The Shaggs
The Shaggs were an American rock band formed in Fremont, New Hampshire, in 1965. They comprised the sisters Dorothy "Dot" Wiggin, Betty Wiggin, Helen Wiggin and, later, Rachel Wiggin. The Shaggs wrote seemingly simple and bizarre songs using untuned guitars, erratic rhythms, wandering melodies and rudimentary lyrics. Their only album, Philosophy of the World, has been described as both among the worst of all time and as a work of unintentional brilliance.
The Shaggs formed at the insistence of their father, Austin Wiggin, who believed that his mother had predicted their rise to fame. For several years, he made them practice every day and perform weekly at the Fremont town hall. The girls had no interest in becoming musicians and never became proficient in songwriting or performing. In 1969, Austin paid for them to record their debut album, which was distributed in limited quantities in 1969 by a local record label. The Shaggs disbanded in 1975 after Austin's death.
Over the decades, Philosophy of the World circulated among musicians and found fans such as Frank Zappa, Lester Bangs, and Kurt Cobain. A 1980 reissue on Rounder Records received enthusiastic reviews for its uniqueness in Rolling Stone and The Village Voice. According to Rolling Stone, the sisters sang like "lobotomized Trapp Family Singers", while the musician Terry Adams compared their music to the free jazz compositions of Ornette Coleman. A compilation of unreleased material, Shaggs' Own Thing, was released in 1982.
The Shaggs became the subject of fascination in the 1990s, when interest grew in outsider music, and they are credited with influencing twee pop. Dot and Betty reunited for shows in 1999 and 2017; Helen died in 2006. As the Dot Wiggin Band, Dot released an album in 2013 containing previously unrecorded Shaggs songs.
History
1965–1968: Formation and first years
The Shaggs were formed in 1965 by the teenage sisters Dorothy, Betty, and Helen Wiggin in the small town of Fremont, New Hampshire. Dot wrote the songs, played lead guitar and sang; Betty, the youngest, played rhythm guitar and sang; and Helen, the eldest, played drums. Their younger sister, Rachel, sometimes joined them on bass guitar.The Shaggs formed at the behest of their father and manager, Austin Wiggin Jr. Austin worked as a mill hand in Exeter, and the family was poor. A Fremont local described him as a humorless man who rarely smiled. He did not allow the girls to attend concerts or have social lives, friends, or boyfriends. Betty said the girls "missed everything", and she fantasized about getting a car and leaving home. Some accounts indicated that the girls suffered parental abuse, and Helen said her father was once "inappropriately intimate" with her.
When Austin was young, his mother read his palm and made three predictions: he would marry a strawberry-blonde woman, he would have two sons after she had died, and his daughters would form a popular band. When the first two predictions proved accurate, Austin set about fulfilling the third. According to Dot, he occasionally had the family hold seances in an attempt to communicate with his mother. Dot later said the sisters thought their father was "nuts", but they did not want to do anything to insult their grandmother in his eyes. She said Austin had no interest in music and only created the band to fulfill the prediction.
Austin withdrew his daughters from school, bought them instruments and arranged for them to receive music and vocal lessons. He named them the Shaggs after the shag hairstyle, which was popular at the time, and in reference to the 1959 film The Shaggy Dog. He designed their schedule, with several hours of calisthenics and band practice every day. The sisters had no interest in becoming musicians and did not enjoy the rehearsals. Dot later said: " was stubborn and he could be temperamental. He directed. We obeyed. Or did our best." They sometimes went to the lake when their father was out, then arranged their instruments to appear as if they had been practicing.
The Shaggs made their first public performance at a talent show in Exeter in 1968, which was met with mockery. Following a performance at a local nursing home, Austin arranged for the Shaggs to play at the Fremont town hall every weekend, joined sometimes by their brothers Austin III and Robert on percussion and drums. The shows attracted up to a hundred adolescents, who would heckle and throw junk. Rumors spread about the girls' controlling father, and Dot said Rachel, who attended high school, was bullied. The sisters felt they were poor musicians and found the performances embarrassing. Footage of one concert emerged in 2015, with the Shaggs playing from handwritten charts and performing rudimentary choreography.
1969: ''Philosophy of the World''
In March 1969, Austin took the Shaggs to record an album, Philosophy of the World, at Fleetwood Studios in Revere, Massachusetts. The studio was mainly used to record local rock groups and school marching bands. The sisters did not think they were ready to record, and one engineer recalled that they looked "miserable". Austin dismissed an engineer's opinion that they were not ready, saying: "I want to get them while they're hot." One producer, Bobby Herne, recalled that the studio staff shut the control room doors and "rolled on the floor laughing" after they performed.Philosophy of the World was recorded in a single day. Herne and another Fleetwood employee, Charlie Dreyer, were enlisted to remix the recordings. They hired session musicians to rerecord parts, but they were unable to follow the Shaggs' erratic tempos. Austin paid to have Dreyer's record company, Third World, press 1000 copies of the album. The liner notes, written by Austin, said the Shaggs "loved" making music and described them as "real, pure, unaffected by outside influences". The songs "My Pal Foot Foot" and "Things I Wonder" were released as a 45 rpm single on Fleetwood Records.
According to many accounts, Dreyer delivered only 100 copies of the album and disappeared with the remaining 900. Dot said that Dreyer had stolen her father's money and could not be traced. However, according to the music executive Harry Palmer, Dreyer said Austin had refused to distribute the extra copies because he feared someone would copy the Shaggs' music. Palmer said that Dreyer kept boxes of the records in the studio and would give them to anyone who asked. The journalist Irwin Chusid argued that it was unlikely Dreyer had stolen the records, as they were valueless at the time. Philosophy of the World received no media coverage and the Shaggs resumed performing locally.
1970s: Decline and disbandment
Palmer, who had been given several copies of Philosophy of the World by Dreyer, was intrigued and wondered if he could find the Shaggs an audience. In 1970 or 1971, he attended one of their Fremont performances and was amazed to see locals dancing awkwardly to the music. Palmer approached Austin about promoting the Shaggs, but stressed that people laughed at them and asked if this was a problem. Austin responded with resignation. Palmer decided he was in danger of exploiting the Shaggs as a freak show and did not pursue them.In 1973, the Shaggs' weekly town hall shows were halted by the Fremont town supervisors. The sisters were relieved, as they were now adults and had tired of their father's control. When Austin discovered that Helen, then 28, had secretly married, he chased her husband with a shotgun. After the police intervened, Helen left the family home to be with her husband, but rejoined the band later.
In 1975, Austin took the Shaggs to Fleetwood Studios for another recording session. Though they had become more proficient through hundreds of hours of practice, the engineer wrote of their poor performances and felt sorry for them. He said they did not notice their out-of-tune guitars or disjointed rhythms when he played the recordings back to them. The recordings went unreleased.
Shortly after the recording session, Austin died of a heart attack in his sleep at the age of 47. The Shaggs disbanded and sold most of their equipment. A few years later, Betty and Dot married and moved out, and their mother sold the family house. The new owner became convinced that the house was haunted by Austin's ghost and donated it to the Fremont fire department, who burnt it down in a firefighting exercise. The Wiggin sisters had never profited from their music and took blue-collar jobs to support their families.
1980s: Cult following and reissues
By the 1980s, copies of Philosophy of the World had circulated among musicians. It developed a cult following, with fans including Frank Zappa, Bonnie Raitt, Jonathan Richman and Carla Bley. Zappa is often quoted as having called the Shaggs "better than the Beatles", but this may be apocryphal. Tracks were played by the Boston radio station WBCN-FM.The Shaggs also attracted fans in Terry Adams and Tom Ardolino of the American band NRBQ. Adams said he saw beauty and originality in the music and that it was "outside of the normal thinking process for songwriting at the time". He felt it "needed to be heard" and that people would like it. He traced the Wiggin sisters and convinced them to reissue Philosophy of the World in 1980 under NRBQ's record label, Rounder Records. According to Adams, the sisters were hesitant to reissue the album and initially assumed they would have to pay for it themselves.
Reviewing the reissue for Rolling Stone, Debra Ray Cohen described Philosophy of the World as "the sickest, most stunningly awful wonderful record I've heard in ages". In another Rolling Stone review that year, Chris Connelly suggested it was the worst album ever recorded. Rolling Stone awarded it their "Comeback of the Year" honor. In The Village Voice, Lester Bangs wrote: "How do they sound? Perfect! They can't play a lick! But mainly they got the right attitude, which is all rock 'n' roll's ever been about from day one." He wrote that Philosophy of the World could stand with albums by the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks as "one of the landmarks of rock 'n' roll history". In 2004, Pitchfork observed that the Shaggs had been "embraced by the exact opposite audience Austin desired: the longhaired avant-garde intellectuals".
Adams and Ardolino curated a new release, the 1982 compilation Shaggs' Own Thing, comprising unreleased recordings made between 1969 and 1975. The title track is a duet between Austin and his eldest son, Robert. Pitchfork described it as "particularly disturbing" and unintentionally oedipal, noting that Austin sings of catching another man, his son, "doin' it" with "his girl". In 1988, Philosophy of the World and Shaggs' Own Thing were remastered and rereleased by Rounder Records as the compilation The Shaggs.