Recently, I was introduced to one of the most polarizing and intriguing bands in history. This is a band whose lone album can be found at #5 on Kurt Cobain’s scribbled Top 50 Albums list, was famously declared “better than the Beatles” by Frank Zappa, and lauded as “one of the landmarks of rock’n’roll history” by Lester Bangs. While at the same time, eliciting such responses as “hauntingly bad,” putting a listener “in the fetal position writhing in pain,” or the most visceral, described as “music for relaxing over a steaming bowl of congealed mayonnaise.” At minimum, you can say The Shaggs’ music gets a response.

I like to view their album, Philosophy of the World, as something of a musical litmus test. For me, I’ve fallen in love with their simplistic, discordant tones and their fascinating story, but I’m fully aware that it isn’t for everyone. I invite you to test your mettle and see how far you can get through the album as I take you through their tragic lives and make a case in support of the reviews Cobain, Zappa, and Bangs had made:

The Shaggs

The Shaggs are an all-female band formed in 1968 in Fremont, NH, made up of the Wiggin sisters: Dot on Vocals and Lead Guitar, Betty on Vocals and Rhythm Guitar, and Helen on Drums. They owe their creation to the insistence of their father, Austin, who withdrew his daughters from the local public school to form the band in their late teen years. Austin was a mighty superstitious man; early in his life his mother had given him a palm-reading and told him that he would grow up to marry a strawberry blonde, have two sons whom she would not live to see, and that his daughters would play in a band. Each step in the fortune came true, he married Annie Wiggin, a strawberry blonde, had two sons after his mother’s passing, and it was now up to Austin to make sure the final prediction came true.

Growing up in a rural farming town, none of the Wiggin sisters had any dreams of becoming pop stars. The town was beaten down and had a very workman-like culture. It was too far from the beauties of the mountains and not near enough to any cities to experience a trickle down of wealth or excitement. None of the girls had even been to Boston, which was just a 40 minute drive away. The town’s major claim to fame was being the first place a B-52 ever crashed without killing anyone; which says a lot about the population and ingenuity of the locale. That being said, in the Wiggin’s household, Austin’s word was law, and so once of age, Austin pulled them from school and started giving them homeschooled vocal and instrumental lessons.

The practice sessions quickly progressed to a weekly performance at the Fremont Town Hall. Austin then spent much of the family’s savings to lock down a recording session at Fleetwood Studios for the girls to record what would become their debut, and only, album. The oral history of these recording sessions is one of the most lighthearted sections of this story. After hearing the band warm-up the studio engineer suggested the Shaggs might not be ready, to which Austin responded “I want to get them while they’re hot.” Austin later spontaneously interrupted the recording of the opening eponymous track, which Austin reportedly claimed they never got right throughout years of practicing. When the engineers asked why he stopped them, he snapped back “They made a mistake!” This apparently drew a few laughs from the team questioning how he could tell the difference in the first place. As their cult popularity grew, people began digging up as much info from these sessions as possible. From these findings we’re left with the poignant words from the studio engineer, “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?”

Ultimately, the family produced 1000 original albums of Philosophy of the World from this session. Though 900 of them (and their down payment) were stolen overnight by the man who promised to press the copies. Austin had the remainders circulated to various New England radio stations, but they garnered little to no attention. The Fremont Town Hall eventually cancelled their weekly performance in 1973. In 1975, according to the sisters, Austin died of a heart attack after hearing a version of Philosophy of the World that he finally deemed perfect. His dreams for his daughters’ superstardom died with him as they disbanded that day.

In the most unlikely of occurrences, the Shaggs eventually did rise to prominence as Austin’s mother predicted. In a late 70’s episode of the Dr. Demento show, guest Frank Zappa played a few of his favorite songs, including multiple songs off the Shaggs album, praising the band. This rebirth continued, as members of the band NRBQ, owners of an original copy, convinced their record label to reissue Philosophy of the World. This reissue was eventually given ‘Comeback of the Year’ honors by Rolling Stone and officially etched the Shaggs as one of the most famous bands of all time in the outsider music genre.

“Who are Parents?”

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hile the above is an amazing story in and of itself, diving deeper into the facts emphasizes why some of the above may have left you feeling uncomfortable about the whole situation. Austin Wiggin was entirely obsessed with his mother’s vision for his future, to the point where you have to wonder whether he truly fell in love with Annie, or searched out for a woman that fit his prophesied future. He was a man with a vision and was determined to see it come to be. He was the real life analogue of George du Maurier’s Svengali and his daughters collectively were his Trilby.

The girl’s homeschooling consisted of little to no actual schooling. Instead, they practiced in the morning and afternoon, rehearsed songs for Austin and the rest of the family after dinner, and then finished the day with either calisthenics or a last practice session. The days seemed so endless that the girls couldn’t decide whether they dreaded the days that ended in forced calisthenics or a final practice session more. Without any inner passion for music, the rehearsals were depressing affairs and Austin was reportedly cold and a harsh critic, often making them redo a single song for an entire day.

The sisters had their first live performance in nearby Exeter at a talent show in 1968. The girls had little skill with their instruments at this point and the audience reacted by jeering and pelting them with soda cans. Rather than give up on his dream, Austin merely reacted by telling them they had to practice more. While the shows could be torturous at least it gave the sisters a chance to leave their home and experience part of the outdoor world. Even with the weekly performances at the Town Hall, the Wiggin sisters were still outsiders in their own community. In a recent interview with Dot and Betty they could recall various specifics about these weekly shows, yet when pressed on their Fremont peers who attended the shows not one name was remembered.

They led completely solitary lives, separate from the rest of the town to the point where they became pariahs. Austin forbid the sisters from dating as it would distract from the practice sessions; keep in mind at the time of the recording of this album in 1969 the girls were full grown adults at the ages of 22, 21, and 18. The town had its own suspicions about the Wiggin family, many correctly suspected that Austin forced them to perform. The family didn’t help stop these rumors and only added to them; Austin’s father and Annie’s mother, after both being widowed became romantically involved and lived with the rest of the family on the Wiggin property. There were also rumors that Austin was intimate with the girls; when asked years later Betty rebuked these rumors but Helen said that he was once intimate with her. Regardless of the truth it was clear his treatment of the girls was inappropriate and damaging.

Austin’s control was so severe that when Helen secretly married her first boyfriend, she continued to live at home for three months following the wedding to avoid his wrath. After bucking up the courage to tell him one night, Austin produced a shotgun and went after the young man. Police had to break up the situation, and Austin waited months before speaking to Helen again, all this happening when she was 28 years old.

Helen is likely most tragic part of this tale. While Dot and Betty were able to find some joy in the bands resurgence in the 80s and 90s, Helen was often absent from interviews and events as she suffered from severe depression, preventing her from being able to work, and eventually passing in 2003. The true haunting nature of this story is represented by the original album’s cover. The girls are posed with haunting smiles, holding their instruments in front of a dark green curtain. There is not one iota of joy to be found on this cover, only dark and foreboding shadows that belie the true tragedy of their story.

Philosophy of the World

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ragic tale aside, the music that was created is undeniably beautiful. Perhaps not as we currently know musical beauty, but the innocence that underlies the album makes me question how we perceive quality. The girls were culturally isolated in a way that is now impossible, allowing them to create something genuinely not derivative nor cliché, just pure. It harkens back to Orson Scott Card’s short story ‘ Unaccompanied Sonata. ’ In this story, a musical prodigy is sequestered from birth in order to guarantee that his only musical influences are natural for hearing any other music would eventually corrupt his originality and make his work derivative. When the prodigy is exposed to Bach, he is banished from creating music as anything new would be tarnished. Similarly, we may never again witness the purity of sound that is found with the Shaggs due to our globally connected world.

The fascination with the Shaggs is most definitely not a ‘it’s so bad its good’ appeal, but rather that their sound is so unique and off-putting, that its familiar charm challenges everything we thought we knew about musical composition. The slightly off tempos, the drumbeats that sound as if they are matched with the wrong song, the nasally and blunt melodies all come together to form something that is eerily earnest. Even the lyricism falls squarely on the line between simplistically, yet truly philosophically, deep and the awkward thoughts of an uneducated unexperienced teenager:

It doesn’t matter what you do

It doesn’t matter what you say

There will always be

One who wants things the opposite way

…

You can never please anybody in this world

With the context of the story I just gave you, the lines to Who Are Parents? should strike you with awe and hollow sadness for a group of girls that knew nothing else:

Who are parents?

Parents are the ones who really care

Who are parents?

Parents are the ones who are always there

Regardless of the talent behind the music there is no one in this world that isn’t able to connect to the lyrics in the song Why do I feel? The deeper I go into this album, I always come back to the lyrics. It’s as if I’ve discovered an ancient text and the lyrics are the key to helping me crack the cypher. However, the more I look at them the more lost I am; when coupled with their music, even the most simplistic of statements have me struggling for comprehension.

Why do I do the things I do?

Why do I feel the way I feel?

Why do I do the things I do?

On the liner notes of the album, Austin Wiggin wrote, “The Shaggs are real, pure, unaffected by outside influences. Their music is different, it is theirs alone. They believe in it, live it. Of all contemporary acts in the world today, perhaps only the Shaggs do what others would like to do, and that is perform only what they believe in, what they feel, not what others think the Shaggs should feel. The Shaggs love you. They will not change their music or style to meet the whims of a frustrated world. You should appreciate this because you know they are pure what more can you ask? They are sisters and members of a large family where mutual respect and love for each other is at an unbelievable high… in an atmosphere which has encouraged them to develop their music unaffected by outside influences. They are happy people and love what they are doing. They do it because they love it.”

This forces me to question if the reason we do anything a particular way is because that is simply the way it is done. The Shaggs’ purity gives me motivation to break these types of barriers in all aspects of my life; there is something deeply beautiful about eschewing societal rules and to have the conviction to stand by it. Throughout this album, near every element can sound ‘wrong’ but they all still fall together and the result is something fascinating. The Shaggs have altered how I think about ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ or the concept of success. With every misstep they make, they open up a door to endless potential missteps, which is very freeing in a way. There’s freedom in failure, as long as it’s earnest. They were very good at doing exactly what they did, even if what they did is not what most people are into, which means that, in a very important way, the Shaggs were a success.