Ram Dass, Alexander Shulgin, Rev. Ian Stang (Church of the Subgenius), Rupert
Sheldrake, Francis Huxley and Robert Anton Wilson. Musicians and DJs present
included Deee-Lite, Irresistible Force (Mixmaster Morris), Mark Sinclair
(Pendragon), Youth and Chris Decker. Inside, Clark claimed, you would meet time-
travelling Megatripolitans amongst the residents and patrons. Were these zippy
residents the immediate predecessors of Mega-tripolitans themselves? Perhaps—
though in Clark’s Gurdjieffian logic, as humans are all potentially zippies we are
indeed all Megatripolitans—we just aren’t conscious of it yet:
at my highest I have sometimes seemed to glimpse that we are actually all
Megatripolitans, in some sense, already. Whether we realise it or not. Take
another look. Doesn’t this present ‘unfinished state’ feel more like the dream,
the teaser, the pale shadow of what we’re meant to be?^30Following this narrative, at Megatripolis, patrons could get closer to their destiny,
perhaps even merging with the landscape of their becoming—if only for the night.
The role of future memories, remembrance of the future perfect state, are as crucial
to Clark’s vision as they are to McKenna’s theory. Timewave Zero is the Future
Perfect State is the Archaic Revival. Preparation appears to be the key. And in terms
of the novelty wave chart, with Megatripolis as ‘the beach head of a benign
mutation in the present’,^31 the tide was apparently in.
In a proclamation dated January 1995, ‘[t]he Final Battle for the Human Soul
will be decided here in America. And you, dear Raver or Raver-to-be, are destined to
be on the front line, and already are, whether you yet realise it or not’.^32 The greatest,
or at least most hyped, campaign in Clark’s rave-o-lutionary Millennium was the
1994 Zippy Pronoia Tour of the US. The Tour’s objective was to ‘bootstrap the
hedonic bliss and communal vibe of the rave party into a mass movement for
planetary awakening’ (Ferguson 1995:54). Accordingly, Rainbow hippies coupling
with techno-freaks were destined to produce ‘Rainbow Ravers’. While Clark and
many of his eventually estranged team of zippies operated underground events in
New York City, Boulder and San Francisco, and at the Rainbow Gathering in
Wyoming, his ‘Omega Rave’—envisioned to host 60,000 in the Grand Canyon in
August—turned out to be a much reduced event held in Arizona’s Kaibab National
Forest as part of the World Unity Festival. Anticipated as ‘a cultural and spiritual
tsunami poised to sweep across America’ (Huffstuffer 1994), hosting 55,000 short of
the initial forecast the Zippy-Woodstock failed to materialize.
Yet ‘zippy’ was more zeitgeist than movement, the term being adopted by various
individuals and groups whose networked activities evinced a turn of the 1990s
optimism that had been fermenting within experimental formations inheriting the
cultural and spiritual resources of previous countercultures (especially hippies) and
holding fast against government and corporate encroachment. In response to the
early commercialism of rave, young digital musicians, activists and esotericists
produced their own music, built websites, published zines and held free parties. And
this network of new digital, chemical and cyber-enabled artists and anarchists was
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