Released October 1974 Length 42:00 Producer The Firesign Theatre | Genre Comedy Label Columbia | |
Everything You Know Is Wrong
(1974) In the Next World, You're on Your Own
(1975) | ||
Everything You Know Is Wrong is the eighth comedy album by the Firesign Theatre. Released in October 1974 on Columbia Records, it satirizes UFOlogy and other New Age paranormal beliefs, such as Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods and claimed psychic Uri Geller, which achieved wide public attention by that time.
Contents
Everything You Know Is Wrong employs the Firesign Theatre's signature surreal playwriting.
Characters
The four main characters are pictured on the album cover:
Plot
The LP album is ostensibly the latest in Cox's series of "mind-breaking records" purveying his New Age revelations, augmented with mock commercial television news coverage. There are no track divisions.
Side 1 (20:45)
After a brief introduction, Cox gives a reverberating montage of his latest revelations, such as "Dogs flew spaceships", "Men and women are the same sex", and "Your brain is not the boss"; concluding with "Everything you know is wrong!"
Cox interviews Heater County, California Sheriff Luger Axehandle (Ossman), who claims to have seen a dog- or wolf-like alien digging up a grave in Curio, Arizona. Cox follows this with his interview of Lem Ashhauler (Proctor), editor of the Hellmouth–Heater Democrat newspaper, who reads an archived 1897 story identifying the grave's occupant as a strange visitor who choked to death on a piece of cheese.
Next, Cox plays the soundtrack of the short film Ben Franklin: Hero or Hophead?, which alleges Franklin (Bergman), Samuel Adams (Proctor), and Thomas Jefferson (Austin) planned the American Revolution while smoking hemp.
Cox follows this with a purported wire recording of an old-time medicine show produced by "Doctor Firesign's Antique Theatre". The show starts with Act One of a play parodying Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which Field Marshal Thomas Legree Quadroon (Bergman), a freed "professional slave", returns from the Civil War as a carpetbagger to terrorize his former owners by demanding they pay a "carpet tax" and telling them it's their turn to be the slaves. At intermission, the charlatan Professor Archer (Ossman) and his assistant Bowman (Bergman) prepare a potion from "Don Brouhaha's Inca Hell-Oil Tonic" and "Chief Dancing Knockout's Pyramid Pushover Paste".
Cox then describes Archer and Bowman ingesting their potion and turning into crows, and narrates a dramatization of their encounter with Don Brouhaha (Proctor), an "ancient cockroach in a sombrero", actually a Native American shaman, a parody of Carlos Castaneda's character Don Juan Matus.
At this point, Cox's recording is interrupted by a phone call from psychic Nino Savant (Proctor), who tells Cox the aliens want to contact him. Savant then moves from the phone to the TV, so Cox can listen to his answering machine. The only messages are from his bank, a teenage stalker fan named Gary (Bergman), and Cox's trailer park manager Art Wholeflaffer (Ossman).
After Savant leaves the TV, we hear the Channel 6 television news report, anchored by the "Where It's Happy" team of Harold Hiphugger (Ossman) and Ray Hamberger (Proctor) (pronounced "am-bur-ZHER", but Cox later addresses him as "Mr. Hamburger"). They parody the "happy talk" television news format which came into fashion about this time. After commercials for "Bear Wiz" beer and "Magog Brothers Atlantis Carpet Reclaimers", who are stuck with a warehouse full of inventory damaged by the recent collision of a comet, reporter Pat Hat (Bergman, a parody of Howard Cosell) cynically interviews "daredemon" Reebus Caneebus (Austin, a parody of Evel Knievel), who plans to jump into the deep hole left in the desert by the comet. Cox ends side 1 with a teaser of his "most startling new revelation."
Side 2 (21:15)
This starts with aliens apparently revealing themselves and demanding the surrender of Earth, until Cox angrily stops the record, declaring he, too, "was taken in by clever fakes like this." As proof that aliens have landed on Earth, he plays an episode of the travel show The Golden Hind, hosted by Bob Hind (Austin), a parody of the 1950s-60s TV series The Golden Voyage, hosted by travelogue film producer Jack Douglas. Hind interviews Buzz (Bergman) and Bunny (Proctor) Crumbhunger, a married couple who present a home movie of their abduction, murder and resurrection by aliens.
Cox then presents an "official stolen Air Force training film" of "the secret plan to deal with an alien uprising", narrated by General Curtis Goatheart (Proctor). The flim contains an enactment of a general (Ossman) telling his wife (Austin) and two of his officers (Proctor and Bergman) at breakfast that "two flying saucers [eggs] have just landed on my plate." Though they think he is insane, he takes command and "bombs aliens back to stone age".
The Crumbhungers happen to live next door to Cox, who enlists Wholeflaffer to spy on a party they are hosting. After giving him a drink containing blue moss, which has hallucinogenic effects, the Crumbhungers and their alien friends abduct Wholeflaffer and drive their motor home out onto the highway. Just then, Gary and his friends drop in on Cox. He tells them to hitch their "Heavenly Bus" up to his trailer, and follow the Crumbhungers. Just before leaving, Cox introduces Nino Savant's "Psychic Minute", a lecture on the subject of holes broadcast by "sending directly from his mind to yours." Nino mentions the comet hole in the desert, saying it leads to "the Sun at the center of the Earth".
This is followed by Channel 6's continuing coverage of Caneebus's jump and its aftermath, anchored by Hiphugger and Hamberger. A videotape of the morning's jump shows Caneebus finding the hole is only 60 feet deep and contains a golden staircase leading to the Sun. When he decides not to return, Pat Hat jumps in after him. Live coverage then resumes to show a literal parade of people following Caneebus into the hole, culminating with "the former President's float" (Austin's imitation of Richard Nixon, who resigned two months before the album's release.) Finally, no one but the newsmen and Cox are left, and they ask Cox to keep the camera pointed at them as they enter the hole.
At last the aliens appear, happening to sound just like the "clever fake" on Cox's earlier record, and flying a spaceship that "looks like a big fried egg." Finding no one but Cox, they leave him alone to ponder: "Seekers...it looks like this is the end. Or is it only the begin–? ...No, it's the end."
Video
After it was recorded, a movie version was made, with the group lip-syncing to the album. The Don Brouhaha scene from side one, and Nino Savant's lecture on "Holes" from side two, are not included in the video. The cinematographer for this was Allen Daviau, who later filmed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The film was released on a VHS format videotape in 1993 by The Firesign Theatre. (UPC barcode 735885 100131.) The group showed the film at Stanford University and took questions and answers.
Issues and reissues
This album was originally released simultaneously on LP, 8 Track, Quadrophonic LP, and quadrophonic 8 track cartridge.
It has been re-released on CD at least once
In popular culture
Musical parodist Weird Al Yankovic used the title "Everything You Know Is Wrong" for an original song on his 1996 album Bad Hair Day.
Paranormal researcher Lloyd Pye used the title in his 1998 book Everything You Know is Wrong – Book One: Human Evolution. Conspiracy theorist Russ Kick used it in a 2002 book he edited, Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies.
The British alternative band Chumbawamba used the title for a song about conspiracy theories on their 2004 album Un.