Lee Abrams introduced himself last week to the Tribune Company's employees as their new "innovation chief" with an all-caps headline:

NEWS & INFORMATION IS THE NEW ROCK N ROLL.

His formulation predictably echoes one by Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone in 1974, wherein, juiced by the excitement of McGovern's recent 49-state loss to Richard Nixon, he declared,

POLITICS WILL BE THE ROCK AND ROLL OF THE SEVENTIES.

Wenner was in essence admitting publicly his loss of interest in music (the mag soured on everything new but singer-songwriters by 1970), but he had already driven off the real politicos on the staff who'd wanted Rolling Stone to get behind the revolution of the Panthers, the Weathermen, et. al. That had been expressed as a defense of music (!?!). But Hunter S. Thompson's ability to revolutionize campaign reportage in 1972 led Rolling Stone from the west coast and rock and roll to New York in 1978, where Wenner rapidly devolved into just another clueless publisher trying to bell the cat--that beast out beyond the Hudson that kept electing Republicans and buying Rush albums.

Such bombast usually disguises its opposite. "It was the star trip all over again," Wenner's staff concluded according to Robert Sam Anson in his book, Gone Crazy And Back Again (Doubleday). Wenner's purpose had been to meet the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and now his mind was wandering.

Lee Abrams' memo (posted at poynter.org) follows his abusive invocation of Rock with three bullet points headed: Soul, Art, and The economics.

He poses as coming from vital, innovative ROCK N ROLL!, when actually he was one of the handful of people who made their fortune destroying rock and roll radio and all but extinguishing vitality and innovation.

Beginning in January 1973 Burkhart-Abrams Inc. formatted, programmed, researched, and syndicated the music for nearly a thousand stations--Burkhart did the AM, Abrams did FM. In my first book I quoted Abrams from an interview he unwisely gave to Rolling Stone in 1977:

"We have about thirty-nine college students who worked 365 days of the year doing legwork distributing questionnaires about general music taste... They're distributed all over the country, mainly in shopping center type locations. We found that if we use music locations like concerts, we get a tremendous bias."

Yeah, a bias in favor of music: live rock and roll. This all dovetailed with the anxiety that punk rock was causing the now corporatized '60s ex-underground. Burkhart-Abrams simply deprived punk rock of oxygen and thereby all but killed rock and roll in the defense of established "Superstars"--their FM format's name. Today one hears the Ramones at major league sports events, but the Weirdos and hundreds more deserved airplay in that 17-year radio desert that ended briefly with Nirvana's breakthrough. With rock and roll safely underground once again, Abrams ditched music for Howard Stern, Steve Dahl and the morning zoo legions of guffawing drive-time buffoons.

Disco had taken the dancers away from the '60s rock audience and given them clubs and sound systems and records that dispensed with musicians and bands and live performances. Steve Dahl's White Sox Disco Demolition in 1979 was a peak clusterf**k of period miscomprehension.

The N.Y. Times quoted a witness, "Donna Summer, like her or hate her, you don't put M-80s on her albums and throw them at people." So true... Dahl's audience didn't really listen to music, not on WLUP anyway, but they were high as a kite as they trashed Comiskey Park that day.

Chicago, at that point was still a largely blue collar town that didn't contribute much to early punk rock, though the granola-crunchers at WXRT (nominally Abrams' worst enemy, tho' no friend of rock and roll either) actually claim they "went punk" in the late seventies. They think of Dave Mason, Bruce Springsteen and Roxy Music as punk rock apparently.

Without Lee Abrams there wouldn't be a Ramones song called, "Do You Remember Rock ‘n' Roll Radio." Recently he's been at XM satellite radio where fractional micro-genre formats are mistakenly thought to be an answer. Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio show is no doubt Lee's proudest achievement--as if a single song played on that show tested or researched its way onto the radio then or now. The Trib's business columnist quotes Abrams, "I'm making amends... with XM. Back then, when I started, what radio needed was discipline. It was all over the place, and we disciplined it. And now, or 10 years ago, we needed to unwind that discipline." (March 16, 2008)

The problem with XM and Sirius is that one must be Bob Dylan and play only oldies to escape the publishers retaking of radio through the back door of secret programming deals. The rest of their DJs' expertise, even when real, is utterly unused as they are mere voices announcing the songs as they are delivered anonymously from on high.

What is Abrams supposed to do at the Tribune? Kill newspapers too? In this case it's too late, the Tribune was Abrams-ized decades ago. It never suffered want of personality while Colonel McCormick ran it (1911-1955). He considered Chicagoland to run from Detroit to Des Moines; the Trib's WGN radio station, begun in 1926, was a clear channel powerhouse; and its WGN television station, signed on in April 1948, is a superstation via cable. The Tribune was FDR's principal nemesis as he expanded the federal government's purview domestically and internationally. The first Harold Ickes threatened to requisition the Tribune's fleet of ships that brought paper from its Canadian pulp mills for the war, and FDR himself threatened to send Marines to occupy the Tribune Tower; he settled for convincing Marshall Field III to start the Chicago Sun-Times to oppose the Tribune. It commenced publication on the very day the Tribune embarrassed the administration three days before Pearl Harbor by revealing its plan to throw ten million American soldiers against Hitler. Sounds like the New York Times today. (footnote: Ted Field forced the 1984 sale of the Sun-Times so he could go into the music business, eventually running Interscope; picture Lee and Ted exchanging sinking ships in the night.)

In the book The Trust, about the New York Times' Ochs-Sulzberger dynasty, Col. McCormick is described arriving at the Sulzbergers'

Hillandale estate "...in a bright red helicopter emblazoned with gold lettering that read THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, AMERICA'S GREATEST NEWSPAPER.

Arthur had carefully instructed McCormick to land in a nearby field, but he descended instead in the middle of Sulzberger's lawn just as guests were having drinks. The wind and commotion sent people flying in all directions." (Usually the slogan was WORLD'S GREATEST NEWSPAPER [hence WGN], so the Colonel was actually toning it down a bit for the swells at the Times.) The removal of this energy and personality was not done immediately on McCormick's death in 1955; Don Maxwell continued the Tribune's once common brand of politicized personalized journalism until it was the last of its 19th century breed. It ended when Clayton Kirkpatrick became editor in 1969 and submitted to the reigning "objective" style that sealed FDR's triumph over the Colonel.

Kirkpatrick even had the Trib race the Times and Washington Post to put the boot in on Richard Nixon.

The Tribune's regime of suits went on to put together a virtual fourth television network of 23 stations, a virtual national paper (dailies in Chi, NY, LA, Baltimore, Orlando, and elsewhere). But with no face it never jelled. The Tribune and Gannett's USA Today national paper were the only full color newspapers for years. But by trying to live down its true political heritage, the Tribune could not become the paper or networks that might have beat the Wall Street Journal to becoming a full service conservative national daily, or Rupert Murdoch to creating a conservative news alternative, or owned talk radio itself (which WGN has been doing for decades). But one wouldn't know from the Trib or WGN/CW television or WGN radio that there is such a thing as politics.

The newspaper sector is taking a beating on Wall Street, but the Tribune has been taken private by real estate tycoon Sam Zell. He has a personality, he's a self-made man, and he swears a lot. But does he have the courage of his invective? Just to service the debt he will sell off the Cubs, Wrigley Field, Newsday, and perhaps the L.A. Times and more. But at least shareholders and stock price no longer rule the Tribune Company's fate; the vultures have moved on to the New York Times, with Murdoch looking on with interest.

But what will Lee Abrams, our ROCK N ROLL motivational salesman hero, be doing in the meantime? Here's some of his guru pep talk from memo #2, which is his response to alleged miscomprehension of memo #1:

"IT'S A LOT LIKE FOOTBALL: OFFENSE, DEFENSE AND SPECIAL TEAMS:

Defense is the comfort and familiarity

Offense is the excitement and surprise

Special Teams are the intangibles...the features and new angles All defense and you are comfortable...but vulnerable to attack All Offense and you risk being too cool for the room But an A+ in all three and you can be invulnerable.

"IT'S NOT TOO LATE FOR NEWSPAPER BRANDS TO OWN 'INFORMATION.'

It is only if you, deep inside, believe that.

"WINNING COMBINES ART, SCIENCE, EMPATHY FOR THE COMMON MAN, STREET SMARTS AND SWAGGER.

"IF YOU DON'T AGGRESSIVELY WRITE THE FUTURE...NO ONE ELSE OUT THERE SEEMS TO WANT TO. THE PUBLIC LOSES. Writing the future is a responsibility to the public as much as us.

"DUMB STUFF PEAKS FAST... SMART STUFF LASTS. ELITE NEVER GETS OFF THE GROUND.

"QUALITY: Timeless. Doesn't mean elite. A blue collar garbage man wants QUALITY seats to a Bulls game. Quality is timeless and cuts across all lines."

You get the picture, blurry as it may be. I just hope Lee doesn't run thru the Tribune's supply of capital letters or it'll start looking like one long email from carducci. Except that those read more like the Colonel than the Tribune ever will again. I'm going to miss newspapers like I miss radio.

Joe Carducci is the author of Rock And The Pop Narcotic and Enter Naomi: SST, L.A. and All That... This is his second blog post for Arthur Magazine. He is currently doing booksigning events around the country.