we're trying to help independent artists. I know that may sound a little silly, to put independent artists ahead of making money in the music industry, but its more about the heart for us, than how we can make money off people. So we realized that we had the Web site and the distribution and our "like artists" references on the site to help people find new music, so the next thing was to help people get their music out there. So we started doing a radio show online first, then we hooked up with a company called one-wing promotions, who I met for the first time at the CMJ convention last year.

We like to think that we make dreams come true at CMJ. Yes, thank you [laughs].They do radio promotion and we put together a show and put it out there and it did really well. We've got a lot of support from independent artists. The next few shows have Moby, R.L.Burnside and Mike ness, so its really great.

How did you start joe's? It started as an independent film company in 1992. We were doing music videos with a film production company and I'd hire independent contractors to do music videos and tv stuff. I was trying to raise money for a television pilot and I realized that the quickest way to fund my tv stuff was through the manufacturing process. So, I hired my first person in 1995 to sell the manufacturing aspect. From there, everything took off. Not that we're a huge company. So, the film stuff went on hold while we followed this through.

Do you seek out artists or are people coming to you directly now? People are coming to us. We're still looking for submissions to the radio show though. We're very choosey about the music we out on the radio show and seem to always be short of good music. So we're trying to get the word out about submissions. It's free promotion for people, you know? They can't lose.

What's that weeding out of submissions like? What are you looking for?
We'll play the music and if we like the first verse, we'll be like, "Please let there be a good chorus. Please let it be a great song!" And what we're looking for are solid songs. Production value isn't a big deal to us. If someone doesn't have the money to produce something, that's not a big deal, but the songs have to be great. We have an internal rating system here, A nine is a great song. Ten is unique. We've got a band, the Ghost of Tony Gold, a sort of retro, Brit-Pop thing and they're really unique.

Have there been a lot of success stories born out of the radio show?
I don't know how much this had to do or not do with us, but we had one artist, Breck Alan, who was flown out by Capitol to do a demo. [We also were the first to air Alien Ant Farm and Jurassic 5 was also one of our indie bands.]

Are the majority of artists you're working with on tiny indie labels or are they mainly self-released?
Our preference is to find unsigned bands. SIgned artists need help as well, because the indies don't have the money to promote. So we do stuff with independent labels as well.The bigger name people are our marquee artists and they help the show get airplay.

Any Plans for joe's to evolve into a label?
We're going to put together a "best-of" CD of the people we think are nines and tens and put it for sale and make it seven or eight bucks. The idea of doing a label is a great dream. We have all the parts, distribution and promotion. but right now, it's one thing at a time. If one day, we get to sign some of the bands that we think are amazing, that'd be wonderful.

Is there an actual joe's grille that the company is named for?
If you were at joe's, I'd tell you that where were sitting, there actually used to be a diner here and that the chair that you're sitting in is where Elvis used to come and have his fried peanut-butter sandwiches.

Wow! Is that true?
No [laughs]. There's no Joe. I just love the name. It serves us well.