Deep Dive - The Shaggs
The Story of The Shaggs
Depending on whom you ask, the Shaggs were either the best band of all time or the worst. Frank Zappa is said to have proclaimed that the Shaggs were “better than the Beatles.” More recently, though, a music fan who claimed to be in “the fetal position, writhing in pain,” declared on the Internet that the Shaggs were “hauntingly bad,” and added, “I would walk across the desert while eating charcoal briquettes soaked in Tabasco for forty days and forty nights not to ever have to listen to anything Shagg-related ever again.” Such a divergence of opinion confuses the mind. Listening to the Shaggs’ album “Philosophy of the World” will further confound. The music is winsome but raggedly discordant pop. Something is sort of wrong with the tempo, and the melodies are squashed and bent, nasal, deadpan. Are the Shaggs referencing the heptatonic, angular microtones of Chinese ya-yueh court music and the atonal note clusters of Ornette Coleman, or are they just a bunch of kids playing badly on cheap, out-of-tune guitars? And what about their homely, blunt lyrics? Consider the song “Things I Wonder”:
There are many things I wonder
There are many things I don’t
It seems as though the things I wonder most
Are the things I never find out
Is this the colloquial ease and dislocated syntax of a James Schuyler poem or the awkward innermost thoughts of a speechless teen-ager?
The Shaggs were three sisters, Helen, Betty, and Dorothy (Dot) Wiggin, from Fremont, New Hampshire. They were managed by their father, Austin Wiggin, Jr., and were sometimes accompanied by another sister, Rachel. They performed almost exclusively at the Fremont town hall and at a local nursing home, beginning in 1968 and ending in 1973. Many people in Fremont thought the band stank. Austin Wiggin did not. He believed his girls were going to be big stars, and in 1969 he took most of his savings and paid to record an album of their music. Nine hundred of the original thousand copies of “Philosophy of the World” vanished right after being pressed, along with the record’s shady producer. Even so, the album has endured for thirty years. Music collectors got hold of the remaining copies of “Philosophy of the World” and started a small Shaggs cult. In the mid-seventies, WBCN-FM, in Boston, began playing a few cuts from the record. In 1988, the songs were repackaged and rereleased on compact disk and became celebrated by outsider-music mavens, who were taken with the Shaggs’ artless style. Now the Shaggs are entering their third life: “Philosophy of the World” was reissued last spring by RCA Victor and will be released in Germany this winter. The new CD of “Philosophy of the World” has the same cover as the original 1969 album—a photograph of the Wiggin girls posed in front of a dark-green curtain. In the picture, Helen is twenty-two, Dot is twenty-one, and Betty is eighteen. They have long blond hair and long blond bangs and stiff, quizzical half-smiles. Helen, sitting behind her drum set, is wearing flowered trousers and a white Nehru shirt; Betty and Dot, clutching their guitars, are wearing matching floral tunics, pleated plaid skirts, and square-heeled white pumps. There is nothing playful about the picture; it is melancholy, foreboding, with black shadows and the queer, depthless quality of an aquarium. Which leaves you with even more things to wonder about the Shaggs.
SHAGGS’ OWN THING (3:54)Fremont, New Hampshire, is a town that has missed out on most everything. Route 125, the main highway bisecting New Hampshire, just misses the east side of Fremont; Route 101 just misses the north; the town is neither in the mountains nor on the ocean; it is not quite in the thick of Boston’s outskirts, nor is it quite cosseted in the woods. Fremont is a drowsy, trim, unfancy place, rimmed by the Exeter River. Ostentation is expressed only in a few man-size gravestones in the Fremont cemetery; bragging rights are limited to Fremont’s being the home town of the eminent but obscure nineteen-twenties meteorologist Herbert Browne and its being the first place a B-52 ever crashed without killing anyone.
In the nineteen-sixties, when the Wiggin sisters formed the Shaggs, many people in Fremont raised dairy cows or made handkerchiefs at the Exeter textile mill or built barrels at Spaulding & Frost Cooperage, went to church, tended their families, kept quiet lives. Sometimes the summer light bounces off the black-glass surface of the Exeter River and glazes the big stands of blue pine, and sometimes the pastures are full and lustrous, but ordinary days in southern New Hampshire towns can be mingy and dismal. “Loneliness contributed to severe depression, illness and drunkenness for countless rural families,” Matthew Thomas wrote, in his book “History of Fremont, N. H. Olde Poplin: An Independent New England Republic 1764–1997,” which came out last year. “There may have been some nice, pleasant times . . . but for the most part, death, sickness, disease, accidents, bad weather, loneliness, strenuous hard work, insect-infested foods, prowling predatory animals, and countless inconveniences marked day-to-day existence.”
When I was in Fremont recently, I asked Matthew Thomas, who is forty-three and the town historian, what it had been like growing up there. He said it was nice but that he had been bored stiff. For entertainment, there were square dances, sledding, an annual carnival with a Beano tent, Vic Marcotte’s Barber Shop and Poolroom. (These days, there are weekend grass drags out near Phil Peterson’s farm, where the pasture is flat and firm enough to race snowmobiles in the summer.) When the Shaggs were growing up, there were ham-and-bean suppers, boxing matches, dog shows, and spelling bees at the town hall. The hall is an unadorned box of a building, but its performance hall is actually quite grand. It isn’t used anymore, and someone has made off with the red velvet curtain, but it still has a sombre dark stage and high-backed chairs, and the gravid air of a place where things might happen. In a quiet community like Fremont, in the dull hours between barn dances, a stage like that might give you big ideas.
WHO ARE PARENTS? (2:58)Where else would Austin Wiggin have got the idea that his daughters should form a rock band? Neither he nor his wife, Annie, was musical; she much preferred television to music, and he, at most, fooled around with a Jew’s harp. He wasn’t a showoff, dying to be noticed—by all accounts he was an ornery loner who had little to do with other people in town. He was strict and old-fashioned, not a hippie manqué, not a rebel, very disapproving of long hair and short skirts. He was from a poor family and was raising a poor family—seven kids on a mill hand’s salary—and music lessons and instruments for the girls were a daunting expense.
And yet the Shaggs were definitely his idea—or, more exactly, his mother’s idea. Austin was terribly superstitious. His mother liked to tell fortunes. When he was young, she studied his palm and told him that in the future he would marry a strawberry blonde and would have two sons whom she would not live to see, and that his daughters would play in a band. Her auguries were borne out. Annie was a strawberry blonde, and she and Austin did have two sons after his mother died. It was left to Austin to fulfill the last of his mother’s predictions, and when his daughters were old enough he told them they would be taking voice and music lessons and forming a band. There was no debate: his word was law, and his mother’s prophecies were gospel. Besides, he chafed at his place in the Fremont social system. It wasn’t so much that his girls would make him rich and raise him out of a mill hand’s dreary métier; it was that they would prove that the Wiggin kids were not only different from but better than the folks in town.
The girls liked music—particularly Herman’s Hermits, Ricky Nelson, and Dino, Desi & Billy—but until Austin foretold their futures they had not planned to become rock stars. They were shy, small-town teen-agers who dreamed of growing up and getting married, having children, maybe becoming secretaries someday. Even now, they don’t remember ever having dreamed of fame or of making music. But Austin pushed the girls into a new life. He named them the Shaggs, and told them that they were not going to attend the local high school, because he didn’t want them travelling by bus and mixing with outsiders, and, more important, he wanted them to practice their music all day. He enrolled them in a Chicago mail-order outfit called American Home School, but he designed their schedule himself: practice in the morning and afternoon, rehearse songs for him after dinner, and then do calisthenics and jumping jacks and leg lifts or practice for another hour before going to bed. The girls couldn’t decide which was worse, the days when he made them do calisthenics or the days when he’d make them practice again before bed. In either case, their days seemed endless. The rehearsals were solemn, and Austin could be cutting. One song in particular, “Philosophy of the World,” he claimed they never played right, and he would insist on hearing it again and again.
The Shaggs were not leading rock-and-roll lives. Austin forbade the girls to date before they were eighteen and discouraged most other friendships. They hadn’t been popular kids, anyway—they didn’t have the looks or the money or the savvy for it—but being in the band, and being home-schooled, set them apart even more. Friday nights, the family went out together to do grocery shopping. Sundays they went to church, and the girls practiced when they got home. Their world was even smaller than the small town of Fremont.
Remainder of the Article at Link Below
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/09/27/meet-the-shaggs
Articles
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyk84w/how-i-fell-in-love-with-a-band-considered-by-many-to-be-the-worst-of-all-timehttps://www.chuckperrin.com/projects/60s-garage-rock-bands-the-shaggs-the-shags/
https://www.wxnafm.org/its-halloween-the-shaggs/https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/02/17/515775669/the-best-or-worst-band-of-all-time-is-back
https://southernreader.com/SouthRead4.4.html
https://www.furious.com/perfect/shaggs.html
https://www.oratoryprepomega.org/2021/05/09/the-shaggs-a-unique-band-with-a-unique-backstory/
https://ndsmcobserver.com/2015/09/time-give-shaggs-another-listen/https://apnews.com/article/53cebde651ee45b8a204c9e8719d424e
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-story-of-the-shaggs-the-beatles/
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/shaggs-dot-wiggin-reflects-on-divisive-philosophy-of-the-world-album-115348/
http://www.shaggs.com/return_of_the_shaggs.html
Album Reviews
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22404-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world/
https://fromcornersunknown.com/album-review/171-retrospective-review-the-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world-1969/
https://www.premierguitar.com/pro-advice/wizard-of-odd/heart-of-the-shaggs-sound
Music Playlist
The Shaggs - Two Albums and Off Broadway Soundtrack
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4L39CnjKh3ymU6toliUiCw?si=oCE3yaL5QWmmDR97IHQmsw&app_destination=copy-link
Video Playlist
VAA Curated Playlist
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh4zYKaPKme6lt2-57oN3EX-EvUEY61cq
Podcast Episodes
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-shaggs-imprisoned-girl-group/id1501739859?i=1000485008050
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shaggs-own-thing-the-story-of-the-wiggin-sisters/id1368608676?i=1000411085445
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reissue-the-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world/id1471679636?i=1000585453489
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/272-dot-wiggin-the-shaggs/id958778095?i=1000472352027
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world/id1471679636?i=1000487051983
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world-w-andrew-wiley/id1324256724?i=1000400529108
Reviews of The Musical
(Some are good and some are bad just like every other review of something to do with their music. But I choose to love it. So make your own decision by listening to soundtrack.
https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/the-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world/
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-still-sad-and-still-strange-the-shaggs-are-back-2011jun10-story.html
https://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2011/05/28/the-fs-saw-the-shaggs/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303714704576385751383680830
https://playbill.com/article/crafting-a-musical-about-the-shaggs-an-artless-trio-com-179849
Possible Film Version
This is one of the last known versions of an article announcing a Shaggs biopic which actor Elsie Fisher was connected to. There hasn't been any update to this happening since then. Hopefully it will happen open day.
https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/the-shaggs-elsie-fisher-barden-schnee-casting-71328/
https://filmschoolrejects.com/eighth-grade-breakthrough-elsie-fisher-will-get-musical-in-the-shaggs/
https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/eighth-grade-elsie-fisher-new-movie-the-shaggs.html
Depending on whom you ask, the Shaggs were either the best band of all time or the worst. Frank Zappa is said to have proclaimed that the Shaggs were “better than the Beatles.” More recently, though, a music fan who claimed to be in “the fetal position, writhing in pain,” declared on the Internet that the Shaggs were “hauntingly bad,” and added, “I would walk across the desert while eating charcoal briquettes soaked in Tabasco for forty days and forty nights not to ever have to listen to anything Shagg-related ever again.” Such a divergence of opinion confuses the mind. Listening to the Shaggs’ album “Philosophy of the World” will further confound. The music is winsome but raggedly discordant pop. Something is sort of wrong with the tempo, and the melodies are squashed and bent, nasal, deadpan. Are the Shaggs referencing the heptatonic, angular microtones of Chinese ya-yueh court music and the atonal note clusters of Ornette Coleman, or are they just a bunch of kids playing badly on cheap, out-of-tune guitars? And what about their homely, blunt lyrics? Consider the song “Things I Wonder”:
There are many things I wonder
There are many things I don’t
It seems as though the things I wonder most
Are the things I never find out
Is this the colloquial ease and dislocated syntax of a James Schuyler poem or the awkward innermost thoughts of a speechless teen-ager?
The Shaggs were three sisters, Helen, Betty, and Dorothy (Dot) Wiggin, from Fremont, New Hampshire. They were managed by their father, Austin Wiggin, Jr., and were sometimes accompanied by another sister, Rachel. They performed almost exclusively at the Fremont town hall and at a local nursing home, beginning in 1968 and ending in 1973. Many people in Fremont thought the band stank. Austin Wiggin did not. He believed his girls were going to be big stars, and in 1969 he took most of his savings and paid to record an album of their music. Nine hundred of the original thousand copies of “Philosophy of the World” vanished right after being pressed, along with the record’s shady producer. Even so, the album has endured for thirty years. Music collectors got hold of the remaining copies of “Philosophy of the World” and started a small Shaggs cult. In the mid-seventies, WBCN-FM, in Boston, began playing a few cuts from the record. In 1988, the songs were repackaged and rereleased on compact disk and became celebrated by outsider-music mavens, who were taken with the Shaggs’ artless style. Now the Shaggs are entering their third life: “Philosophy of the World” was reissued last spring by RCA Victor and will be released in Germany this winter. The new CD of “Philosophy of the World” has the same cover as the original 1969 album—a photograph of the Wiggin girls posed in front of a dark-green curtain. In the picture, Helen is twenty-two, Dot is twenty-one, and Betty is eighteen. They have long blond hair and long blond bangs and stiff, quizzical half-smiles. Helen, sitting behind her drum set, is wearing flowered trousers and a white Nehru shirt; Betty and Dot, clutching their guitars, are wearing matching floral tunics, pleated plaid skirts, and square-heeled white pumps. There is nothing playful about the picture; it is melancholy, foreboding, with black shadows and the queer, depthless quality of an aquarium. Which leaves you with even more things to wonder about the Shaggs.
SHAGGS’ OWN THING (3:54)Fremont, New Hampshire, is a town that has missed out on most everything. Route 125, the main highway bisecting New Hampshire, just misses the east side of Fremont; Route 101 just misses the north; the town is neither in the mountains nor on the ocean; it is not quite in the thick of Boston’s outskirts, nor is it quite cosseted in the woods. Fremont is a drowsy, trim, unfancy place, rimmed by the Exeter River. Ostentation is expressed only in a few man-size gravestones in the Fremont cemetery; bragging rights are limited to Fremont’s being the home town of the eminent but obscure nineteen-twenties meteorologist Herbert Browne and its being the first place a B-52 ever crashed without killing anyone.
In the nineteen-sixties, when the Wiggin sisters formed the Shaggs, many people in Fremont raised dairy cows or made handkerchiefs at the Exeter textile mill or built barrels at Spaulding & Frost Cooperage, went to church, tended their families, kept quiet lives. Sometimes the summer light bounces off the black-glass surface of the Exeter River and glazes the big stands of blue pine, and sometimes the pastures are full and lustrous, but ordinary days in southern New Hampshire towns can be mingy and dismal. “Loneliness contributed to severe depression, illness and drunkenness for countless rural families,” Matthew Thomas wrote, in his book “History of Fremont, N. H. Olde Poplin: An Independent New England Republic 1764–1997,” which came out last year. “There may have been some nice, pleasant times . . . but for the most part, death, sickness, disease, accidents, bad weather, loneliness, strenuous hard work, insect-infested foods, prowling predatory animals, and countless inconveniences marked day-to-day existence.”
When I was in Fremont recently, I asked Matthew Thomas, who is forty-three and the town historian, what it had been like growing up there. He said it was nice but that he had been bored stiff. For entertainment, there were square dances, sledding, an annual carnival with a Beano tent, Vic Marcotte’s Barber Shop and Poolroom. (These days, there are weekend grass drags out near Phil Peterson’s farm, where the pasture is flat and firm enough to race snowmobiles in the summer.) When the Shaggs were growing up, there were ham-and-bean suppers, boxing matches, dog shows, and spelling bees at the town hall. The hall is an unadorned box of a building, but its performance hall is actually quite grand. It isn’t used anymore, and someone has made off with the red velvet curtain, but it still has a sombre dark stage and high-backed chairs, and the gravid air of a place where things might happen. In a quiet community like Fremont, in the dull hours between barn dances, a stage like that might give you big ideas.
WHO ARE PARENTS? (2:58)Where else would Austin Wiggin have got the idea that his daughters should form a rock band? Neither he nor his wife, Annie, was musical; she much preferred television to music, and he, at most, fooled around with a Jew’s harp. He wasn’t a showoff, dying to be noticed—by all accounts he was an ornery loner who had little to do with other people in town. He was strict and old-fashioned, not a hippie manqué, not a rebel, very disapproving of long hair and short skirts. He was from a poor family and was raising a poor family—seven kids on a mill hand’s salary—and music lessons and instruments for the girls were a daunting expense.
And yet the Shaggs were definitely his idea—or, more exactly, his mother’s idea. Austin was terribly superstitious. His mother liked to tell fortunes. When he was young, she studied his palm and told him that in the future he would marry a strawberry blonde and would have two sons whom she would not live to see, and that his daughters would play in a band. Her auguries were borne out. Annie was a strawberry blonde, and she and Austin did have two sons after his mother died. It was left to Austin to fulfill the last of his mother’s predictions, and when his daughters were old enough he told them they would be taking voice and music lessons and forming a band. There was no debate: his word was law, and his mother’s prophecies were gospel. Besides, he chafed at his place in the Fremont social system. It wasn’t so much that his girls would make him rich and raise him out of a mill hand’s dreary métier; it was that they would prove that the Wiggin kids were not only different from but better than the folks in town.
The girls liked music—particularly Herman’s Hermits, Ricky Nelson, and Dino, Desi & Billy—but until Austin foretold their futures they had not planned to become rock stars. They were shy, small-town teen-agers who dreamed of growing up and getting married, having children, maybe becoming secretaries someday. Even now, they don’t remember ever having dreamed of fame or of making music. But Austin pushed the girls into a new life. He named them the Shaggs, and told them that they were not going to attend the local high school, because he didn’t want them travelling by bus and mixing with outsiders, and, more important, he wanted them to practice their music all day. He enrolled them in a Chicago mail-order outfit called American Home School, but he designed their schedule himself: practice in the morning and afternoon, rehearse songs for him after dinner, and then do calisthenics and jumping jacks and leg lifts or practice for another hour before going to bed. The girls couldn’t decide which was worse, the days when he made them do calisthenics or the days when he’d make them practice again before bed. In either case, their days seemed endless. The rehearsals were solemn, and Austin could be cutting. One song in particular, “Philosophy of the World,” he claimed they never played right, and he would insist on hearing it again and again.
The Shaggs were not leading rock-and-roll lives. Austin forbade the girls to date before they were eighteen and discouraged most other friendships. They hadn’t been popular kids, anyway—they didn’t have the looks or the money or the savvy for it—but being in the band, and being home-schooled, set them apart even more. Friday nights, the family went out together to do grocery shopping. Sundays they went to church, and the girls practiced when they got home. Their world was even smaller than the small town of Fremont.
Remainder of the Article at Link Below
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/09/27/meet-the-shaggs
Articles
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xyk84w/how-i-fell-in-love-with-a-band-considered-by-many-to-be-the-worst-of-all-timehttps://www.chuckperrin.com/projects/60s-garage-rock-bands-the-shaggs-the-shags/
https://www.wxnafm.org/its-halloween-the-shaggs/https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2017/02/17/515775669/the-best-or-worst-band-of-all-time-is-back
https://southernreader.com/SouthRead4.4.html
https://www.furious.com/perfect/shaggs.html
https://www.oratoryprepomega.org/2021/05/09/the-shaggs-a-unique-band-with-a-unique-backstory/
https://ndsmcobserver.com/2015/09/time-give-shaggs-another-listen/https://apnews.com/article/53cebde651ee45b8a204c9e8719d424e
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/the-story-of-the-shaggs-the-beatles/
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/shaggs-dot-wiggin-reflects-on-divisive-philosophy-of-the-world-album-115348/
http://www.shaggs.com/return_of_the_shaggs.html
Album Reviews
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22404-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world/
https://fromcornersunknown.com/album-review/171-retrospective-review-the-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world-1969/
https://www.premierguitar.com/pro-advice/wizard-of-odd/heart-of-the-shaggs-sound
Music Playlist
The Shaggs - Two Albums and Off Broadway Soundtrack
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4L39CnjKh3ymU6toliUiCw?si=oCE3yaL5QWmmDR97IHQmsw&app_destination=copy-link
Video Playlist
VAA Curated Playlist
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh4zYKaPKme6lt2-57oN3EX-EvUEY61cq
Podcast Episodes
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-shaggs-imprisoned-girl-group/id1501739859?i=1000485008050
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shaggs-own-thing-the-story-of-the-wiggin-sisters/id1368608676?i=1000411085445
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reissue-the-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world/id1471679636?i=1000585453489
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/272-dot-wiggin-the-shaggs/id958778095?i=1000472352027
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world/id1471679636?i=1000487051983
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world-w-andrew-wiley/id1324256724?i=1000400529108
Reviews of The Musical
(Some are good and some are bad just like every other review of something to do with their music. But I choose to love it. So make your own decision by listening to soundtrack.
https://didtheylikeit.com/shows/the-shaggs-philosophy-of-the-world/
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-still-sad-and-still-strange-the-shaggs-are-back-2011jun10-story.html
https://feministspectator.princeton.edu/2011/05/28/the-fs-saw-the-shaggs/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303714704576385751383680830
https://playbill.com/article/crafting-a-musical-about-the-shaggs-an-artless-trio-com-179849
Possible Film Version
This is one of the last known versions of an article announcing a Shaggs biopic which actor Elsie Fisher was connected to. There hasn't been any update to this happening since then. Hopefully it will happen open day.
https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/the-shaggs-elsie-fisher-barden-schnee-casting-71328/
https://filmschoolrejects.com/eighth-grade-breakthrough-elsie-fisher-will-get-musical-in-the-shaggs/
https://www.vulture.com/2018/10/eighth-grade-elsie-fisher-new-movie-the-shaggs.html