‘The most astonishingly terrible record’: How the Shaggs became rock’s most divisive band | music

WWhen Austin Wiggin Jr. was a boy, his mother read his palm. She predicted that Austen would have two sons whom she would not live to see; He will marry a strawberry blonde. His daughters played in a popular band. By 1965, the first two milestones had been achieved. Austin felt this was reason enough to withdraw Dorothy, Betty, and Helen Wiggin from school in pursuit of musical stardom.

Austin’s tyrannical daily regimen began immediately: homework by mail, calisthenics, and constant band practice under his watch. Whether they like it or not, the sisters are now Shags – and forbidden from being anything else. They were rarely allowed to leave their homes, except to go to church, shop, and perform every Saturday at City Hall in Fremont, New Hampshire, where they played for five years to peers they never knew.

“We’ve missed a lot,” says Betty Wiggin, 75, a rhythm guitarist and singer. “I’m a little sad about it. When you hear people talk about high school — ‘You know what it was like in gym class,’ this and that — well, I have no idea, you know?” As for their mother, Dot says: “She supported what our father wanted and agreed to it.” “She never said how she felt,” Betty adds.

The ultimate prophecy has been fulfilled and the sisters have finally found fame, but, as a new documentary We Are the Shaggs explores, not necessarily the fame anyone expected.

With their unintentionally avant-garde style and apparent naivete about music’s basic rules like tuning and timing, the Shaggs became one of the most divisive bands in rock history, arousing wonder and awe in equal measure. A critic at the L.A. Weekly Album Network later compared their only studio LP, 1969’s Philosophy of the World, to “a mass murder so horrific as to be unfathomable, and yet it actually happened” — but Kurt Cobain called it one of his five favorite albums.

Full of bewildering rhythms and motifs, Philosophy of the World sounds as if the sisters are playing different songs simultaneously. “We thought our guitars were in tune,” says guitarist, singer and songwriter Dorothy “Dot” Wiggin, 77. “I think that shows how ignorant we are.”

“The Shaggs were doing all this crazy, tangled stuff — and didn’t even know it,” says musician Jesse Krakoff, a “Shaggs fanatic” who covered the band meticulously, setting the weird melodies and everything, and recorded with Dot. According to Krakow, world philosophy is full of hemiolas, compromises, and ritardandos, strange musical forms reminiscent of Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and Stravinsky.

But the Shags never wanted to make music, so when Austin died of a heart attack in 1975, they immediately broke up. Helen, who died in 2006, had already been fired for her marriage without Austen’s knowledge, even though she was 28 years old. “She was stronger than most of us because she was the one who went out and found a boyfriend,” Betty says.

Although the sisters say they feel “respect” for their father because of “what he did for our music,” Betty adds that they only felt free after his death. “We can do whatever we want then,” Betty says. “We couldn’t do much before.” The sisters sold most of their equipment and rarely talked about their time in the band. They took care of the cleaning and care, and had families of their own. “It was different, trying to start without music, because we didn’t have a lot of friends or anything, but we went to work, met people, and got married,” Betty says.

If fate had not intervened, the final prophecy might have died with Austin: 900 of the 1,000 copies of The Philosophy of the World disappeared shortly after its publication. But WBCN Radio in Boston had a copy, and when Frank Zappa showed up for a session while on tour, he took the album with him and declared the Shaggs “better than the Beatles.”

However, they remained unknown until the saxophonist of the blues-rock group, Keith Spring, came across the album in the record store where he worked. He presented the record to the band, who reissued it in 1980 on their Red Rooster label, and later a collection of unreleased recordings, Shaggs’ Own Thing, featuring Betty’s one and only hit, Painful Memories. “I was thinking I wanted to write another novel but nothing ever came to mind,” Betty says.

The Village Voice described Philosophy of the World as “a landmark in rock ‘n’ roll history.” Rolling Stone said it was “the most astonishingly terrible great record”. Patti Smith loved the Shaggs so much, she and bandmate Lenny Kaye called each other Foot Foot, after Dorothy’s cat in My Pal Foot Foot. Krakow says Cobain’s guitar solo on Come As You Are has echoes of the Shaggs song, as it repeats the song’s melody. “It’s really amazing,” say many Betty of the Shags fans. “We did not expect this, and we did not even know it until years later.”

Dot and Betty now tell their extraordinary story in “We Are the Shaggs,” where director Ken Kwapis aims to “bring humanity and dignity” to the sisters, while musicologists and collaborators reflect on their legacy. “When I first heard the Shaggs song in 1980, it was a strange experience,” Kwapis says. “He came from such an honest place.” The lyrics, which he compared to those of Brian Wilson, were “from the heart and personal”, but “the texture of the music was very unusual. Making the film taught me to check my biases at the door. And not just when it comes to the arts.”

Dot and Betty reunited twice at parties, and played their songs together again for the first time in years. In 1999, they shared a bill with space jazz master Sun Ra, where fans surprised them, and they appeared at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival in 2017. Today, their songs have millions of streams on Spotify and their unusual origin story inspired an off-Broadway play.

But given the option of going back in time and repeating her music career, “Honestly, I don’t think I would have done any of that,” Betty says. “If their father had not forced them into music, we could have lived a normal life,” she says.

“I might still have written the lyrics, but I’m not sure I would have written the music,” Dorothy adds. “We probably would have gone to high school and socialized. But I feel proud of what it has become and all the followers and fans we have.”