Originally Posted: March 29, 2018
As a Lead-in to next week’s planned Musings, I share this Encore post from March of 2018 with this preface: In the fall of 1998, radio programming guru, Lee Abrams, was appointed Chief Programming Officer of XM Satellite Radio, one of two companies which had recently been licensed by the U. S. Government to operate a Satellite Digital Audio Radio Service commonly known as satellite radio.
If Lee saw this as an opportunity, I did too and quickly made contact. Knowing of my industry reputation, he indicated there might well be a slot for me but they were nowhere near ready to begin hiring staff, as everything was still very much in the planning stage and the search for a suitable building to house the massive operation was still on-going.
And, when I was invited to join the team in late 2000 it was not to program the format in which I’d built my reputation in the radio industry, a genre of programming which was the favorite of millions of music lovers (a fact which due to personal biases XM management chose to ignore) it was to use my overall programming skills to create a compelling product in a different genre read on!
By the way, if you don’t recognize the reason Savoy was chosen as part of the channels name, you’ll find the answer on Page 187 of my memoir, RADIO My Love, My Passion!
With XM Radio having located a suitable building … a concrete and brick structure nearly 100 years old and formerly housing a printing plant … and the remodeling of it well under way and, even though the actual launch of service would be a year away, by July of 2000 hiring of programming personnel had begun.
It would be another five months before my time would come … December 4th, to be exact! And, the reason I was chosen to join the team boiled down to a few simple factors: I was old enough to truly relate to the era in question, and I had clearly demonstrated programming skills and a resourcefulness needed for creating a product that would be uniquely different from what was typically found on regular radio. This was the criteria for hiring everyone who’d be responsible for developing each of the 100 channels we’d be offering on launch day.
After all, when you are launching a brand new radio service which would require both purchasing a receiver and then paying a monthly fee in order to hear anything on that receiver … there had to be a magnetic attraction in order to bring paying customers on board. And that is what we were challenged to do!
As we joined the team, we were quickly challenged to not only create dynamic programming fitting the genre in question, we were expected to “brand” our channel as well. I was brought on board to create a channel labeled 1940’s/Big Band. Therefore, what was significant about this era? Of course, the heart of it centered on World War Two. Whether it was dance halls or USO clubs, the music was swinging! And … with gasoline for cars in restricted supply and the need to transport huge quantities of war materials plus thousands of troops, the railroads became of ever greater importance. So, out of this combination came the Savoy Express!
No more than a year, maybe two, had passed that we had a goodly number of devoted listeners, and a fair group was desirous of having a Savoy Express T-shirt, so a logical image came to mind … the express train which passed my house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, daily. Based on that visual, our graphic artist friend, Jane Albanese, came up with this design.
For the record, let me note two pieces of information relevant to this story: 1) Today, the channel is known as 40’s Junction and lives on Channel 73. While it retains the great musical sounds of the era, much of the non-musical elements of the original format were discontinued following the merger of the two companies. And, 2) while management for many years had no knowledge of the origins or meaning of the Savoy Express name, or that it had any connection to railroads, they did choose to register it as a trademark in the corporation’s name.
This is just the earliest part of my nearly 15 years spent in satellite radio, all documented in Chapter 13, the longest chapter in my radio industry memoir, “RADIO … My Love, My Passion.” As the weeks pass, there’ll be more stories and more photos from this 70-year journey … so please stop back regularly.
Thank you!
