Berkeley Barb - History

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. Eventually about a third of the paper was occupied by various forms of sexual advertising: as well as the personals there were ads for X-rated films, pornographic bookstores, mail order novelties and classifieds for models and massage, all both gay and straight. Gratuitous photos of nude models spilled over into the news section. The radical politics + sex formula worked, and the Barb was one of the top-selling underground papers in the nation. However, efforts to clone this formula in other cities (e.g. Rat in New York City) ran into resistance from staff, readers and local authorities; female staffers and supporters staged a sit-in at Dock of the Bay to successfully block publication of a proposed sex paper, and when male staffers at another underground paper tried to put out a special "Sex" issue, women staffers stole the layouts.

In 1969, under pressure from an underpaid and rebellious staff which believed (based primarily on information from an accountant) he was making windfall profits (the Barb may have been the only underground newspaper of which this could be said), Scherr sold the paper for $200,000 to Allan Coult, a professor of anthropology. The deal fell apart shortly afterwards and Scherr resumed ownership when Coult failed to make the initial payment, accusing Scherr of failing to uphold the terms of the agreement. Almost all of the 40 person staff, including managing editor James A. Schreiber, left at this point and formed the "Red Mountain Tribe." After putting out a special Barb on Strike issue, they soon were putting out their own rival newspaper, the Berkeley Tribe, with a circulation of 53,000 copies. Scherr continued publishing the Barb out of new offices with a new staff, and the paper continued to be successful for a few years; but the heyday of the underground press was passing and the Barb was caught up in the general downhill trend, with contributor burnout and slowly dropping circulation and ad revenues leading to a vicious circle of decline.

In 1978, with circulation down to 20,000 copies and dropping, the numerous sex ads were spun off into a separate publication, Spectator Magazine. Freed of the stigma of "adults only" but deprived of advertising income, the Barb went out of business within a year and a half. The final issue was dated July 3, 1980. Spectator Magazine ceased publication in October 2005.