Kings of the Mountain
Internet radio station picks up where Live 100.5 left off
cover story Sam George
Radio just isn’t what it used to be. When
the vast wilderness of the FM bandwidth was
thrown wide open in the late 1960s by a new
rule from the FCC banning the practice of du-
plicating AM programming on FM stations,
the space was quickly (and more important,
inexpensively) filled by DJs who played long
sets of music from multiple genres. It was a
radio wonderland, where it was possible to
sample a vast spectrum of what the airwaves
had to offer in one sitting. You could hear
folk, jazz, blues, rock, soul and R&B, all in one
go. Any and all tracks were permissible, and
the chances of hearing a new tune you hadn’t
heard before were high (as were many of the
listeners).
Now, of course, the broadcast landscape
looks much different. The majority of music
stations on the air are controlled by just a
few giant conglomerates, like Clear Channel,
Cumulus Media and Citadel Broadcasting.
Stations are programmed to fit into narrow
demographics, with short, singles-only playl-
ists. Since much of the music being put out to-
day is designed to fit firmly into these station’s
narrow definitions, the broadcast behemoths
have slowly and surely turned themselves into
obsolete schlock-hawkers.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t bright spots
in the darkness of the airwaves. Birmingham
has played host to a few trend-bucking upstart
stations that have dared to expand the scope
of their playlists to include songs that (gasp!)
people might not have heard before. There was
the nationally recognized 107.7 The X, which
distinguished itself with the Live in the X
Lounge series of albums in the late 1990s and
early 2000s. And, of course, the ill-fated Live
100.5 station, which was shut down last Febru-
ary by Citadel even though it had over 20,000
people join a Facebook group petitioning for
its survival just before it was switched over to a
talk-radio format.
Sounds bleak, doesn’t it? Well, hope is on
the horizon. Quietly, a few local entrepreneurs
have been working on filling the void of qual-
ity radio broadcasting here in Birmingham.
The new station is called Mountain Radio, and
it will be going live for your listening pleasure
in the first week of December. The only thing
is, this new radio station isn’t on the radio at
all. It’s on the internet.
Mountain Radio is, at its core, three gentle-
man: Geno Pearson, Jeff Clanton and Jeremy
Harper. I met them recently to discuss their
recent endeavor, and from the get-go, it’s clear
this is something they’ve been pondering for a
long time.
“We talked about it before Live 100.5 even
came on the air,” says Clanton, “but when
they came on we wanted to support that. Then
[they] went off the air and we sat and waited
and waited. We thought somebody else would
come up with the idea, but then we said ‘Let’s
just do this.’ We felt like there was a hole in
Birmingham for good indie rock and alterna-
tive music. [I’ve] worked in radio in sales for
a long time, and I knew Geno was a genius at
programming that kind of format, so I knew
 n o v e m b e r 1 8 - n o v e m b e r 25 , 2 0 1 0
he was somebody i wanted to talk to about it,
and we’d been friends for many years anyway.
And Harper is prolific at web design.”
Pearson denies his genius status, but agrees
he had a vision of a way to move forward. “I’ve
been programming an internet radio station
called gotradio.com for the past seven years,”
he notes. “It’s jockless and it’s just music, we
have 40 channels and I program seven of
them—all of the alternative-related channels.
It’s not trying to be local, but national and
international. And [I thought], we could try to
do it locally and get jocks on because I think
this town would eat it up.”
One of the first things they did was to
recruit Scott Register, host of popular Sunday
morning radio show Reg’s Coffeehouse, and
the last human voice heard on Live 100.5 be-
fore it was snuffed out. Register has spent the
intervening months since that moment look-
ing for the right opportunity to get his show
back on the airwaves, and though opportuni-
ties presented themselves, none seemed the
right one until Mountain Radio. “There’s a
niche in this town that we were filling that was
taken away, and it’s been long enough,” says
Register. “It’s time to fill that niche again.”
Clanton concurs. “We thought the way that
we could do it,” he says, “is really hearken back
to the radio stations of old, like the 70s Album
Oriented Rock (AOR). It’s locally driven, it’s
community-driven, it’s a live radio station,
and we’re live and local as much as possible.
We want this show to be living and breathing
too; to change, and to grow as the community
grows with it.”
It can’t hurt that they’ve also brought on
former Live 100.5 personalities Drew Cun-
ningham and Chris Adler and picked up
The men behind the Mountain: Jeff Clanton (left), Geno Pearson (middle) and
Jeremy Harper (right) are bringing back quality radio to Birmingham.
B I R M I N G H A M W E E K LY
Reed and Will Lochamy, creators of the “Oh
Brother” podcast, who will be expanding their
locally-made podcast into a longer format.
“I’m excited about what [the Lochamy
brothers] are going to do,” says Clanton.
“It’s going to be a two hour-long show [on]
Thursday nights and it’ll be more a call-in and
guest kind of talk show, but with their own
slant. Very similar to what they were doing,
but more. I think they had a lot of ideas with
the podcast that they couldn’t do.”
Having the internet as your broadcast me-
dium can provide benefits that terrestrial radio
doesn’t offer, especially in the area of social
media. Scott Register has a clear perspective
on the differences. “Back with 100.5,” he says,
“I always felt our parent company never quite
grasped the social media aspect of today’s
culture like we did. So it wasn’t a big a surprise
to me when they dismissed the 21,000 people
on the Facebook page. They don’t get it. They
don’t get what kind of a milestone it is to have
that many people join a cause to save some-
thing on Facebook.”
“One of the first things we did [at Live
100.5] was implement the texting feature for
anything where we were interacting with our
listeners,” continues Register, “so they could
have real-time conversations with us. I love
seeing people’s reactions to songs as they’re
playing, especially in the morning. It’s one of
the things that made me able to get up at five
every morning and be there at six. When you
know you’re not alone, when you’re sitting
there and it’s dark and cold, and you’ve got
your cup of coffee in your hand, and you play
a song and all of a sudden ten messages pop up
with people saying, ‘Dude, you just saved my
life. I needed this song this morning.’ It really
makes it fun from our end as well. That’s one
of the first things I do when I walk in, is log
into my Facebook page and say, ‘Good morn-
ing. Here we go. Let’s do this.’ I think it will be
a vital part of what we do.”
Geno Pearson is also gung-ho on the
prospects of using social media to pioneer
an internet radio station. “The social re-
sponse has really caught me by surprise, says
Pearson. “This town is so passionate about
music. Bands that, for this size of a town, you
wouldn’t think they would sell 50 tickets, but
when they come here they’ll sell out Work-
play, they’ll sell out Bottletree, they’ll sell out
the Alabama Theatre. Other towns this size,
[those bands] wouldn’t get half that. Obvi-
ously, even with no radio exposure, people are
finding out about it and they’re going to the
shows and buying the CDs.”
From the way reaction to the new station
is shaping up, it seems like Mountain Radio
may indeed have stumbled onto the new radio
model. Their Facebook page has been up for
a little under two weeks and already has 1500
fans, even though they aren’t on the air yet.
Public reaction has also been positive.
“We did a kind of faux preview launch
down at [Lakeview’s] Nightmare on 29th
Street Celebration on Halloween, where we ran
a faux version of the station with the sweepers
and the music we would play, and the reac-
tion was, ‘What is this!, You’re going to play
Silversun Pickups, you’re going to play Band of
Horses?’ All the music we were playing, every-
body was like, “This is great, I can’t wait!”
Whatever the future of Mountain Radio
holds, while it is on the air, Birmingham will
once again be able to call itself the home of a
radio station that plays music worth listening
to, programmed by people who care about
such things. In an age where the listening
choices available to us have ballooned into an
imposing mass thanks to online distribution,
we need someone to filter out the signal from
the noise. Or, as Reg puts it, “There’s so much
going on in the world today and there aren’t
enough good filters out there. We’ve proven
ourselves time and time again to be that filter.
So, as happy as I am to be able to broadcast
again, I’m even happier for our listeners and
the artists, because at the end of the day the
whole reason I started Reg’s Coffeehouse
all those years ago and the whole reason we
started Live 100.5 was to connect these music
lovers with these artists and give them a
forum, and now we’re going to try it
another way.”
Mountain Radio will go live the first week in
December at www.bhammountainradio.com,
but in the meantime you can get the skinny on
what they are up to at their Facebook and Twit-
ter pages, which you can reach from their main
website.
Sam George is the Managing Editor of Bir-
mingham Weekly. Please send your comments
to editor@bhamweekly.com.