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Berkeley Barb
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The Berkeley Barb was an underground newspaper that was published in Berkeley, California, from 1965 to the early 1980s. It was one of the first and most influential of the counterculture newspapers of the late 1960s, covering such subjects as the anti-war and civil-rights movements as well as the social changes advocated by the youth culture.
History
The newspaper was founded in August 1965 by Max Scherr, who had earlier been the owner of the Steppenwolf bar in Berkeley.
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Encyclopedia
The Berkeley Barb was an underground newspaper that was published in Berkeley, California, from 1965 to the early 1980s. It was one of the first and most influential of the counterculture newspapers of the late 1960s, covering such subjects as the anti-war and civil-rights movements as well as the social changes advocated by the youth culture.
History
The newspaper was founded in August 1965 by Max Scherr, who had earlier been the owner of the Steppenwolf bar in Berkeley. Scherr was the editor from the newspaper's inception until the mid-1970s.
The Barb carried a great deal of political news, particularly concerning the Vietnam War and local political events surrounding the University of California. It also served as a venue for music advertisements and was among the first of the underground papers to carry an extensive classified ad section in which explicit personal sexual advertisements were posted.
In 1978 the numerous sex ads were separated out into a separate publication, Spectator Magazine. Deprived of advertising income, The Barb went out of business within a year and a half; the last issue was dated July 3, 1980.
Spectator Magazine ceased publication in October 2005.
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Banana skins and other hoaxes
Max Scherr had a satirical sense of humour and used the Barb as a vehicle for comedy as well as news. One of the Barbs most famous covers showed a boy with a chain around his mind. Another cover, printed in green ink, depicted the body of a dead hog. The headline read Pig Slain!. This issue sold rapidly as readers sought additional information on what they thought would be an article on a cop-killing. Search as they might, there was nothing in the paper that related to the cover.
In March 1967 Scherr, hoping to trick authorities into banning bananas, ran a satirical story which claimed that dried banana skins contained "bananadine", a (fictional) psychoactive substance which, when smoked, supposedly induced a psychedelic high similar to opium and psilocybin. (The Barb may have been inspired by Donovan's 1966 song "Mellow Yellow", with its lyric "Electrical banana/Is gonna be a sudden craze"; Donovan, in turn, was inspired by a banana-shaped vibrator.) The hoax was believed and spread through the mainstream press, and was perpetuated after William Powell included it in The Anarchist Cookbook. Runs on bananas at supermarkets occurred, reminiscent of those that had occurred with morning-glory seeds a few years earlier. A New York Times article on illicit drugs by Donald Louria, MD, noted in passing, that "banana scrapings, provide— if anything—a mild psychedelic experience." The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was forced to make a serious investigation, and concluded that banana skins are not psychedelic. Interestingly enough, the skins do contain a measurable amount of toluene, which is also found in airplane glue.
The Barb was itself subjected to hoaxes. At a memorial for the social activist and founder of the Yippies, Stew Albert, the following story was told:
One victim of an Albert prank was Max Scherr, editor of the Berkeley Barb, that legendary paper of the days of "the Movement."
"A lot of Jewish kids were converting to Buddhism then," Paul Glusman said, so Albert cooked up a hoax, getting a letter mailed from Japan to the paper reporting that "all the Buddhist kids in Japan were converting to Judaism."
Scherr ran the letter.
The Barb's relationship to the poor
The Barb was used as a means to make a few bucks by Berkeley's early hippies, denizens of The Ave, locals, runaways, and later by street people. The paper originally sold for 10 cents and later for 25 cents. Every Thursday night around 9pm a VW truck (the one with the fold-down sides) would arrive from the printer, pulling up to Max's house on Oregon St (which served as the papers offices). The waiting street vendors would help unload the papers and then get in line to get their stack. The papers would be purchased at half-price or obtained for collateral. The prospective Barb vendor who wished to obtain papers on collateral would show Scherr something of value, such as a musical instrument or a backpack containing clothing and poems. If Scherr felt the goods were valuable enough that the owner would return to get them, he would keep the collateral in exchange for a bundle of 50 papers to sell on the street corner. As soon as their papers were in hand vendors would rush off to a popular corner or their personal favorite corner and spend the night on the corner so that they'd be able to sell their papers during the rush hour Friday morning. The first vendor to get to "The Pic", now known as the Mediterranean, coffee house was guaranteed sales of up to 25 papers. The vendor got to keep half of the money, so when that bundle of papers was sold, he or she would return to the office, buy back the collateral and possibly buy more papers with cash, and then return to the street corner to sell enough papers to buy food, dope or whatever. At the time, a plate of fish and chips cost 30 cents, and an ice-cream scoop sized portion of turkey stuffing could be had for 14 cents at Larry Blake's restaurant, so Max Scherr kept many hippie runaways and homeless people from starving.
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