The Tribe Is Restless

Max Scherr, 53, is a lawyer who looks a lot like Allen Ginsberg and lays claim to being a Marxist. He owned the Steppenwolf bar in Berkeley for seven years but, so the story goes, the toi let in the men's room broke down one day in 1965, and rather than lay out the money to fix it, Max simply sold the place and started an underground newspaper, the Berkeley Barb. Max, it seems, has this thing about money; he refuses to spend it, on himself or anyone else. Featuring sex, rebellion and kinky ads, the Barb grew into a going enterprise with a circulation of 86,000, ad rates of $450 a page and a net profit of about $130,000 annually. But Max still refused to spread the bread further than the nearest bank. This time the toilet held out, but the staff's patience broke under the poverty.

Calling themselves the Red Mountain Tribe (in honor of their favorite wine), the 40-odd staffers submitted to Max's economy in the interests of freedom and underground rebellion. They supplied their own typewriters, accepted salaries ranging downward from $80 a week--in the case of a dropout reporter from the Chicago Daily News, the remuneration of $7.25 for three weeks' work on an investigative story later picked up by the overground press.

"The Barb was a holy thing," says one tribesman. "A quest for the new life."

About a month ago they decided the new life was too much like the old life, circa the Depression. Someone asked Max for a $5 pencil sharpener. Max replied: Let them use razor blades.

Up from Slavery. The result was a list of wage demands. Max consented, but in a Steppenwolf mood decided to sell the paper. Enter Timothy Leary and a rich friend who came to town to talk about buying the Barb for $250,000 and turning it into a psychedelic-trip sheet for the acidhead community. Oh, no!, exclaimed the tribe, which wanted to make the paper into a kind of revolutionary New York Times. Leary and friend then became "honest brokers," suggesting that Max sell the paper to the tribe-- for $1,000 a week for 140 weeks, plus interest. The tribe had to debate that one. "Before, we were slaves," argued a tribesman. "If we take the offer, we'll have feudalism. Marx wrote that feudalism was a step up from slavery, so maybe we should take the offer."

Such logic carried the day, and the tribe began rounding up a syndicate of staffers and their families. Negotiations went smoothly until Max insisted on default clauses that would make the purchasers liable should the paper fail for any reason, from staff negligence to earthquakes to sheriff's raids. The tribe agreed to the first liability, but balked at taking responsibility for acts of God or Ronald Reagan. There the matter lay until one morning last week when the tribe arrived at the office to discover that Max had made off with the subscription lists, some ad copy and an office machine. "An act of aggression," one angry tribesman cried.

A Bourgeoise Family. Max, of course, feels more aggressed against than aggressing and claims that the staff have been blinded to the revolution by visions of their own gain. "I can't tell you how many times I've fed these people," he says. "For four years they've been coming to my house and my wife has been feeding them. She sends food to the office all the time. It's been like a family. Now they've got this bourgeois idea--they want to make the best possible deal."

For now, all deals are off and the tribe is preparing a Barb on Strike edition of the paper and thinking about starting their own weekly, called, naturally, Tribe. Max is trying to put out an edition of Barb on his own, which is about as likely as levitating the Pentagon with chants of "Om."

The moral of the story, as Max should have known after studying the contradictions of capitalism, is that any journalist denied access to a pencil sharpener will surely find another way to get the lead out.

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