Save Live 100.5

This Sun­day, my favorite radio sta­tion got the axe thanks to Citadel Broad­cast­ing.  I shouldn’t be sur­prised, because it seems as soon as I get attached to a sta­tion, it will be cut soon in favor of some­thing more cor­po­rate.  This time, the rumor is that WAPI, a local AM talk sta­tion, will move to FM.  This mir­rors the sim­i­lar fate of 105.5 the Vul­can last year.  I liked the Vul­can, too, and had just about decided to give up on Birm­ing­ham radio all together. I was going to just go to the inter­net. And then Live 100.5 won my heart.

To the best of my under­stand­ing (and faulty mem­ory — cor­rect me if I’m wrong on any of this, I’d appre­ci­ate it) Live 100.5 was built around a show, Reg’s Cof­fee­house, that has sur­vived a few incar­na­tions in the Birm­ing­ham mar­ket.  I’ve lis­tened to some ver­sion of Reg’s Cof­fe­house for ages, prob­a­bly all the way back since 1997.  Then his show was just a Sun­day a.m. spe­cial DJ on WRAX.  WRAX bounced around a lot, and even in 2006 became WJOX for a lit­tle while, a Citadel sport­stalk sta­tion but it didn’t work out, and the Birm­ing­ham pub­lic clam­ored for some­thing bet­ter to replace the old WRAX.  That some­thing became WWMM Helena, Live 100.5.

Reg (Scott Reg­is­ter) and I don’t always see eye to eye on music.  He loves John Mayer, for exam­ple, and con­sid­ers him­self at least partly respon­si­ble for that tool’s suc­cess.  But Reg always is about expand­ing your music col­lec­tion, try­ing new things, and not clos­ing your mind. He even played coun­try music (*gasp*) on an alter­na­tive sta­tion! Old stuff, new stuff, Reg was an hon­est DJ and all about the music. And the sta­tion was built on that con­cept, too. You could tell it, because it wasn’t a con­ven­tional lineup by any means. Tues­day nights were one of my favorites, because the DJs would get together and play new stuff and ask the lis­ten­ers to voice their opin­ions. If we liked it, we heard more of it, and things like it. If the lis­ten­ers gen­er­ally hated it, we weren’t sub­jected to it. Even if I hated some­thing they were play­ing, it was so cool because they actu­ally cared about the music and the lis­ten­ers. They weren’t out there just shilling the same old cor­po­rate music.

Right now the sta­tion hasn’t made the tran­sis­tion to WAPI. Instead, they’re just play­ing “auto­mated” music and stock com­mer­cials, no DJ per­son­al­i­ties involved. And it’s already pretty bad. Yesterday’s Fleet­foxes, Neko Case, Flam­ing Lips and Johnny Cash have already dis­ap­peared, as far as my obser­va­tion goes. There is hope, though, in the form of a hum­ble Face­book page. My fin­gers are crossed that a pub­lic out­cry will be heeded.