Raver Madness

(a shocking yet true tale

of youthful folley
and
misadventure at the hands
of the Zippies)
by David Dei
(and the Domain of the Cuddly Deity)
 NOTE ABOUT THIS PART BOOK

I am releasing this part book for free, as a freely redistributable ebook.

You can download it, put it on a P2P net, put it on your site, email it
to a friend, and, if you’re addicted to dead trees, you can even print it.
Why am I doing this? The Zippies were the original free spirits of the Internet. To do something
for Zip is to do it for FREE or next to nothing, ZERO, NADA.

Now more than ever, in the Age of Zip, FREE needs to be given a second chance. Even if doing
so much for so little made no sense at the time, and I still struggle to figure out why we never
broke even back in the days of WEB 1.0, I like being part of a greater global culture and planetary
movement than the isolated Well community in which the Zippies first made their voices heard.
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for reminding my why I support the creative commons.

So here’s the deal: I’m releasing this part-book under a license

developed by the Creative Commons project (http://creativecommons.org/).
This is a project that lets authors roll our own license agreements for
the distribution of creative work under terms similar to those employed
by the Free/Open Source Software movement. It still is a great project, and like Cory, I’m
proud to be a part of it.

Here's a summary of the licence:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0
Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy,
distribute, display, and perform the work. In return,
licensees must give the original author credit.
Noncommercial. The licensor permits others to copy,
distribute, display, and perform the work. In return,
licensees may not use the work for commercial
purposes—unless they get the licensor's permission.
No Derivative Works. The licensor permits others to
copy, distribute, display and perform only unaltered
copies of the work—not derivative works based on it.
The full terms of the license are here:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-legalcode

If you support this project please let me know how to get further
parts, editions online at no cost and without a budget. Your help
is greatly appreciated.

Contact the author at: PO BOX 4398, Cape Town 8000 South
Africa, anaartjie@yahoo.co.uk
 FORWARD
Burn baby burn! - Disco inferno!
Burn baby burn! - Burn that mama down!
Burn baby burn! - Disco inferno!!
Burn baby burn! - Burn that mama down!
Burnin'!
Disco Inferno by The Trammps

The nineties club scene had birthed out of the Second Summer of Love which
had catapulted rave culture into the headlines. Acid house, technobeats, ecstasy
and a new style of music called trance, would all coalesce out of the resulting
cyberdelia. Whereas the hippies had promoted peace, love and psychedelics,
the zippies placed their faith in technology. More than a few heads missed the
distinction, and embraced an all out Dionysian revolt that included a lot more
than the Internet.

The resulting digital rush towards the end of the millennium and the zero’s or
“zippies”, would be more than merely a reiteration of the classic myth conjured up
by bands as diverse as Orbital, Prodigy and Dee-Lite. It involved the Politics of
Free – freedom, rave culture, the end of the world, and a lot more besides.

With the Shaman falling prey to the likes of Terence McKenna, and Tim Leary
making an electronic come-back, everything was considered possible, including
the insane notion that a small band of clubbers could take on America. This is a
slice of the larger picture, in which 15 club kids from Britain staged a media prank
that landed them on the front page of the New York Times. Who or exactly what
were the Zippies back then? Why was Wired Magazine presumably in on the
deal, and why would the Zippie end up being blackballed in the same way the
hippy was killed off in 1967? You are free to figure out the answers, as I attempt
to relate my side of the story involving one of the biggest media pranks of the 20th
and 21st Centuries.

David Dei

Nutopia
 Chapter One
"Your commands shall be obeyed," said the leader; and then, with a great deal of chattering and
noise the Winged Monkeys flew away to the place where Dorothy and her friends were walking."
L Frank Baum, Wizard of Oz.

IN THE aftermath of the much vaunted "Zippy *Pronoia Tour to US", in which 15
club kids were taken from London and put on a publicity tour by Wired Magazine,
Cubensis, aka John Bagby the magic mushroom-advocate and self-proclaimed
communications director began relating a wild story, in particular a tale about one
fateful night at the Crash Palace on Divisidero Street in San Francisco during
July 1994, and a moment that signaled the break-up between various factions of
rave culture vying for attention. The publicity tour started by Wired Magazine to
promote their new online news service, would continue in the absence of Fraser
Clark, the man responsible for a particular brand of "technoshamanism" and who
had ostensibly coined the term "zippy".

(* The sneaking suspicion that others are conspiring behind your back to help
you. And you them.)

The legendary one night event called "Zen Inspired Performance Publishing"
(ZIPP) achieved mythic status on his website. Cubensis, in his own words says:
"This event originally began as an idea of Mark Heley's (publisher of Clublife
Magazine - SF). It was to be the launch of the Zippy Times USA, created in a
live, interactive, creative environment. Unfortunately, this was the same week the
Zippy Pronoia Tour split with its spokesman Fraser Clark. Seeing as Fraser was
the original editor of the UK Zippy Times, we thought it inappropriate to create a
"Zippy Times".

Annoying for some, I was to become part of Clarks "lifelong, unending mega sci-fi
novel," -- and later, de facto "editor of the Zippy Times USA" . But to put this nut
in a monkeyhouse -- I was never party to, nor a part of that stylish ZIPP party --
neither the "Zen Inspired Performance Event" nor the much touted "Omega
Rave". However I came to know Clark intimately and followed him for much of
the period subsequent to the split. This is a tale about youthful folly and my own
misadventure if you can call it that.

Briefly, ZIPP was not the only such event, in which performance art and
publishing became intertwined with zippiness and human destiny. However what
is significant here is the fact that Fraser Clark, the "Columbus of Rave Culture",
and the leading figurehead for the Zippies as far as the media were concerned,
was obviously "not exactly there", the result of a "split" between two factions of
"zippies" which was to impact on my life for years to come.

While this parallel universe was unfolding, and a lot of counter-cultural hocus
pocus was busy being organised in and around San Francisco, I "joined the tour"
and in the ensuing confusion left people wondering whether or not there was
actually one tour or many? Undoubtedly there are bound to be several different
versions of the same theme of Zen Inspired Pronoia or whatever, each with its
own team of zippies, yippies, psychodippies.

One Pronoia tour itinerary I downloaded from the net is mysteriously dated "03-
April-97" -- perhaps there was a repeat performance? As I write this monograph
of sorts, there is precious little, in the way of fact -- no way of knowing for sure,
whether or not anything actually happened during 1994. Could we all be victims
of an elaborate hoax? I raised this issue with Jules Marshall who had written the
initial story in collaboration with John Battelle, then managing editor of Wired,
and his response was to write a background piece, giving more substance to
what had really been an over-hyped "confab".

"Could you play up the tour a bit more?" Battelle had apparently requested,
setting the tone.

The result was a record smashing cover story by Marshall, syndicated around the
world, including appearances in Polish Playboy and Paris Elle. Batelle's
cyberdelic passion "play" had taken on a life of its own, promoting Wired's new
target market and Internet services as the Zippies struggled to hold onto their
own interests and began to swim in a semiotic maelstrom that is still being
contested to this day.

As an obviously smarting retort from Wired suggested recently: "In May 1994
Wired Magazine [had] "announced that a confab of techno-pagans at the Grand
Canyon in August would spark a cultural wildfire that could change America
forever. It was the next Woodstock, the inauguration of a millennial culture."

The same magazine then went on to dismiss Marshall's cover story as "one of
the most heinous examples of a non-event accorded disproportionate attention.
In fact there is some question as to whether the people involved were simply
circulating a hoax, with the deliberate aid of Jules Marshall, its author."
"A cynic might view the scene as a willful media hoax. To Clark and his loopy
posse of Zippies (or Zen Inspired Pagan Professionals) it's yet another symptom
of "pronoia" -- the sneaking suspicion that others are conspiring behind your back
to help you." Sarah Ferguson, High Times, Feb 1995.

Presumably, as one of the contributors to this media prank, how did I end up
becoming party to an open conspiracy, a global intrigue or confab as Wired
would have it? How did I end up typesetting the same "Zippy Times" that would
probably have also been part of the "Zen Inspired Publishing" night sponsored by
Mark Heley, and why had Clark decided to seek my help, in renaming his
publication "The Megatripolitan"? I don't claim to know all the answers, but what I
presume to tell here, is a semblance of the truth and at least my half of the story.

*******

It is mid-morning in October 1994. I'm living in an unfurnished room with my de

facto girlfriend at the time Rehane X**, opposite the "projects" in the Lower
Haight district of San Francisco. Fraser is on the telephone: You see David,
there's this Orb of History, and we all dive into it, and we will wonder one day why
we never did this before..."

"Gosh, that sounds like incredible fun, come over." I reply, "let's do it."

When the "caramel maned" rapster arrives at my rented room in an unfurnished

apartment and inexplicably insists on paying me for my rudimentary services. I
don't pretend to kick up a fuss or strike a big movie deal, because I need what
little money there is, even a fiver would do, besides the man is flashing a clipping
from Newsweek, which describes him fending off a couple of rangers in Arizona's
Kaibab National Forest. The rangers offer him "a list of reasons why amplification
and lighting equipment are prohibited on national forest land." and Newsweek
describes the plot: "Behind the rangers backs, a white truck carrying two dozen
speaker cabinets and 24 000 watts of power bumps its way up a closed seven-
mile road -- sans headlights." Heady stuff.

With the polite "approval" of the establishment, Clark has committed some kind
of an eco-crime and it all seems so normal, in spite of warnings that: "The
confluence of subcultures gave the remote area the aura of a 21st century
tribalism, a dash of Mad Max mixed with a Robert Bly retreat in the midst of a
hippie love-in." I ignore the advice from my cute facto de girlfriend, who tells me
to "flee, before the hippies get to you."

And so I eventually extricate some kind of a commitment from Clark: "Not to

worry," says Clark, "I'll pay you for the flyers" he promises. "Zippies are not just
hippies, I tell my brown-eyed factotum. "They also have a lot of professional
people helping out, you know, like Internet experts and sound engineers and this
could lead to bigger things."
I would soon learn to my detriment, the difference between making a sane career
choice and "a paradigm jump off the Grand Canyon”. Joining a bunch of
pranksters stumbling along on some kind of a peyote laden joy-ride is not exactly
something one puts on ones resume. Hell, these were real Zippies -- Zen
Inspired Pagan Professionals hacking the system for all it was worth and doing it
all for free.

Jules Marshall acknowledged this when he agreed with me "to be honest...there

was an element of hacking wired," but while the Zippies did everything for free,
others were simply making money. Wired Executives would end up getting far
more mileage out of the Zippies than the core group of original Zippies, who were
content merely with a couple of airline tickets and the publicity and underground
cred they received. It is a moot point whether there was ever a fair and equal
exchange between the digital capitalists who promoted Net-freedom, -- the
politics of free -- and those who were expected to contribute to the free-culture
that had sprung up around the Internet without any thought of financial reward.

This was a "bone fide youth trend" however and people wanted to get in on the
action. Steering clear of the millions of users and hangers-on who had wizened
up to the wizards tactics would become a full-time obsession for Clark, who quite
frankly, should have retreated back to Britain as soon as the press got wind of a
looming legal battle over ownership of his club -- Megatripolis -- and the
subculture he had created behind it -- Zippie.

However even the "fact" that Columbus had discovered rave culture not
"invented" it, would fall into question, like so many things that start off being solid
and then disappear in a shower of sparks, fire and brimstone. More on the "who
created Zippie dispute, later.

To get back to my story, I was stuck and didn't have any money, flat broke in a
foreign country, when Clark suddenly called, and that's probably why I jumped at
the opportunity. I trusted Clark and he saw me as his lap-top toting secretary or
so it seemed. Making a couple of dollars doing some flyers and a newsletter
about free stuff was about as far as my "financial" ambition over this zippy
phenomenon extended. It was no big deal, I was just a writer who had happened
to be at Megatripolis UK the previous summer. Clark had actually even invited
me then to join him in his conspiracy "to tour America". But as luck would have, it
all sounded too much like a proposal you make when you're a bit stoned, not
something as serious and illicit as hacking Wired Magazine and hauling
equipment through the Kaibab national forest, so I politely declined.

It was August or September 1993 and I had made my way to Britain from my own
country, South Africa, had then bumped into one of Clark's "Megatripolitans" on
the tube, a modern merry prankster who had handed me a flyer for the club night
You have to "experience", a night with the "Zippies" hadn't I heard about them?
"The future perfect state every Thursday at Heaven." In fact Clark and I had
already been corresponding for a while via his "Encyclopaedia Psychedelica
International" or Epi for short. Nothing particularly unusual, for the editor of a
small counter-culture zine in South Africa, isolated from the rest of the world by
sanctions and a cultural boycott.

I had edited Kagenna, an irregular fanzine, from 1989-1993. The only way of
keeping in touch with the outside world had been to write letters and trade
magazines, one of them being Epi. As RU Sirius can probably testify, I had been
writing letters to a number of west coast publications like Mondo 2000 and had
even had letters published under various pseudonyms like Ted Head. So you can
say all my "sneaking suspicions of positivity" were confirmed by finding a copy of
Clark's next venture, the ^evolution in a bookstore in West London, with a small
contribution from a South African "Buddhist queen" called Samten, a regular
contributor to Kagenna, the magazine I was now hawking around the globe.

So I end-up on the tube, going to one of the Megatripolis parties, basically a

great big technoclub with a nice ambient lounge and good vibe. Mixmaster Morris
on the decks, couple of kids taking acid, probably for the first time, and of course,
a dancing granny and a small inner circle surrounding Uncle Fraser, who seemed
like a warm old man who wanted nothing more than for everyone to have a good
time. It was all rather innocent, until he took me aside and mentioned offhand
that he was going to America, and "won't I join him, I can introduce you to
people, you know -- like Tim Leary".

I laughed it all off as some kind of a practical joke, and left for Camden with one
of the many rabble-rousers on the night-bus. If anything, Clark's offer only
confirmed my own plan to go to San Francisco, do a tour of West Coast Counter-
Culture, and basically meet people like "Tim Leary" on my own steam. Leary, as
far as I was concerned, was making a drug-free come-back with virtual reality
and his new stance on pushing computers instead of psychedelics had intrigued
me enough to actually publish an article by him on the "new wave" of cyberdelia
peaking in the 1990s.

I bought a cheap six month return ticket to California, (which later turned out to
have a one-way code) and hopped aboard a United Airways flight to San
Francisco, not expecting that it would take a while longer than I expected to get
back home.

After interviewing people like RU Sirius in an Indian Restaurant in Berkeley, I

headed for LA, to meet some Extropians, and hang with them for a while. This is
how I got to meet Tim Leary on my own steam. While this was all happening
"according to plan" I suddenly got caught-up in an earthquake, lost my return air-
ticket to the scalpers and spent a good few extra months simply eking out a living
-- struggling to survive. Then suddenly the "Here come the Zippies" cover
appeared. "Cool!" I thought, "They've actually gone and done it." I myopically
contemplated jumping aboard a bus right there and then, heading for Flagstaff
right away to join the tribe, but this plan was quickly dropped as being
impractical, besides, I had no money.

Nevertheless I enthusiastically followed events as they unfolded in the papers

and on the Internet. The alt.culture.zippies topic on usenet was one of the most
popular topics and hundreds of postings mere made, but compared to what was
happening back home in South Africa where a country had just been liberated,
this was kids stuff, "let them have a good time," I thought, "maybe I'll go to a
rave". Some of the Extropians on the West Coast were dismissive. "Youth nazis"
they said. "They're good guys, what's the problem?" I responded.

By the time I got back to San Francisco, Megatripolis West was about to be
launched. I spotted a flyer in a clothing store and simply pitched-up. It was
October 1. "Free Festival at the Trocadero" "Opening night speaker -- John Perry
Barlow (Grateful Dead/Cyberologist/Founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation)
talking about "The trouble with You Kids today." "Your participation is invited in
our opening ceremony with Aum dancer and the Kiwi Theatre." "Everybody is a
star" and so on. I join the crowd outside and Clark is welcoming a long line, a
veritable queue of guests. Practically everybody in San Francisco.

"There's a familiar face" says the "lord of the new techno shamanarchy"
(according to the New York Times), greeting me.

(Note: **Rehane X = Rehane Abrahams, an actress and performance artist from

Cape Town, South Africa.)
 Chapter Two
"Tell me something about yourself, and the country you came from, said the
Scarecrow..." L Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz.

AS FAR as Clark was concerned, I was already a part of his "conspiracy." While
hanging at the new club, I found myself quickly roped into doing things for him
and the obvious reason why any of this is significant to you or anybody else, is
because the media event created by Jules Marshall's "Here Come the Zippies"
cover story, had mutated into a plethora of verbiage on all things Zippydom.

As I would eventually learn, the High Times version of events was only
scheduled for publication in February 1995 of the next year. Hampton Sides
excellent imitation of Tom Robbins' new journalism appeared only at the end of
1994 in December. If the meme carried by the Daily Newspapers had seemingly
dried out, and Wired Magazine's letters pages had begun to slip into sneering
condescension about "the zippie techno poseurs" it was only because the roller
coaster had stopped to take on some passengers "still in the stone age of
personal computing" -- and all of us, including those who were merely in it, for the
hell of it, were still very much part of the cyberdelic ride. For some, just being
near the tickle of America's latest orgasm would produce media convulsions.

So we're back at that morning in early October. A phone call from Clark etc etc.
And now it's later in the morning I'm just casually doing my small task, for a man,
a friend, who I know very little about actually, when suddenly my complete and
total attention is demanded. (Folks - nobody can be accused of holding a gun to
my head, I simply acquiesced in following the leader but it's a diabolical plot
nevertheless)-- one minute you're following the yellow brick road, the next minute
you're being transported by flying monkeys to the palace of Brumhilda the Bad
Witch with the Tin Man --- Basically I'm picked up in a car driven by someone's
mom. As far as everybody is concerned this is hype heaven in hippyland. "We
need more zippies" says Sionadh Craigen, packing us all in.

Fraser's adolescent girlfriend is basically in charge. We drive off and I struggle to

remain composed, nonchalantly I tell her that seriously all I promised Mr Clark
was a flyer or two, nothing more.... and it all seems to happen in slow motion. I
guess you could also say I was abducted by a flying saucer never to return home
to normality again. I'm a little queasy in the pit of my stomach. "We need more
zippies." A strange inexpressible emotion, -- "you don't even know me that well,
and already you're telling me who I'm supposed to be", but foolishly I ignore the
warning signs, my own inner voice, and float downstream, go along with the
carnival. What I probably should have been doing is making an appointment with
the "teenager inside my twenty-something body", if only to reassure him that all
this was not a commitment to a lifelong fraud, a simple hoax, a publicity stunt, a
media prank -- Hey I'm just a professional, an associate, an equal, my whole life
is still ahead of me.

Quaint stuff like this would soon melt under the pressure to become an arbitrary,
totally anonymous "Zippy".

As I write this, Time magazine has published a cover story called "Secrets of the
Teen Brain". Apparently research is "revolutionising our view of the adolescent
mind -- and explaining it in mystifying ways."[Time June 7] No doubt the mystery
of life is unfolding, but research like this invariably comes too late to save me
from teenage expectations of who and what a Zippy ought to be, even way back
in 1994.

As those who are perhaps already familiar with this demon of an issue, getting
treated like a new species of teenager was only half the problem of being
associated with Clark's new "posse". The other problem was putting up with
"adults" like Peter Booth Lee, a perpetual four-year-old, who had literally taken
over the cultural persona of Wired's "Here Come the Zippies" cover -- knitted
cap, techno glasses and all. Rather brave I thought, since Wired was accused by
irate readers of "plastering zombie nerd-boy all over the cover" of something that
should usually be "left on a coffee table." If Lee, a freelance photographer
covering the tour for Clublife, had been serious, he would have probably gone all
the way and "outed himself" as a Zippie, but to do this would mean living up to
the expectations created by "Pincus the Cyborg" who had joined the tour in New
York. According to Clark, Pincus been earning a living posing as a cyborg statue
on Wall street before being pressed into the service of pronoia.

Net Item: "Pronoia" by Sunset Magnet North, Album, "Cooler Perspective", 2001.

Despite fears that young and impressionable ravers across the country had
simply transformed themselves into zippies and that technology was being used
"simply to legitimize a cult which is little more than a kind of violent Wayne's
World on Internet" The tour proceeded apace, with or without the fashion police.
"Zippies?" commented one fashionista: "one, a fashion failure wearing virtual-
reality goggles, graced the May cover of Wired magazine, the 18-month-old
guide to technohip that's the biggest marketing success since Rolling Stone, and
already not as good as it used to be." (Sheila Lennon, The Reader). Of course,
zippies were really "technohippies from England who deftly mix the music and
multimedia of the rave club scene, Druid religious roots, psychedelics and that
old hippie freedom trip. Their tour is called Pronoia -- the sneaking feeling that
others are conspiring to help you -- and their goal is evolution, a revolution in
consciousness".

I'm no better off in a maroon bomber jacket, grey tracksuit and khaki trainers --
since I admit now to the entire world, that I wouldn't have been able to figure out
the street fashion of San Francisco in '94 either, even if Nike had paid me $1000
000 and told me to like swoosh. I'm lost in the fashion stakes, much to Sionaidh's
dismay. While we're driving in the car to yet another "photo opportunity" I ask her
what's up. She updates me in her boho lilt: "the zippies have already had a press
conference, and a eco-friendly fashion show, you know, like with hemp
products..." and it all sounds terribly cultish, and exciting and I want to be a part
of what one could call the carnival of free, but like whose backing the zippies?

My naiveté about the dialectics of zip would eventually get me into hot water but
for the meantime I was content to ruminate about the public’s current fixation.
You know I know the Zippies like as in Fraser Clark created them and the Zippies
are US, but is that one ZIPPY with a "Y" or many Zippies with an IE? When
you're having the wool pulled over your eyes its usually because somebody
wants you to be a sheep, -- Was I slaughtered simply because I was "white",
South African, and nobody thought Y?

We end-up downtown in silicon alley. RU Sirius, my cyberpunk friend is there,

being interviewed for a television spot I guess, and it's an interview conducted by
some young brat who is covering the incipient counter-culture, probably with a
student loan and his dad's video camera. I'm told to just sit on the floor or like
"wait in the kids room". If I had a portable rocket from the future I would get out of
there, but all I manage is to chirp-up that actually, in reality, I'm nearly 26 and a
publisher of sorts, in fact I have published zines down under in South Africa etc,
etc. The video guy just looks at me, like I'm worse than a redneck or white-trash,
on the inside of his politically correct televisionland brain.

Fraser does the interview. I try to network a little: "Names Dave Dei," I say
struggling to appear cool and using one of my newly acquired net-names (as it
turns out, from the Domain of the Cuddly Deity). Big mistake. Because, since
Shionadh doesn't know that Fraser already knows me from London I am marked
as some kind of an attention-getter or worse, one of those complete nobodies
who grab microphones while you're still on stage, grandstands a little or goes out
of the way to steal your thunder.

Jules Marshall wrote recently in his "Decade after the Zippies" piece
commissioned by Wired Magazine about something familiar to all of us: "I caught
up with Fraser at a party just outside Santa Cruz." says Marshall, "Fraser was
introduced to speak beforehand, when suddenly this weirdo called Pincus,
dressed in body armour, fur and cow horns as I remember, grabs the mike and
announces HE is Fraser Clark, and goes on to spout complete gibberish for ten
minutes." According to Marshall "This guy had at some stage attached himself to
the zippies, or one half of them as it had become by now, it seems."

If the man bothered to read the script between the lines, it is quite obvious from
postings made by myself and others on the Well Bulletin Board, that I had by
implication then "attached myself" to the other half. Yes there was a split and no,
I wasn't even party to that split. What happened in reality, it that I had become a
useful part, of what Clark would always term "the reinforcements we were waiting
for" and as such was an easily expendable commodity in both media terms and
in terms of THE ZIPPIES, after the news story seemingly dried up. What am I
doing here? Obviously the problem is not too difficult to sort out looking at it from
the year 2004.

As High Times says: "Clark decided to pull the plug on the Zippies' Canyon party
and re-direct his energy towards opening a Megatripolis-style club in San
Francisco... Then he caught wind of the European press, which was hyping the
mega-rave as the Woodstock of the 90's... hype had overtaken reality; the show
had to go on."

While Fraser was being touted by the press as some kind of cult-figure
surrounded by a horde of acolytes, on the one hand, the reality was completely
different. On the other -- there were no "true-believers" only variations of what
can only be described as a rag-tag army of techno-hippies and cyber-anarchists -
- the reinforcements he had been looking for since the sixties.

While people like Earth Girl and Michael John seem to pop-up in story after story
about the Zippies, it is probably because they were already well-known and
Americans to boot. Very little is ever said about the actual tribe that accompanied
Clark from London, and this criticism is not a new one. In fact in a piece posted
on the web shortly after the tour fell-apart, (the Pronoia Tour was supposed to
continue on to Hawai and a 1/4 million rave with the KLF, followed by an Eclipse
after-party in Peru) an anonymous author makes the startling point: "Take the
very question of who these people are: How were they educated? What parts of
Britain are they from? What do they do for a living? Who are their parents?"

And comments: "This was barely touched upon for those who were the nucleus
of this movement, and not at all for the late-comers, who form, by [Marshalls
estimates] about half of the 200 000 zippies."

I'm not trying to include myself, here, but Americans like to honk their own horn,
and it is probably safe to say that the closer you were to the nucleus surrounding
Clark, the least likely you were to actually get heard --- since the man was quite
capable of telling everybody to shut-up while having a conversation about topical
profundities like "we don't want to be all commercial or have stars". The thought
police and people like John Bagby were only too happy to oblige in following
orders.

We return from yet another fashionable appearance at the Marconi Convention

Center, go up to the apartment and one of Clark's goons, from the bad side of
London clubland, asks me "are you gay you know like a fag". His name is
Ronnie, and he's shooting a movie about the tour, and "do you get it in the
backside, you know, like in the arse?"
"Can't say I do....do you? I seem to reply, but instead I play dumb, not wishing to
appear so ultimately stupid, but then what is Ronnie actually doing here, making
history with a capital H, with a bunch of gay-bashers in San Francisco of all
places? According to Ronnie, the Zippies are having trouble with a bunch of club
queens (in particular one promoter) and they need a couple of extra zippies, you
now like for the support.

The totally anonymous monkey creature inside of me still wants to shout some
totally queer and outrageously camp expletive: Sure I'm a Zippy supporter, what
club soccer do you watch? Zippies FNL, Zippies Guiness Cup or the Zippies
United Local?

Except where I'm from this kind of cultural bickering is taken seriously. Politicians
often feel the need to feel popular by rigging the polls, bussing in supporters who
have no idea what they are supporting, and press ganging people with little else
to do, except go along for the ride. I ask myself the question -- am I just one of
the crowd -- the mob -- the passing parade whose presence has no effect on the
outcome of events whatsoever?

I have no answers. The reality is that I've spent the last ten years thinking a
particular event was possibly significant, when in fact the truth is, it was just a
side-show and as insignificant and impossible to believe as King Kong on a
rollerblades, dancing down the Nile, or as futile as owning one of those quaint
do-hickeys for someone else's brand new Beetle (1960s pretty boy reissue) --
you know it does something probably useful, you know it is probably vital to the
workings of the man and his car engine but what? If it falls out and the car still
goes, you do nothing, tell nobody and go about your business blissfully unaware,
and for all they know, internal combustion could be the result of a wormhole in
space-time.
 Chapter Four

Your Messiah will arrive much later than expected.

"I am Oz, the Great and Terrible. Why do you seek me?" L Frank Baum, The
Wizard of Oz

THERE were always elements of the messianic about Clark's mission. Part of his
charm and allure was in recasting the yuppie as a hippie holding a computer with
an innocent vision of dancing outdoors on the grass amidst a bigger dose of
millennium fever than most. Indeed there is nothing wrong with being
characterised as some kind of holy man carrying a laptop computer while riding
on a donkey, even if this makes you look like the Jesus Christ of rave culture as
Time or Newsweek would have it, (Christopher Columbus as I still maintain) it is
another thing altogether to actually tout oneself as G-d or to claim to embody the
spiritual physicality of a Christ without stopping to consider that there could well
be a pantheon of gods out there that include Buddha and even the Zoroastrian
embodiment of the god Mazda?

We arrived one night at -- Terence McKenna's ex-wife, Kat McKenna’s

houseboat in Sausalito somewhere, and we are instantly thronged by
worshippers who insist that I am Krishna and Fraser is like God. They all circle us
like pixies at a fairy wedding and dance and sing a song too horrible to imagine. I
think it has something to do with Fraser's birthday, but I am too stoned to
remember anything more than that.

It would be a while until the infamous "Smells like Zippy Spirit -- the stillbirth of a
supertribe" piece in OUTside Magazine was published, along with the terrible
quote "I'm just a guy. Jesus was just a guy, too, of course." I could never figure
out exactly why Hampton Sides wanted to pronounce the Zippies "Dead on
Arrival", but then you have to figure in the exploitation angle. The fact that none
of us were getting paid, and as the "new supertribe" multiplied, so did the number
of venture capitalists all of whom balked at the new economics created out of
free. Not even the resulting dot-com explosion would compensate for the lack of
faith, as calls came in from somebody who claimed to be from Merrill Lynch and
Associates, of all people.

"Being a zippy means believing in a technology-based spiritualism where, in

essence, the Macintosh is the messiah. For many followers, it's more than just an
excuse to indulge in a night of loud music and dabble in psychedelic drugs." P.J.
Huffstutter, LA Times.

Being so close to a superego like Clark, can be dangerous. It is one thing to

stand next to a real Saint, a Mandela or a Tutu, and to get a whiff of actual
greatness, but being situated next to Clark, at any time of the day, was, as the
saying goes, "like being absorbed by an unstable supernova about to explode,
"He had the ability, armed with a concoction of psychedelic folklore, to make
even the smallest detail seem completely trivial and yet "oh, so significant", to
literally mesmerize your mind, hypnotizing you with his birdlike, rhyming verse --
yes the man as so many critics like to tell us, had the real gift of the gab, and was
indeed some kind of stoned leprechaun spouting poetry and persuading you that
things were, far from being stillborn and over, just about to start .

"Zippies are a product of gene-splicing between Timothy Leary and Microsoft."

P.J. Huffstutter

When the "Here come the Zippiest" story was breaking on the West Coast of
America during 1994, Bill Griffith, the creator of a cartoon character named
"Zippy" expressed his concern that people like myself were simply "cashing-in".
Even though I could not afford to wash my socks, we were "cashing-in", perhaps
on Zippy himself?

"I've always longed to be a Mascot,” says Zippy the Pinhead in the comic strip -
"Yippee, its Zippier", about a "bunch of weirdoes who guzzle mashed enzymes
and get communal and stuff" "Good!" says Zippo’s ultra-rationalist partner Griffin,
"Fantabulous! Now I'll get this out on the' Internet and we can start licensing - I
see 'Zippier' screensavers, 'Zippier' flavored teas! 'Zippier' clam dippiest!! You'll
be huge!"

While it seemed to an ultra-rationalist as if Clark was making money off the odd
appearance, cadging a dollar here and there, and generally mooching his way
around while conning masses of hysterical new age wannabes, all of whom
wanted to be in on the action, he was far from being a Sai Baba or Maharaji. In
fact being Jesus Christ was not all that desirable, since one of the side-effects of
being cast as an impoverished beggar on a donkey was that the apple power-
book was always out of date or on loan, a simple prop. Indeed a marketing
opportunity that failed to alert brand managers or the faithful to some potential
high-tech shenanigans that could conceivably have enriched those whose lives
depended upon making money.

Clark raised the issue of his status as "guru" one night.

"I'm reading 'On the Guru Trail', what do you think? He asked

"Dunno." I said. We haven't eaten for days."

Aside from the enormous marketing opportunities which failed to materialize

around the promise of free – freakonomics -- and the claim to a demographic that
could be measured in the hundreds of thousands, and which still today measures
something in the absurd region of a 300 million plus audience on the Asian
Subcontinent (if you believe Outlook India), there were the association with
technology companies that were exploitative, the media which exploited us, and
the expectations that if we were not already being exploited, or exploiting those
teen spirits, then who the hell were we to even ask for, g-d forbid, money?

When Clark eventually left for England, he went home to a council flat and a
welfare cheque. I on the other hand, had to rough it back in Africa, a "third world
country" which sometimes makes India look like a summer camp on a hot day.

Picture a scene in a boho cafe off Height St, Clark surrounded by hordes of teens
who all want a piece of zippy nippy, and the promoters of this zippy spirit who all
want a piece of teen. Either way, I'm stuffed. Whether I like it or not, I still end up
being some kind of purveyor of jail-bait at the end of a publicity hook that had
threaded sharky school-moms who only wanted Fraser for dinner. Cut to the
Moscone Centre techno fair, innocent me, accosted by adult techno-tourists, and
still I go down in the history books as, " a new species of gibbon" to use Hampton
Sides' phrase, a "new age groupie".

Yet another appearance at the same venue, packed to capacity with San
Francisco's youth. Fraser laughs and shows me the cartoon. I am introduced to
an overfed, leering man in a suit as "a zippy" and still I can't even get a drink.
Eventually all I manage is a glass of mineral water -- apparently zippies live
exclusively on a rare minerals mined at the bottom of the ocean. They don't eat
meat or drink wine like you or I.

The crazy thing in this image, is I imagine my beatific facto-facto girlfriend there
too. I imagine her, fending off the teenagers, the both of us, escaping from this
weird scientific laboratory from the fifties. Dissected. Redirected. Injected. All
because of the west coast fantasy industry. The need by the media to possess
your soul and to literally own a piece of the new energy without actually paying
for it -- the new media the new techno resource -- and all because of Clark's
original sin -- the neat switch that created Zippy as the supposed antidote to the
Yuppie and the result into Jesus Christ with a laptop computer on a donkey.
Ashes and sackcloth beating a bible of "ravelations" on your forehead. Son --
You can be a technopagan and still work in an office if you want to. Girl -- you
can be an office party and still live in the wilderness. We can all liberate our
desktops from the dance floor. We can all club ourselves conscious, at least if
there's still something conscious left to club for.

Zippy Pronoia Tour to US ’94 Jupiter Bash

 Chapter Five

Unzipped: Saint Crasier Flark the Martyr and his highly original
Fleet Street Philosophy.

"Hush, my dear," he said; "don't speak so loud, or you will be overheard -- and I
shall be ruined. I'm supposed to be a Great Wizard." L Frank Baum, The Wizard
of Oz

WHAT Fraser Clark has in terms of a philosophy, is really not all that unique or
difficult to express -- Goddess worship, WoManity, Peace, love and a fair
prophet. Then there's the "harmonise your hemisphere's racket, which ties into
hemi-sync mythology created by cyberpunks. Rewire the brain, using chemicals.
Listen to the beats at approximately 140bpm, (124bpm to be exact, the heartbeat
of the human fetus in the womb according to Clark) everything else is like
"banging" unless its "trance" but that's like synthesiser music with a metronome.
Sounds pretty surface hype, or is it?

According to pop theorist Mark Dery, "the archetypal cyberhippie featured in

Sunday supplement articles is largely a media fiction, synthesised from scattered
sightings." A being "wearing printed squirming sperm, leggings adorned with
scuttling spiders," and "belled jester caps popular at raves." Furthermore, he or
she "meditates on cyberdelic mandalas like the New Electric Acid Experience
video advertised in Inner Technologies, a mail order catalogue of 'tools for the
expansion of higher consciousness'. 'Recreate the Summer of Love with this 90s
version of a 60s light show', the blurb entreats."

When one reads Clark in his multifarious forms, extracts from Epi, ^evolution, or
Zippy Times, you realise that the man is really just one of those incredibly
interesting characters situated in a pantheon that includes the entire history of
psychedelic pop-culture, from Ginsberg to Burroughs and beyond, part Wavy
Gravy, part Sir Francis Drake, part Franz Anton Mesmer. But to understand him
you have to remember the period in which he speaks to various sections of the
community across different generations. For example -- There's nothing terribly
profound about wearing a "smiley" badge, unless you're living in a fascist state,
and this is where Clark becomes interesting.

He is the master of systems collapse, because everything the Tories and the
right-wing say about Clark and the Zippies are inevitably true. In the face of
Puritanism and the Christian orthodoxy, Clark is positively satanic -- a breed of
Celtic shaman and pagan hedonism that goes hand in hand with a form of anti-
authoritarian mysticism.

"The zippies believe that word processors can be used to save the earth and ask
you to project "negative vibrations" at the stock exchange to provoke economic
collapse." So goes the I-D story published in 1989.
Sadly, it is here that he expresses his early reaction against punk, an "anti-punk"
attitude because "punks were the second wave of energy - a negation of what
the hippies had become". Ironically the early hippy who created zippy, would
come unstuck on the issue of cyberpunk versus techno-hippy. Was there any
difference essentially with what was already happening on the West Coast at the
time of the Pronoia Tour? The failure of Clark's team to address this and other
pressing issues of cultural importance relegated him and the tour to the status of
oddity. Reactions were swift. Clark and his team were denounced as nothing
more than a bunch of hoodlums, who had come from England to disturb the
tranquility of new-age America. As one Wired letter writer wanted to know: "was
technology being used to simply legitimise a cult which is little more than a kind
of violent Waynes World on Internet?"

It is one thing to repackage the sixties and to marry the techno tribes of the future
with the earth people of the south, while plugging Marshall McLuhen and sages
like Ram Dass aka Richard Alpert or Alan Ginsberg in a club, and calling the
resulting combination "Zippie" it is another thing entirely, to try to doing the same
thing in hippy home territory. What was occurring at Megtripolis West and so
many of the party's we attended, was that the audience was preaching to the
grand converter, the Zippie priest was being lead by his congregation. Clark had
become a victim of his own philosophy.

If you read "Morning of the Magicians", by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier,
first published in Paris 1960 as "The Dawn of Magic" you'll be amazed to find a
form of new age patois current doing the sixties and the title of the first chapter,
just two innocent looking words- Future Perfect! If that were not clearly amazing
in itself, there is an entire chapter on the thought of Gurdjief. Stuff like "A man is
immersed in dreams, whether he remembers them or not does not matter...[but]
what is necessary to awake a sleeping man? A good shock is necessary. But
when a man is fast asleep one shock is not enough. A long period of shocks is
needed. Consequently there must be somebody to administer these shocks... a
man may be awakened by an alarm clock. But the trouble is that a man gets
accustomed to the alarm clock far too quickly, he ceases to hear it. Many alarm
clocks are necessary and always new ones." Sound familiar?

The idea that we "have to wake-up" is common to a lot of new age thinking. What
isn't common, is that we have to "wake-up on the dancefloor" or "use a laptop
computer" in other words, create a new-fangled alarm clock. It was Clark's
genius to suggest elaborate methods of consciousness raising that really got
people. The man was more accessible than either John Lilly who "talked to
dolphins" or Tim Leary who had turned to virtual reality as a form of psychedelic,
or Terence McKenna, who has gone from describing aliens and mushrooms, to
talking about the I Ching and computers.

Clark didn't need a psychedelic, there was no prescription except acceptance of

an earlier state of conscious, call it an awakening - the "summer of love" which
had hit Britain in 1988 and crossed the Atlantic in 1989. The Berlin Wall came
down. The Cold War ended. Clark proceeded to create a "Magic Maggie Healing
Doll", "You are invited to participate in the most important psychic experiment in
history...whether you think Maggie is good, all bad, or a bit of both, the fact is that
she in a position to affect the destiny of every psyche on this planet."

We were invited to make use of "acupuncture points" to help open "Margaret

Hilda Thatchers' heart centre. "this will fill her with peaceful energy and love for
all life-forms, thus arousing the living goddess within her. We consulted a range
of healers and acupuncturists about the prime minister in order to arrive at these
particular points" and so it goes, in a classic example of what is known as "magic
politics".

Reading Clarks' EPi, meant that you could partake of the counter-culture without
necessarily taking drugs. Drugs were just a side-effect, not the cause of a youth
rebellion against the status quo, that had decided to use the iconography of the
sixties as its starting point. This innocence was lost on the Pronoia Tour, when
instead of invoking the sixties as a counter-balance to the nineties, resurrecting
the swinging decade became an end into itself, an old-timers reunion, which was
not surprising seeing as how literally every baby-boomer had jumped on the
band-wagon, and expected us to deliver, not only hippies, but drugs, and even
better, young children smashed on acid or heroine to exploit, and a vision of me
dying at age thirty. My response is -- you must have wanted this insanity really
bad, you wanted it so much, look now you've even got another Vietnam!

Not only is Clark, a follower of Gurdjief, but he subtitled his club Megatripolis,
(just another joke) "the future perfect state". However, to understand Clark, one
has to understand not just the people who inform his philosophy but the milieu in
which he operates. The early nineties for instance were a hot-bed of counter-
cultural activism and this activism eventually found its way into rave culture.
Naomi Klein in her chapter "Reclaim the Streets", mentions a particular creative
combination of "rave and rage" which proved "contagious, spreading across
Britain to Manchester, York, Oxford and Brighton, and in the largest single RTS
event to date, drawing 20 000 people to Trafalgar Square in April 1997." [Klein,
315]

It was memes like this which created the "Zippy Intervasion of the UK" and the
"Paradigm Jump off the Grand Canyon Rave". We wanted to reclaim the internet
from the straights and use it to "spook John Majors Criminal Justice Bill, which
sought to outlaw dancing and banned "music with a repetitive beat." As Paul
Staines says in "Acid House Parties Against the Lifestyle Police and the Safety
Nazis". "Imagine a regime so totalitarian that it will not allow its young citizens to
dance when they want. Imagine that this regime introduced a law which banned
dance parties unless they were authorised by the state, and even then the
parties would only be allowed to be of limited duration and on state-licensed
premises. Naturally this regime would, in line with its ideology, only apply these
laws to parties held for profit."

Thereby forcing the "wicked and evil" dance promoters into the untenable
position of throwing parties for nothing. It was this ultimate sacrifice of the notion
of profit which would force much of the counterculture during the nineties, into
giving away virtually everything of value, including the music, which we all were
encouraged to "copy and burn". The result would be traumatic in terms of ones
personal status and bank account. Very few people actually made any money,
and of those who did, invariably they were damned as the "sell-outs", artists
signed to studios and record companies producing industrial-issue dance music
that had little going for it, except the beat and a passing reference to the
underground.

PART TWO We kidnap Tim Leary: To be continued.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia – Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace

Mark Dery – Escape Velocity

Hampton Sides, Smells like Zippy Spirit, Still birth of a Supertribe , published
in Outside December 1994

The Zippies, ID February 1989

Sarah Ferguson, Raving at the Edge of the World, High Times, February 1995

For Peace and Love Try Raving Till Dawn, New York Times, August 7, 1994

Fraser Clark, Shamanarchy in the UK, May 1992

Jules Marshall, Here Come the Zippies

 FURTHER ILLUSTRATIONS