The Wiggins returned to Fleetwood a few years later. By then, the girls were more proficient—they had practiced hundreds of hours since the first recording session—but their playing still inspired the engineer to write, “As the day progressed, I overcame my disappointment and started feeling sorry for this family paying $60 an hour for studio time to record—this?”

I once asked Annie Wiggin if she thought Austin was a dreamer, and after sitting quietly for a few moments she said, “Well, probably. Must have been.” If he was, it no doubt got harder to dream as the years went on. In 1973, the Fremont town supervisors decided to end the Saturday-night concerts, because—well, no one really remembers why anymore, but there was talk of fights breaking out and drugs circulating in the crowd, and wear and tear on the town hall’s wooden floors, although the girls scrubbed the scuff marks off every Sunday. Austin was furious, but the girls were relieved to end the grind of playing every Saturday night. They were getting older and had begun to chafe at his authority. Helen secretly married the first boyfriend she ever had—someone she had met at the dances. She continued living at home for three months after the wedding because she was too terrified to tell Austin what she had done. On the night that she finally screwed up the courage to give him the news, he got out a shotgun and went after her husband. The police joined in and told Helen to choose one man or the other. She left with her husband, and it was months before Austin spoke to her. She was twenty-eight years old.

The Shaggs continued to play at local fairs and at the nursing home. Austin still believed they were going to make it, and the band never broke up. It just shut down in 1975, on the day Austin, who was only forty-seven years old, died in bed of a massive heart attack—the same day, according to Helen, they had finally played a version of “Philosophy of the World” that he praised.

PHILO_S_OPHY OF THE WORLD (2:56)

Shortly after the newest rerelease of the Shaggs’ album, I went to New Hampshire to talk to the Wiggin sisters. A few years after Austin died, Betty and Dot married and moved to their own houses, and eventually Annie sold the house on Beede Road and moved to an apartment nearby. After a while, the house’s new owner complained to people in town that Austin’s ghost haunted the property. As soon as he could afford it, the new owner built something bigger and nicer farther back on the property, and allowed the Fremont Fire Department to burn the old Wiggin house down for fire-fighting practice.

Dot and Betty live a few miles down the road from Fremont, in the town of Epping, and Helen lives a few miles farther, in Exeter. They don’t play music anymore. After Austin died, they sold much of their equipment and later let their kids horse around with whatever was left. Dot hung on to her guitar for a while, just in case, but a few years ago she lent it to one of her brothers and hasn’t got it back. Dot, who is now fifty, cleans houses for a living. Betty, forty-eight, was a school janitor until recently, when she took a better job, in the stockroom of a kitchen-goods warehouse. Helen, who suffers from serious depression, lives on disability.

Dot and Betty arranged to meet me at Dunkin’ Donuts, in Epping, and I went early so that I could read the local papers. It was a soggy, warm morning in southern New Hampshire; the sky was pearly, and the sun was as gray as gunmetal. Long tractor-trailers idled in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and then rumbled to life and lumbered onto the road. A few people were lined up to buy Pick 4 lottery tickets. The clerk behind the doughnut counter was discussing her wedding shower with a girl wearing a fuzzy halter top and platform sneakers. In the meantime, the coffee burned.

That day’s Exeter News-Letter reported that the recreation commission’s kickoff concert would feature Beatle Juice, a Beatles tribute band led by “Brad Delp, former front man of ‘Boston,’ one of the biggest rock bands New England has ever produced.” Southern New Hampshire has regular outbreaks of tribute bands and reunion tours, as if it were in a time zone all its own, one in which the past keeps reappearing, familiar but essentially changed. Some time ago, Dot and her husband and their two sons went to see a revived version of Herman’s Hermits. The concert was a huge disappointment for Dot, because her favorite Hermit, Peter (Herman) Noone, is no longer with the band, and because the Hermits’ act now includes dirty jokes and crude references.

The Shaggs never made any money from their album until years later, when members of the band NRBQ heard “Philosophy of the World” and were thrilled by its strange innocence. NRBQ’s own record label, Red Rooster, released records by such idiosyncratic bands as Jake & the Family Jewels, and they asked the Wiggins if they could compile a selection of songs from the group’s two recording sessions. The resulting album, “The Shaggs’ Own Thing,” includes the second session at Fleetwood Studios and some live and home recordings. Red Rooster’s reissue of “Philosophy of the World” was reviewed in Rolling Stone twice in 1980 and was described as “priceless and timeless.” The articles introduced the Shaggs to the world.

Three years ago, Irwin Chusid, the author of the forthcoming book “Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music,” discovered that a company he worked with had bought the rights to the Shaggs’ songs, which had been bundled with other obscure music-publishing rights. Chusid wanted to reissue “Philosophy of the World” as it was in 1969, with the original cover and the original song sequence. He suggested the project to Joe Mozian, a vice-president of marketing at RCA Victor, who had never heard the band. Mozian was interested in unusual ventures; he had just released some Belgian lounge music from the sixties, which featured such songs as “The Frère Jacques Conga.” Mozian says, “The Shaggs were beyond my wildest dreams. I couldn’t comprehend that music like that existed. It’s so basic and innocent, the way the music business used to be. Their timing, musically, was . . . fascinating. Their lyrics were . . . amazing. It is kind of a bad record—that’s so obvious, it’s a given. But it absolutely intrigued me, the idea that people would make a record playing the way they do.”

The new “Philosophy of the World” was released last March. Even though the record is being played on college radio stations and the reviews have been enthusiastic and outsider art has been in vogue for several years, RCA Victor has sold only a few thousand copies of “Philosophy” so far. Mozian admits that he is disappointed. “I’m not sure why it hasn’t sold,” he says. “I think people are a little afraid of having the Shaggs in their record collections.”

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While I was waiting for the Wiggins, I went out to my car to listen to the CD again. I especially love the song “Philosophy of the World,” with its wrought-up, clattering guitars and chugging, cockeyed rhythm and the cheerfully pessimistic lyrics about how people are never happy with what they have. I was right in the middle of the verse about how rich people want what poor people have, and how girls with long hair want short hair, when Betty pulled up and opened the door of my car. As soon as she recognized the song, she gasped, “Do you like this?” I said yes, and she said, “God, it’s horrible.” She shook her head. Her hair no longer rippled down to her waist and no longer had a shelf of shaggy bangs that touched the bridge of her nose; it was short and springy, just to the nape of her neck, the hair of a grown woman without time to bother too much about her appearance.

A few minutes later, Dot drove in. She was wearing a flowered housedress and a Rugrats watch, and had a thin silver band on her thumb. On her middle finger was a chunky ring that spelled “Elvis” in block letters. She and Betty have the same deep-blue eyes and thrusting chin and tiny teeth, but Dot’s hair is still long and wavy, and even now you can picture her as the girl with a guitar on the cover of the 1969 album. She asked what we were listening to. “What do you think?” Betty said to her. “The Shaggs.” They both listened for another minute, so rapt that it seemed as if they had never heard the song before. “I never play the record on my own anymore,” Dot said. “My son Matt plays it sometimes. He likes it. I don’t think I get sentimental when I hear it—I just don’t think about playing it.”