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In March of 1969, Austin Wiggin, an eccentric loner from Fremont, New Hampshire, brought three of his four daughters down to a recording studio outside Boston. The Wiggin girls, Dorothy, Betty and Helen, had only recently started taking music lessons. Their musical skills were such that the sound engineer politely suggested that they weren't ready to record and perhaps the family would be better off spending the $60 an hour studio time on something else. Austin disagreed. The Beatles had recently hit America. A fortune teller had prophesied that Wiggin girls would strike it rich as musicians. "I want to get them while they're hot," he said. So the three girls slogged on through what was, by all accounts, a difficult session, doing take after take of songs that Austin wasn't pleased with. (Legend has it that Austin was never happy about the title track and that the girls finally performed a version he liked just before his death in 1975.) By the end of the day, they had the raw materials for Philosophy of the World, one of the most bizarre and controversial albums ever made.
Philosophy of the World and later, slightly more proficient recordings, languished in obscurity for most of the 1970s. Then NRBQ's Terry Allen became fascinated with the group and released first Philosophy of the World, then Shaggs' Own Thing, a comprehensive collection of Shaggs tracks, including all of the first album and selected other tracks.
The Shaggs elicit nothing if not mixed reactions, but they have built up a strong, slightly sheepish following among musicians and critics. Frank Zappa pronounced them "better than the Beatles". Outsider music scholar Irwin Chusid devoted a whole chapter of Songs in the Key of Z to them. The New York Times called Philosophy of Life "maybe the best worst rock album ever made". Lester Bangs named the Shaggs' first album "a landmark in rock and roll history". Moreover, a whole generation of rock writers and enthusiasts have added "Shaggs" to their shorthand, using the band's name whenever they want to denote untutored, amateurish music that nonetheless has an indefinable appeal. If someone compares you to the Shaggs, it means that you can't write or play, but they love you anyway.
Listening to Shaggs' Own Thing, I find, is a multilayered experience that changes as you learn more about the band. The first and most obvious layer -- the hardest one to get through -- is how bad they were by all objective standards. The Wiggin sisters play in an alternate universe -- one that is devoid of time signatures or chord structures. They sing in unison, barely, the guitars straining to mimic odd melodies in high tones. Occasionally the notes veer off into other worlds, discovering new scales and new chords along the way, and all apparently by accident. The lyrics arrive in strange, stream-of-consciousness packets, irregular in length, simple to the point of parody in theme and content, refusing to rhyme or scan or allude to anything. The drums are quite simply off, thumping and thundering in their own parallel universe. Many of the songs end with an unmistakable sense of relief, the final strummed chord or bass drum beat followed, almost palpably, by a glance at Dad to see if that would do.
Many people never get past this first layer -- including, reportedly, many Southern New Hampshire, Nixon-era teenagers who saw the Shaggs play live. They performed every Saturday night from 1968 to 1973 at the Freemont Town Hall, and by all accounts, spectators came as much to sneer and throw things as to appreciate the Shaggs. They quite correctly noted, as many uncharmed rock critics have done since, that the Shaggs could not play their instruments or sing or write songs or do any of the things normally expected of rock bands.
Still, if you listen long enough, you may begin to experience another layer. Rock fans, after all, have never been completely convinced of the value of skill, and the Shaggs clearly have that elusive "other than skill" quality. There's something very primal about their songs, something that reminds us that rock music is, ultimately, a form of communication. With the Shaggs, you feel a very direct connection to something pure, deeply felt and completely foreign. The girls often sound like Japanese pop stars singing for the first time in English. They struggle to make themselves understood, to get the cacophonous sounds in their heads come out through their guitars. Yet despite this struggle, their music is an unblocked conduit for emotion. "I'm So Happy", with its rollercoaster melody and just-off drums, injects its happy-sad vibe directly into your veins. "Philosophy of the World" is completely believable as an unsophisticated, sheltered teenager's attempt to make sense of existence. (Sample lyrics: "Oh the rich people want what the poor people's got / And the poor people want what the rich people's got / And the skinny people want what the fat people's got / And the fat people want what the skinny people's got.") Is it art? Maybe. Is it true? Definitely.
The second layer of experiencing the Shaggs has you believing that whatever the technical shortcomings, the Shaggs' work is an authentic, unfettered expression of personal experience, an outpouring of pure joy and exuberance that overcame all barriers to emerge in this recording.
Still, the Shaggs' story was a lot more complicated than that, and before we finish, there's a third layer of complexity to get through. Put succinctly, it was all dad's idea. For all his talk of the Shaggs' music being pure and all their own, they would probably never have picked up guitars if he hadn't forced them to. Indeed, the Shaggs' career, from a human perspective, looks pretty dysfunctional and maybe abusive.
Austin Wiggin pulled his daughters out of school, early on, home schooling them and enforcing a bizarre routine of calisthenics and musical practice. They had no contact with other teenagers, except at the Saturday night concerts at the town hall. Until the 1969 recording session, they had never been to Boston, about an hour away. They were not well-off. The original art for Philosophy of the World shows them wearing hand-made clothing. Seen from this perspective, tracks like the plaintive "Who Are Parents?" seems less like an innocent expression of familial love and more like the Stockholm Syndrome. The famous ode to a lost cat "My Pal Foot Foot" gains added poignancy when you consider how little contact the girls had with anyone -- even animals -- outside the family circle. And there is the fact that the band stopped playing immediately after Austin's death.
Today, Dorothy, Betty and Helen continue to live in Southern New Hampshire, leading very ordinary lives as house cleaners, factory employees, mothers and grandmothers. They are bemused by the letters that arrive from all over the globe, the reporters, the rumor that Tom Cruise was producing a movie about them. Dorothy and Betty performed two concerts in 1999 in New York City with NRBQ. (Helen, who has been diagnosed with clinical depression, didn't participate.) They are the most unlikely of rock stars, looking more like the women ahead of you in line at the grocery store than anything else.
Still, Shaggs' Own Thing is an amazing accomplishment, a visible manifestation of the spark of artist that maybe all of us have buried deep inside. It is weird and awful and wonderful, and it sets all conventional standards upside down and backward.
-- Jennifer Kelly
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