I first heard about The Shaggs reading a little article about them in a 1980 issue of CREEM magazine. The article, written by Robot A. Hull, described...
"...Betty, Helen and Dorothy Wiggin, lonely sisters losing their minds in Squaresville in the limbo years of 1969-72. Sheltered by their parents as if they were porcelain figurines, the Wiggin sisters never had a chance to date, never were allowed to taste of the delicious sins down at the local Tastee-Freeze. So they went up to their rooms, cried their eyes out, and formed a rock band, the self-destructive and chaotic Shaggs."
The article left an impression, but it wouldn't be until some dozen or so years later that I'd actually get a chance to hear them while going through my partner's CD collection after we moved in together. He had a copy of a CD reissue of The Shaggs, Philosophy of the World, but it was coupled with bonus material from a 1982 album of unreleased early 1970s recordings (released then as "Shaggs Own Thing") and the CD was simply called The Shaggs.
In the interim between reading that article and discovering that CD, I'd come across numerous other references to them, all falling somewhere between ridicule and reverence. By the early 1990s, I was more than a little acquainted with "difficult" music, but nothing in my musical vocabulary could have prepared me for what I heard from these three sisters. At first, I reacted as I'm sure most people do, by contextualizing it as a joke, some kind of prank or simply the product of such profound musical ignorance that it was merely laughable. Over the years since that first listening, however, I've come to appreciate it's idiosyncrasies as far more than an accident of ineptitude.
Yes, ignorance does play a critical role in this music because it sounds like these girls were raised in utter isolation from the world and had to invent the very concept of music all on their own without any points of reference to guide them. That means that this music exists with its own internal logic and rationale. It's not like they're incompetent at playing regular music. They're actually quite precise about how they play THEIR music THEIR way. In that regard, one simply has to acknowledge that these sounds are not the result of stupidity or incompetence. They're the result of resourcefulness and ingenuity forced to function in a vacuum.
The proof of the above proposition rests in the fact that Dot (Dorothy) Wiggin has continued to tour and perform this music with a backing band of professional musicians who have been able to replicate the nuances of the original recordings with the guidance of Dot. They have personally verified that she is completely cognizant of the intricacies of the arrangements and their function. In the same way that Don Van Vliet was able to transcribe his abstract, angular vision into the music of Captain Beefheart, the Wiggin sisters were able to do the exact same thing for the music of The Shaggs.
If there's a lesson to be learnt here, it's that "music" can be defined as any organized sound provided that there is an organizer. The structure, method and techniques of this organization are, however, completely up to the individual doing the organizing.
