15 November 2024
Terence McKenna’s Alien Dreamtime
By Graham St John, Ph.D.
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXIV Number 1 • 2024
The following is a story untold in the life of Terence McKenna, a towering figure in the history of psychedelic culture, as enigmatic as he was charismatic. The story emerges from an extensive study bearing fruit in a biography to be published by MIT Press in 2025, Strange Attractor: The Hallucinogenic Life of Terence McKenna. While he died in 2000, aged 53, from the aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma multiforme, McKenna became a shooting star in the backplane of cyberspace, where he remains today the single most sampled voice in electronic music. This strange circumstance is rooted in the early nineties when McKenna adopted rave as a much-vaunted creode in the “Archaic Revival.” While not a music person himself, nor someone even known to dance, McKenna became an overnight booster for a new dance movement.
In this bizarre pre-millennial fling, ravers, in turn, adopted McKenna. The story I relate returns us to the heights of the rave-o-lution, to a time when McKenna was raver-in-residence at clubs in London and San Francisco, to a moment when he even enjoyed his own hit single. Featured on the Shamen’s 1992 double platinum album Boss Drum, the eight-minute screed “Re: Evolution” was surely one of the strangest tracks to reach the top twenty on the UK Singles Chart (# 18) (Figure 2). The single was a digital trojan horse for McKenna’s hope-filled eschaton. As he proclaimed from his podium on the Hit Parade, rave “is the cutting edge of the last best hope for suffering humanity.”
Carrying a nudge-nudge, wink-wink attitude toward DMT and psilocybin, exposure to which McKenna advocated as a human right, “Re:Evolution” featured extraordinary messaging for a hit single. But the celebrity stature deriving from McKenna’s association with the Shamen was tinged with irony. As everyone on the street knew, the Shamen’s chart-topping single “Ebeneezer Goode,” also released on Boss Drum, was a sonic billboard for “Ecstasy.” In other words, it promoted a substance McKenna imagined in his preacherly moments to be among the trash peddled among “whores of mammon.” He had long committed to distinguishing “shamanic” plants from what he saw as “onanistic” and “soulless” drugs. In a 1987 lecture, “Psychedelics Before and After History,” McKenna contended that taking MDMA was akin to self-gratification when it comes to experiencing “the felt presence of the other.” Later, in Mother Jones, readers were urged to take the three-step “drug test.” Does the substance occur in nature? Is it close to compounds naturally present in the human brain? Does it have a history of human use for thousands of years? (Olney, 1989). In application of Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance, it was long affirmed that, by comparison to MDMA, “plants have souls,” and they carry the morphogenetic field of thousands of years.
When you take psilocybin, it also takes you, you are participating in all of the trips that were ever induced in anyone. This is a tremendously stable field of experience. When you take a drug straight out of the laboratory [by which he meant MDMA and ketamine], it has no soul. It has no story, it has no direction. It’s a product of the daemon artifice of man (Anon, 1993).
Illustrious chemist and rediscoverer of MDMA, Alexander Shulgin, was in the Esalen audience when McKenna once expressed the rank dichotomy: drugs that come from labs are “suspect” compared with “natural” products deriving from plants. “But Terence, I’m as natural as they come,” Shulgin responded.
Excluding Ecstasy from the soulful vegetal kingdom had limited appeal among the rave-going populace. It also held little truck within the underground psychiatric community in which the compound became highly valued as a therapeutic aid. On this subject, Rick Doblin conveyed in an interview that McKenna’s early objections to MDMA were so frustrating that, in 1984, his comments served as a catalyst for a “secret safety study” that was the first step on the long road to sanctioning MDMA as an assisted therapy.
A high point in McKenna’s rave career was a multimedia collaboration and 48-hour rave held in San Francisco’s SoMa district over 26-27 February 1993. The brainchild of filmmaker Ken Adams, Alien Dreamtime was mounted in a warehouse on 11th St near Fulsom. The space, then called the Transmission Theatre (later Club Z, now Audio Nightclub), was leased by a real estate entrepreneur who also owned the club next door (in more recent years, Halycon). Alien Dreamtime gave McKenna the opportunity to belt out his greatest hits supported by Jonah Sharp’s techno-ambient arrangement, Space Time Continuum, and didgeriduista Stephen Kent, with live video mixing by Rose X (as released on Alien Dreamtime, Figure 3).
Adams and then wife and Rose X partner Britt Welin intended to shoot a film over two nights. The event was a high watermark of the SF rave scene before it became a club, warehouse, desert, or beach scene. At this juncture, it was impossible to distinguish between random barefoot overalls-wearing pot smokers and future leaders of the tech industry. The event served as a platform for, as Adams reflected, the then-building “ideational matrix that allowed people to feel confident about going forward and taking risks.” It was a proof of concept that was about to undergo serious performance testing. When the crowd filled out around midnight on the opening night, over a dozen police officers moved in. As the cops started pushing people around, and pulling plugs on video equipment, McKenna climbed up on stage. “We’re being visited by some of San Francisco’s finest,” the crowd was entreated. “If you have a camera of any sort, come to the front of the stage and point it at a cop.” People responded as instructed, greenlit camcorders effectively freezing the police in their tracks. “They weren’t ready for this,” Adams recalls, noting how the cops backed out of the building. There were too many people, and it was too much to deal with.
Filming was again disrupted on the second night when the police returned with a vengeance. As it was an unlicensed all-ages event, authorities were bent on protecting what they saw as corrupted innocence. But the kids were keen to meet the cops with a “force” of their own. They started dancing to protect the stage, a response which seemed communitarian and courageous to Adams. These kids were “dancing away the fear.” It was a tense moment, and the stakes were high. Adams convened with the senior cop in the property owner’s office. The overbearing officer, a silver-haired and buttoned-up character from a Superman comic started gnawing away at both men. “We’re not going to have psychedelic preached in my precinct,” he snarled. The owner took the heavy handle of his baked ceramic phone off the desk and announced he was calling “the Mayor.” The officer shifted with skepticism. Someone on the other end answered, and the owner soon got to the point. “There’s a show going on, and there’s a cop in here with his foot on my neck. I want you to get this Nazi out of here!” He then handed the phone to the badge who was grilled by a high-ranking city official at 2:00 AM Sunday morning. When “the Mayor” disconnected, the cop threw the phone with great force onto the desk and departed. It was an unexpected outcome and a clarifying moment of “power alignment” — offering a perfect resolution to the animated storybook playing in Adams’ mind. Permission had come from the top. The show would go on.
The show did go on. In his UK tours of the early nineties, McKenna became the beneficent source of DMT (the legendary “pink packet”) extracted from Psychotria viridis home grown in Hawaii. In the testimonies of Martin Glover (aka Youth, founder of Butterfly Records) and Raja Ram, who were among many transfigured beneficiaries, McKenna served as an unwitting midwife to the emergence of Goa trance and its psychedelic progeny. McKenna’s DMT was pivotal to the formation of the lead act in the psychedelic diaspora, Shpongle, and catalyzed the birth of the seminal Goa label Dragonfly Records (St John, 2015). As I have related more recently in Dancecult (St John, 2023), through the medium of psychedelic electronica, McKenna became the voice of the unspeakable.
Alien Dreamtime intimates an extraordinary moment in the life of Terence McKenna and in the world of the Bay Area rave scene. The mounting historical crisis that became the persistent focus of his attention appeared to be echoed in the efforts of authorities to shut down the event. McKenna’s commentary on the “end times” continues to haunt us in the accelerated dystopia in which we are immersed. While he was gone within six years of the Alien Dreamtime production, McKenna became an unassuming figurehead for intrepid enthusiasts within the broad network of psychedelic electronica, where he has continued to serve posthumously as a cyberdelic trip-sitter.
References
Anon, “Terence McKenna — The Re: Evolution(ary) Shaman,” Freakbeat, no. 8 (19 April 1993): 17-19, 23-24.
Olney, Kathryn. “Out Front — On Drugs,” Mother Jones (June 1989), 9.
St John, Graham. “The Voice of the Apocalypse: Terence McKenna as Raving Medium,” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, vol. 15, no. 1 (2023): 61-91.
St John, Graham. Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT (North Atlantic Books, 2015).
Graham St John, Ph.D.
Graham St John, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist specializing in transformational events, movements, and figures. He is Senior Research Fellow in the Dept of Media, Humanities and the Arts at the University of Huddersfield, UK, and author of the forthcoming book Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna (MIT Press, 2025). He is the author of ten books, including Mystery School in Hyperspace: A Cultural History of DMT (North Atlantic Books 2015), and Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance (Equinox 2012). Graham is Executive Editor of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. His website is: www.edgecentral.net
