Smoking bananas to get high? This wild hippie magazine convinced the mainstream you could.
In the 1960s, The Berkeley Barb was America’s foremost radical magazine
In 1967, The Berkeley Barb — perhaps the country’s most radical underground newspaper — published a peculiar recipe. “Freeze the peels,” it read, “break and reduce to a pulp in a blender, put in the oven (low heat, 200 degrees) until it’s dry enough to smoke.” Yes, The Barb was suggesting that people get high off of bananas. “Smoke-in was a success!” the newspaper declared. “Watch this space!” People were indeed watching. A doctor wrote in The New York Times that banana scrapings “provide — if anything — a mild psychedelic experience.” A recipe appeared in William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook, and before long, everyone was talking about “banadine,” a supposedly hallucinogenic chemical naturally occurring in bananas. A few weeks later, The New York Times reported that a federal investigation was underway.
But The Barb was full of it. It was a hoax played on the mainstream press and government authorities, who were clumsily watching the newspaper for insights into youth culture and activism. The Barb was the voice of the radical left, galvanizing a generation of activists through its coverage of the Vietnam War, civil rights, and police brutality. They had a different vision for the role of the journalist in turbulent times and saw themselves as “an unabashed alternative to the conformist mainstream press.” The founder and publisher, Max Scherr eschewed the model of journalist as objective vessel for facts. “Impartial journalism” was a shill for the status quo that kept America at war and minorities and the poor oppressed. The Barb staff were “active participants,” and the newspaper frequently issued calls to protest.
As Todd Gitlin wrote in The Sixties, during The Barb’s heyday, Berkeley was “a cafe cluttered college town … big enough for urban ailments, small enough to imagine transformed.” The city had long been home to anti-war demonstrations, civil rights sit-ins, radical radio stations, free clinics and schools, and collectives — “all the possible hybrids, to feed any utopian vision imaginable.”
Max Scherr printed his first issue of the newspaper in August of 1965, two days after the Watts riots began, while televisions filled American living rooms with scenes of U.S. soldiers torching villages in Vietnam. The first printing was a mere 1,200, but in a few short years, the Barb had a circulation of between 85,000 and 93,000. In the beginning, Scherr, a robustly bearded former bar owner, stood on street corners, hawking the newspaper himself. Before long, he had a small army of flower children doing it for him.
One former Barb salesperson would recall, “Before I got a job and was living on the street, I sold the Barb on Haight St. 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. The Barb literally saved my life and other friends during those years. Just saying!”
Scherr was “scruffy and earnest, sweet and gentle, a ‘genial provocateur,’” or a tightwad tyrant willing to promote misogyny in his pages, depending on who you asked. Once, when a young reporter asked for a press pass, Max famously replied: “If you have a press pass, you aren’t a member of the Underground Press.”
In 1969, after a group of activists unrolled sod on a lot owned by the university and declared it the People’s Park, The Barb published the “Berkeley Liberation Program,” which was a call to “make Telegraph Avenue and the South Campus a strategic free territory for revolution … turn the school into training grounds for liberation…break the power of landlords…[and] abolish the tyrannical police forces not chosen by the people.”
The paper was deliberately provocative. One issue featured a photograph of a toddler smoking a joint and a headline that read “Fuck the Flag.” Paul Krassner, who reported for the paper during the Patty Hearst trials said, The Barb was like “the unregulated Internet before there was such a thing. I mean, anything went in those pages. It was so free.”
The Barb was largely funded through sex ads — for dildos, pornography, orgies, and “massage” studios where “ten young attractive girls!” were employed. “Tits above the fold!” Scherr was known to say. The managing editor, John Jekabson, would later say with a shrug, “Sex sells. It sold then and it sells now. Max understood that.”
This didn’t go over well with the feminists on staff, who argued that the ads and some of the content were degrading to women. To make matters worse, Scherr appeared to be raking in the cash from these ads, while his staff earned meager wages and he quibbled over the tiniest purchases. They staged a revolt in 1969, many breaking off to form a new radical paper, The Tribe.
That same year, John Jekabson, the managing editor of the Berkeley Barb, got a call at home from Scherr. The newspaper had been busted on obscenity charges for publishing a photograph of several men from the band MC5 having an orgy with one woman. When Jekabson arrived at the Barb’s offices, he found a swarming media circus with Scherr “holding court.”
“That is not obscene. The war in Vietnam is obscene,” Scherr gleefully told the press. The hoard then headed to the nearby courthouse for arraignment, where they were charged. Scherr overcame his penny-pinching and happily paid the $500 fine. It affirmed their place in the counter-cultural pantheon.
But as the radicalism in America died down, so too did the Barb’s air of vitality — not to mention its readership. The paper shut down in 1980, the circulation having dwindled to around 2,000 issues a week. As The New York Times put it, “The Barb never survived the changed social climate after the 60's.” A year later, Max Scherr was dead from cancer, at the age of 65.
