A POP CULTURE MOMENT (DAY 1)

Tune in, turn on, but let's not drop out just yet. We are approaching the close of the 50th anniversary of the decade that was a huge influence on the America we are living in today. Through its gargantuan leaps in technology (yes, folks, we did make it to the moon), the civil rights movement, the assassination of a President and other high-profile figures, the Vietnam War, and the hippies and the counterculture, it was a ten-year span of the likes that we're not likely to see again. Like all history, it is obviously contemporaneous, that is, it always occurs in the present, but it's easier to look back than to see what's in front of you.

One of the key components of the counterculture was the use of newspapers to proselytize the hippie's, yippie's and trippie's antiestablishment message in freak-friendly communities like Greenwich Village, NY and Berkeley, CA. From the psychedelic (San Francisco Oracle), to the politically-charged (Berkeley Barb) to the downright militant (The Black Panther), "underground" newspapers were the printed mouthpieces for the peace. love and political manifestos of the 60's counterculture.

The BERKELEY BARB's (short for Barbarian) first issue was in August 1965 and was one of the first underground newspapers. It was heavily political and contained anti-war material (that's the Vietnam War for the historically curious) and social issues, such as the civil rights movement. It was also one of the first underground newspapers to carry underground comix from the likes of Joel Beck, Dave Sheridan and Bill "Zippy The Pinhead" Griffith. The voice of the 'Barb went silent in 1980.

Posted today are two issues of "The 'Barb", Vol. 5 No. 24 (whole number 122), December 15-21, 1967 and Vol. 6 No. 2 (whole number 126), January 12-18, 1968.

Barb Bows Out
Vol. 30, No. 24, Issue 735 -- July 3, 1980

International News Keyus (INK), the owners of the Berkeley Barb, announces the suspension of Barb publication with this issue. Inc. thanks the Barb's readers and advertisers for their continuing support over the years. The following statement reflects the feelings of the Berkeley Barb staff members.

On July 2, 1980, six men and women worked until the wee hours of the morning to "put to bed" the final edition of the Berkeley Barb. The Barb began as a one person operation on Friday, August 13, 1965, in the kitchen of Max Scherr's Berkley home. It quickly became the most popular -- and certainly the best-known -- "underground" newspaper of the era. Everything the Barb did -- from championing extremist causes to exposing corrupt politics to calling for civil disobedience -- was controversial.

Both at its birth and for years afterwards, the Barb was partisan, polemical, and prophetic -- a forum for minority views, a channel for political protest, a unifying factor among dissidents.

It followed the model of the old Chicago Times: "The duty of a newspaper is to print the news and raise hell." In later years, the Barb toned it down, substituting research for rumors, investigation for accusations, substance for stridency. However, it never strayed from its original commitment -- to present alternative reporting and analysis of significant political and social issues.

But two trends have developed in this century, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, that have put most "underground" newspapers out of business: the rise of a conservative backlash that may put the Ku Klux Klan in Congress and Ronald Reagan in the White House; and the overwhelming growth of political apathy among those who can't bring themselves to climb aboard the neoconservative bandwagon.

Both of these factors have helped to destroy the Berkeley Barb.

Our circulation is at an all-time low. We have lost money that can never be regained. In fact, the Barb is finally joining the casualty list of the "underground" press it inspired.

We've been told that "the times aren't right" for us; that people want only "good news"; that we are to follow the path of some other "alternative" publications, replacing information with entertainment, hard news with "fluff" features, political concerns with trendy fads.

But stayin' alive was never as important as staying true to an ideal -- and rather than lower its sights or sacrifice its integrity, the Barb has chosen to die -- with dignity and, we hope, with style.

This, then, is the last Berkeley Barb. Read -- enjoy -- and remember.

 

Berkeley Barb Dies, a Victim of '70s
By Paul Grabowicz, The Washington Post | July 3, 1980

The Berkeley Barb, the notorious underground weekly that championed the era of student rebellion, LSD and changing sexual mores, quietly stopped publication this week, another Sixties symbol brought down by the Seventies.

Faced with a staggering deficit, dwindling circulation and a longstanding image problem the Barb's owners have announced they are suspending publication "indefinitely." Insiders expect it will never be revived.

Since its heyday in 1969 when it was distributed worldwide and its readership topped 90,000, the Barb has been in decline. Current circulation hovered at barely 2,500 and weekly losses were about $1.500, according to sources at the paper. "For 10 years, these undergrounds papers have been dropping like flies, and the Barb was one of the last survivors," says Barb general manager Ray Riegert. "But the Seventies took over from the Sixties, and even the Barb became anachronism."

Nowhere has the shift in attitudes been more marked than at Berkeley, where 15 years a thriving population of hippies, bohemians, campus revolutionaries and dropouts gave birth to and nourished the Barb. Today, the nearby University of California campus is awash in apathy and the city's once proudly rebellious street denizens have become little more than the cronically unemployed.

"The only connection now between the Barb and the street people," said one former editor, "is they rip off copies of the Barb and burn them in trashcans in People's Park to keep warm."

The Barb was founded in 1965 -- the brainchild of Max Scherr, a Baltimore-born attorney who migrated West in the 1940s to join the Bay area's burgeoning bohemian community. In the beginning Scherr, a pixieish man now in his 60s who still gets his wardrobe out of free clothing boxes, put out the paper virtually singlehandedly, even hawking it on the city streets.

The amateurish, ink-smeared tabloid nonetheless quickly caught on with Berkeley's antiestablishment subculture.

Early headlines read, "One Hundred and Sixty Pigs Provoke Riot as Panthers Keep Cool" and "Crowd Mostly Right On." Its stories included the "exclusive" two-part series entitled, "I Was a Straightie" along with an announcement of a "Kiss In" to protest an arrest for lewd public conduct.

"It was a weird novelty," says former editor David Armstrong. "It was a hybrid of sex and dope and politics -- and all of that stuff was peaking at the same time."

The Barb was at its peak in 1969 when it ran stories advocating the formation of a "People's Park" on university owned land. In a bloody confrontation with police over the park, Barb staffers were shot, beaten and arrested as they freely mixed their rioting with their reporting.

But as quickly as it rose, the Barb fell, as the fervor of the 1960s diminished and the paper found itself clinging to a fading era. "Max [Scherr] was still back there plugging away, but there weren't too many other people still with him," says former editor Armstrong. "I mean how many times do you want to read about, 'Pigs Kill Kids'?"

Adding to the paper's problems was its sale in 1973 to International News Keyes, a subsidiary of Aruba Bonair Curasao & Trust Co., whose ownership remained a closely guarded secret by mangement. The sale bred paranoia in the Barb's staff.

Worse still, the paper's status with Berekely's dwindling leftist community suffered as the Barb relied increasingly on sleazy sex ads for income. What once had been romanticized as the promotion of "free sex" became little more than thinly disguised advertising by prostitutes and massage parlors.

In a last-ditch effort at revamping the paper, the Barb in 1978 started what its staff dubbed "The Great October Revolution" by splitting the paper in two, spinning off the sex ads into a raunchy new publication called the Spectator. The Barb brought in a new editor and abandoned the strident tones of its revolutionary past in favor of feature stories and solid investigative reporting.

Quickly, however the "revolution" fizzled as the paper's ownership instituted severe staff cutbacks in the face of larger and larger losses. By February, the editorial budget had been cut nearly in half.

Later the editor was fired and the publisher quit in protest, sparking feelings that the paper was quickly nearing an end.

The end finally came this week, with the suspension of publication. There is still the possibility the paper will be sold, but the chances are "remote," according to International News Keyes secretary-treasury Tom Meehan.

The Spectator, meanwhile, will continue publication.

Sex, Drugs, Revolution: 50 Years On, Barbarians Gather to Recall The Berkeley Barb
By Pat Joseph | California Magazine (UC Cal Berkeley Alumni Association | July 30, 2015

The inaugural edition of The Berkeley Barb hit streets on Friday, August 13, 1965—incendiary times. It was the first days of the Watts riots, and the conflict in Vietnam was beginning to play out in living rooms on the nightly news. That week TV viewers watched as American GIs casually torched Vietnamese villages with their flamethrowers and Zippo lighters. Meanwhile, all across the United States, disillusioned young men were beginning to take those Zippos to their draft notices. To a kid in Berkeley in that era, it must have seemed as if the whole world was going up in smoke.

It was against that backdrop that the heavily bearded Max Scherr, an aging lawyer/bohemian saloonkeeper with roots in the Old Left, appeared clutching copies of his new underground paper, The Berkeley Barb—a weekly tabloid that would feature news of the revolution… and sex… and drugs…and the next Jefferson Airplane show. The masthead was inspired by Jorge Posada’s La Calavera de Don Quixote, the skeletal rider on his skeletal steed, lance leveled for battle. As the tip of the lance, Scherr, who held a bachelor’s degree in sociology from UC Berkeley, put the campus Campanile.

The first run was only 1,200 copies and, in the beginning the publisher doubled as newsboy, hawking his product on city street corners. Price per copy: Ten cents. “Read the Berkeley Barb,” Scherr called out. “It’s a pleasure not a duty.”

Folks seemed to agree. By 1969, circulation had grown to 93,000 and the Barb had become the leading voice of Berkeley radicals and an institution of the New Left. And, as it so often goes with the Left, it also engendered internal dissent, labor strikes and splinter factions. In time, Max would be denounced by his own erstwhile staff as petit bourgeois and a capitalist pig.

But that all came later. In the early days, Scherr’s Barb was where it was at.

Writer and satirist Paul Krassner, sometimes called the dean of underground journalism, covered the Patty Hearst trial for the Barb—a saga he recalls in his latest book, Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders: A Tale of Two Trials. He compares the Barb to “the unregulated Internet before there was such a thing. I mean, anything went in those pages. It was so free.

“There was a sense of community around it,” Krassner adds, “so that even when people left Berkeley, they kept subscribing because that was their social media. That was their connection to their people.”

Krassner also published his own paper, The Realist​​, favored reading material of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, who flipped through it on their famous psychedelic bus as they tootled around the country, high on acid and morning glory seeds. 

There were other underground papers in the Bay Area at the time as well, but they tended to be more narrowly targeted; The Oracle to “the heads,” the Express Times to the political activists. The Barb was unique, says former contributor and Free Speech Movement alum Kate Coleman, in being “the only one that brought the whole counterculture together—drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, free speech, free love, politics—all of it.”

Scherr, who died of cancer in 1981, not long after the Barb itself gave up the ghost, will be remembered next week at a trio of events to mark the 50th anniversary of his newspaper’s debut. The occasion will serve as a reunion of the loose-knit tribe of contributors and employees who produced it across a 15-year span.

“There were massage ads up the ying-yang!” recalls Coleman, engaging in some pre-reunion reminiscences for California.  “In those days, Berkeley had more massage parlors than hands!”

Not surprisingly, many of the female staff took issue with being roped into the skin trade. Kathy Streem, now a retired public defender, remembers when the masseuses would drop by to pay for the ad placements. “I tried to organize them and encourage them to strike for better pay and working conditions.” She even took to the streets. “I had a sign that said, ‘Off the Pimps!’ ”—a riff on the Black Panther rallying cry, “Off the Pigs!”

For his part, Scherr tolerated feminist editorials but didn’t suffer them gladly. A feminist tract written by female staffer Judy Gumbo appeared, much to the writer’s chagrin, under the Scherr-supplied headline, “Why the Women Are Revolting.”

Mostly, he was keen on getting more nudity into the Barb’s page. “’Tits above the fold!’ was Max’s motto,” recalls John Jekabson, former managing editor of the Barb. With a shrug Jekabson adds, “Sex sells. It sold then and it sells now. Max understood that.”

The sex certainly sold, but it also led to an obscenity bust, after the Barb ran photos showing members of the rock band MC5 engaged in group sex with a groupie. The raid only served to reinforce Scherr’s stature in the Berkeley counterculture, which, given the legacy of the Free Speech Movement, was united in its opposition to all forms of censorship.

From the beginning, the Barb ran on a shoestring and the famously tight-fisted Scherr nickeled-and-dimed writers and staff. Streem remembers doing the layout as Scherr hovered over her shoulder, urging her to widen the margins. “Max paid by the column-inch,” she explains, laughing. “If I widened the margins, I saved him money.”

As the paper grew, the sales force was plumped out with underpaid contributors and starving hippies. One such specimen, a cat named Crowbar, is quoted on the reunion website, recalling how he and friends sold the Barb on San Francisco’s Haight Street. “That’s how we lived: made enough money every day to buy a loaf of bread, peanut butter, jelly, a hit of acid, and a outrageous priced ticket ($2.50) to the Fillmore or the Avalon to hear some cool music.” Crowbar says the Barb saved his life.

Not everyone found their arrangement with Max so copacetic. Discontent boiled over in 1969 after a mysterious, short-lived paper called the Berkeley Fascist appeared, in which it was calculated that the Barb netted $5,000 an issue. Adjust for inflation, multiply by 52 and that translates to roughly $1.7 million a year in 2015 dollars. Apparently Max Scherr, the old Marxist, was getting rich off the backs of the workers.

Years later, Gar Smith, FSM veteran and a reporter who covered the “peace beat” for the Barb, would reveal, in an article for New West, that Scherr had for years been socking money away in offshore bank accounts. What was he saving for? John Jekabson says it was part of a long-term plan to build an alt-press empire: “I think he wanted to become the William Randolph Hearst of the counterculture.”

Whatever the case, staff members at the time were understandably outraged by the revelations in the Fascist and soon went on strike. Then, after trying and failing to buy the paper, the majority defected to start their own competing weekly called The Berkeley Tribe, led by Yippie co-founder Stew Albert. More strident than the Barb, the Tribe’s rhetoric was often as subtle as a rock through a windowpane. At times it was simply hateful. After a rookie Berkeley cop named Ronald Tsukamoto was gunned down on August 20, 1970, allegedly by members of the Black Panthers, the Tribe ran a full-page photo of the fatally wounded young officer under the headline “Blood of a Pig.”

Although the Barb didn’t shrink from the radical rhetoric of referring to police as pigs, it would never have stooped to gloating over a slain officer’s body, insists Kate Coleman. She acknowledges, however, that she herself was swept up in the militancy of the times. “I was carried away, until I wasn’t,” she says, remembering the moment when her old friends in the Weathermen started setting off bombs as the Weather Underground. “And it dawned on me. Oh, now we’re fucking terrorists!”

The Tribe would fold in 1972 but the Barb soldiered on until 1980, although by that time, Scherr was no longer owner, having sold off his interests. Just as well. By then Berkeley was no longer berserk but merely quirky, and politically the Right was ascendant. Just weeks before the Barb’s old nemesis, Ronald Reagan, accepted the Republican nomination for President, the paper’s last issue appeared in print. “The Barb Bows Out” read the headline. A front-page illustration showed the skeletal Quixote of the masthead slumped in the saddle, the Campanile-tipped lance protruding from his back.

In his book, Uncovering the Sixties, journalist Abe Peck quotes Max Scherr from his death bed, reflecting somewhat bitterly on the counterculture’s accomplishments and failings. “We were a lot of well-meaning fools,” Scherr lamented. “All of us were tainted by the environment we were brought up in. We had no revolutionary base, no real class consciousness. Along with the good, we developed a large rip-off philosophy.” At the same time, he said, “We broke down a lot of barriers to honest thought and opened up a whole visionary realm to the future, which has to be worked on.”