A decade after Jesse first heard The Shaggs, they were fully absorbed into his musical world. His life as a professional had matured, with gigs and lessons he was making a living in the big city doing music full time. He decided to organize his first tribute show, where a big group of musicians do a series of cover songs along some theme. “I have lots of great musician friends, that’s putting it mildly, all of who are much more talented than I am,” Jesse said regarding the company he keeps.

One of Jesse’s friends was the former record store clerk, Mike Fornatale. Now a professional guitar player, a vocalist, and a writer. Mike and Jesse had bonded over their mutual love for weird music and a shared reverence for that genre’s sovereign king, Captain Beefheart. They consummated the relationship with Jesse’s first tribute show, a concert of covers of the songs of Captain Beefheart featuring over 50 musicians. Jesse asked Mike to sing most of the Beefheart parts. “It was spectacular,” Mike said. “By all rights it shouldn’t have come off at all, but it was seamless. Everybody that got up there was great and boy did my throat hurt the next day.”

So Jesse followed that tribute with a concert honoring the music of Spinal Tap. He put together a big, fun show in Brooklyn on November 11th, 2011 (because “this one goes to 11”). “It went over great and we sold the place out,” Jesse said. “And they were actually giving us shit there because there were too many people there.” Jesse says that was the night the guy who ran the club asked for another tribute. “I had to convince them, ‘Hey let my friends in…’ And the guy said, ‘Listen I’ll tell you what. You do another show for me and I wont give you shit for violating fire codes…’ So I had to come up with another idea for a show.”

“OK Jesse what’s next?” Mike remembers asking.

Other People had put together tribute shows in New York and Jesse played a small part in a few of them. He played in a Kate Bush and Bryan Ferry tribute show, a “Rocky Horror Picture Show” tribute show, a David Bowie tribute show. There was a show where musicians played all of “Jesus Christ Super Star” with celebrities like Gene Ween and Dr Know from Bad Brains. With the Captain Beefheart and Spinal Tap shows, Jesse had checked two of his favorite things in the world off his tribute to-do list. It was natural for him to organize a tribute to The Shaggs next because it had never been done before.

“A lot of people say, ‘Oh my God, I love the Shaggs, they’re clueless! They’ve never heard music before.’ ” Jesse said. “No. You’re wrong. It sounds that way, but they do.” They understand music, but not always the same way as everyone else. “And that’s what makes it so fascinating.” He knew it would be amazing to do an entire concert of Shaggs songs.

“Everybody was on board. They were like wow, like god damn. The Beefheart show was astonishing , and that’s impossible music,” Jesse said. “If we could get a bunch of people to play Beefheart music with that much passion and that seriously, then we can do the same thing with The Shaggs.”

Dot’s drawing of Foot Foot for “Philosophy of The World”

“He came up with The Shaggs idea and that same group of musicians would be saying things like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” Mike recalled. “And that’s when he went out and got Foot Foot tattooed on his arm; and we went, ‘OK, he’s serious.’ ”

Jesse’s vision for the Shaggs tribute was to have everyone learn to play the songs exactly as they sounded on the recordings, which might seem obvious, but no one had tried it before. “There was a Shaggs album, ‘Better Than The Beatles,’ but that was covers and that was people making the songs their own, which I usually don’t like,” Jesse said, explaining that he prefers faithful renditions which are not easy. “I can see why people who love The Shaggs wouldn’t even try to approach it because how can you do that, how could you approach The Shaggs?” Asking everyone at the tribute for “faithful renditions” meant that Jesse was laying down a challenge to some of the best musicians in New York. “My thing was you can do it. Yeah, it might seem impossible but we can do it.”

So Jesse assigned groups of willing musicians one or two Shaggs songs which they began to learn on their own. But how? How did these skilled people figure out how to play like the Wiggins had on their old recordings? The musicians studied and analyzed over countless hours, dissecting the choices of the young beginners from another world. The Wiggin sisters had learned to play together in near complete isolation, in their parents’ basement, when they were just kids growing up in a small town in the middle of the last century. The musicians who signed onto Jesse’s Shaggs tribute were big city professionals at the top of their game and they put their backs into learning how to sound just like The Shaggs. They began the work to unravel the mystery of the music one song at a time. What was at the core of these weird tunes? Not everyone could agree.

“It demystifies pretty quickly once you start sitting there and playing it,” Mike said about the songs. “They have their own logic and you follow it. Or else.”

Some of the highly trained musicians chose to dive into the remarkable tunings of the songs they were assigned to, because when you seek to understand The Shaggs, those out of tune guitars seem like a good place to start. “There were a couple of guys who actually worked out the microtones on their iPhones,” Mike recalled,”and tuned their guitars precisely as they had been on the record. Which is a great theory but as soon as you turned it up to a performance volume it just sounded horrible, to me.” Mike asked everyone to dial it back and bring their guitars closer to “just a hair out.”

The big decision was made to tune their guitars “better,” and the music still sounded like The Shaggs. They had determined that the unique tuning on the records was more incidental than essential to The Shaggs sound. But if you listen to Dot Wiggin’s ode to her lost cat Foot Foot, the first thing you are likely to notice after the introductory drum solo wipes your mind clean, is how strange the notes are. “Learning how to play Foot Foot is an interesting thing,” Jesse said. “Mike said such a great thing about this: What made The Shaggs music unusual was that it wasn’t unusual. People said that the Shaggs came up with all these alternate tunings. And they weren’t alternate tunings, they were accidental tunings. Unsuccessful tunings. When you realize that you say, God, these are three chord songs. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. These are lullabies. But they are out of tune and they’re sung in unison and there’s one guitar playing along with it (sort of) and the drums are doing something different. But at their core they are like lullabies. And to me it reminds me of the sea shanties that Captain Beefheart used to sing. I can totally picture Beefheart doing ‘Foot Foot’ a cappella.”

The Beefheart comparison is important to people like Jesse and Mike, because nobody assumes that an artist like Captain Beefheart, with his large body of work, was writing weird songs by accident. But conventional wisdom on The Shaggs has always been that they were totally clueless. It’s clear Beefheart had a vision, but did the Wiggins? Couldn’t an artist have a clear vision but be unaware of how strange it sounds to the rest of the world?

So sitting down and learning to play a Shaggs song on guitar is more straight forward than you might think. “It’s not like you have to learn an alien language, or anything like that,” Mike said. “The music itself is really pretty simple. The guitar melody follows the lead vocal ruthlessly, and the rhythm guitar [parts]… are sort of stapled on to it in — ” here Mike pauses and changes course mid sentence. “I was going to say in a non-rhythmic sense but that’s not correct.”

Travel back in time, tune up their instruments and force the Wiggin sisters into speech therapy to erase their charming New Hampshire accents, and “Philosophy of The World” would still be really, really weird, because the Wiggins worked together as a band to innovate a sense of rhythm that was entirely their own creation. That Shaggs rhythm presented a real challenge to the people trying to learn to duplicate it.

“It’s really crazy,” Jesse said about the different ways each musician had of figuring out their parts. “I learned this stuff by ear and I think every musician has their own way of doing it. Some people would just learn it by ear, note by note.” As an example, Jesse picks the five note melody of “Things I Wonder.” He says the melody’s rhythm defies conventional musical notation and his friend who was assigned that song was forced to learn it beat by beat, there was no other way to count it out. “Other people would try to figure out the chords, detune them and then write their own charts to them,” Jesse said.

But that’s not how Mike did it. To get it to work on paper, he came up with his own solution. “There aren’t obvious bars and beats so much as the chord changes simply follow the melody,” Mike explained. “I just wrote down the lyrics and I wrote down the chord changes. I let the chords fall where they fell and it was just about always in the right spot. It seemed to me that it made more sense to do it intuitively then to ruthlessly try to chart it out.”

Now, because of Jesse, graduates of elite music schools like Julliard and NYU alongside self taught professionals were faithfully working to emulate the unschooled amateurs on these 40-something year old recordings. Jesse had his core group of musicians who had played in the earlier tributes, but there were also super talented Shaggs fans coming out of the woodwork. They’d hear about what Jesse was planning and they wanted in. Like Brittany Anjou. “I heard that there was going to be a tribute to The Shaggs and I said, oh my god that’s awesome I want to do it!”

Brittany had been in love with the innocence and the authenticity of The Shaggs for years, ever since a friend played it for her for the first time. “He told me the story of Austin Wiggin and the palm reader, just the back story of The Shaggs and it was so powerful. Then we listened to the record and I was like, oh my god this is the coolest thing. I just felt like I identified so strongly with it so much immediately.”

At the time she joined up with the tribute to The Shaggs, Brittany was a recent music school graduate. She had been playing piano her whole life and doing things like transcribing traditional Ghanaian xylophone music for fun. It had never occurred to her that she could try to learn to play the music of The Shaggs, even though it was one of her favorite things.

Mike’s method of learning the songs by “stapling” the chords to the lyrics (which stands the classical Western musical tradition on its head) worked for him, but there were several trained professionals, Brittany among them, that had gone so far down the path of their musical education that it was more fun to blaze a Shaggs inspired trail ahead then for them to turn back and play the songs simply by feel.

“No one asked me to do it. I just wanted to see if I could do it,” Brittany said about getting to work to put the unschooled musical choices of the Wiggin sisters down onto music paper. “It’s really geeky, but I was like: I wonder if I could get my Sibelius to play back this, like verbatim,” Brittany lets out a burst of nervous laughter because only the biggest nerd in the world would enjoy attempting such a thing; applying her education, her keyboard and her professional musical composition software to a transcription of “My Pal Foot Foot.” “That’s actually what drove me to do it was: I’m going to nerd out so hard I’m going to see if I can get my Sibelius midi player to try to sound like The Shaggs.”

Jesse recalled what it was like to add Brittany to the team. “Brittany Anjou was sort of the find of the show because she transcribed everything. I don’t know if she has perfect pitch, but she can transcribe anything. She came up with charts for every song she was on. She charted out ‘Foot Foot.’ She charted out songs that are not possible, she worked them out. So we were able to go off of that; now you can play The Shaggs looking at a sheet of paper.”

Making musical charts for players to use when they join a group is the standard way to work in Brittany and Jesse’s world. But as far as they knew, no one had ever tried to chart out The Shaggs before, and they were thrilled to see the weirdness of The Shaggs fixed to the page. They imagined that Brittany’s charts were one of a kind, but they were in for a big surprise.