Berkeley Barb

Berkeley Barb

Cover of he Berkeley Barb vol. 5, no. 9 (1967), depicting Lyndon Johnson dressed as Timothy Leary.
Type	Newspaper
Format	Tabloid/Alternative newspaper
Founder(s)	Max Scherr
Publisher	Max Scherr
Founded	August 1965
Ceased publication	1980
Headquarters	Berkeley, California
Circulation	90,000 (1968)
Website	http://www.berkeleybarb.net

The Berkeley Barb was a weekly underground newspaper that was published in Berkeley, California, during the years 1965 to 1980. It was one of the first and most influential of the counterculture newspapers of the late 1960s, covering such subjects as the anti-war movement and Civil Rights Movement as well as the social changes advocated by the youth culture.

The newspaper was founded in August 1965 by Max Scherr, a middle-aged radical who had earlier been the owner of the Steppenwolf bar in Berkeley. Scherr was the editor and publisher from the newspaper's inception until the mid-1970s.

The Barb carried a great deal of political news, mainly concerning opposition to the Vietnam War and activist political events surrounding the University of California, particularly the Vietnam Day Committee and the Free Speech Movement. It also served as a venue for music advertisements and starting around 1967 was the first of the underground papers to have an extensive classified ad section carrying explicit personal sex advertisements. 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 from the Berkeley Tribe staged a sit-in at San Francisco's Dock of the Bay to successfully block publication of a proposed spin-off sex paper, and when male staffers at Good Times tried to put out a special "Sex" issue, women staffers stole the mock-ups and page layouts and burned them.