THE SHAGGS - PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD @ 55

 

Marking its 55th anniversary as the poster child for outsider music is the debut and only official album from the Wiggin sisters, collectively known as The Shaggs, with Philosophy of the World being released on June 15th 1969. It's an album that should have sank into obscurity, forgotten as an ill conceived indulgence by an over-ambitious and misguided father, but the fates would turn it into a signpost of inadvertent originality, pointing the way for future generations of outcasts to pioneer their own creative paths.

The story of The Shaggs is as bizarre and inexplicable as it is tragic and disturbing. In many ways, it is a tale of parental abuse by a father who was subject to obsessive, delusional compulsions, and who turned his children into unwilling vehicles for his determination to realize a reality that completely ignored his family's well being. It all started with a series of "psychic" visions by the mother of one Austin Wiggin Jr., who one day read his palm and made three pivotal predictions. First was that he would marry a strawberry-blonde woman, secondly he would have two sons after she had died, and finally, his daughters would form a popular band. With the first two predictions eventually coming to pass, Austin became obsessed with the third and began to focus on his three daughters in order to realize his mother's divination. He was so attached to her that he would hold seances with the family in order to attempt to communicate with her.

Austin worked as a low income mill hand in Exeter and was described by a local as a humourless man who rarely smiled. He was strict and did not allow his daughters to have social lives, friends or boyfriends, or attend concerts. Betty Wiggin said they "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. After withdrawing his daughters from school in 1965 and purchasing a set of musical instruments, papa Wiggin kept his girls to a militarily strict regimen of practising their instruments and doing calisthenics every day for several hours each. It was a brutally strict routine and the girls were allowed almost no time for normal childhood activities, save those instances where they could sneak out of the house when they were supposed to be practising and get away for a couple of hours. But for the most part, they were dutiful and obedient to their father's relentless demands.

Austin had named the band, The Shaggs, after a popular haircut of the late '60s and as a reference to a favourite Disney film, The Shaggy Dog. By 1968, Austin felt his girls were good enough to perform in public, though they had no interest in music and were not at all confident with their musical abilities, which would prove to be virtually bereft of any conventional techniques or talents. Nevertheless, he booked shows for the girls at local school dances, where audiences would be bemused into hurtling abuse at the trio with their seeming inability to play, a situation that left the girls mortified and traumatized.

In March of 1969, Austin paid for studio time and brought the girls in to record their first 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 the Shaggs 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. The session for the album took only a single day to complete. The studio was tasked with mixing the album, even going so far as to hire session players to augment the recordings in an effort to salvage the session, but the musicians couldn't follow the erratic and unpredictably idiosyncratic original compositions and left without adding anything to the record.

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. At this point, the entire venture should have sunk to the bottom of the swamp of obscurity, but the fates had something else in mind, and rather than vanishing into oblivion, the album would fester into an unexpected cult curiosity, eventually gaining international recognition.

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, likening them to zombies. 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 off 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 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.

The music captured on their debut album was unlike anything that had ever been created before. Despite the fact the girls hated making it and the entire process was like a forced death march for them, somehow there's an innocence and purity trapped in those grooves, like an insect in amber. Songs like It's Halloween, Sweet Thing and That Little Sports Car exude a sense of childhood wonder and naivety that completely obscures the torturous conditions which brought the album to life. It's an undeniable alchemy that would cause the album to be blown into the breeze, like dandelion seeds, and take root in the collections of influential musicians around the country.

By the late 1970s, stray copies of the LP had managed to find their way into the hands of people like Frank Zappa, Bonnie Raitt, Jonathan Richman and Carla Bley. Zappa played two songs from the album when he appeared on the Dr. Demento radio show. He is often quoted as having called the Shaggs "better than the Beatles", but this may be apocryphal. This spurred on a grassroots word-of-mouth interest in the band, enough that Terry Adams and Tom Ardolino of the American punk band NRBQ spearheaded an effort to reissue the album in 1980 on their own indie label, Rounder Records. That reissue was the move that fanned the spark of their cult popularity into a full flame as a new generation of music lovers, most of whom had been brought up on the DIY eccentricities of "Punk" and "New Wave", found the album's inadvertent avant-garde strangeness a perfect fit for an era of risk taking and barrier breaking. While the sisters had no inkling of their distinctiveness at the time they created that music, as the age of musical exploration reached its crest a decade later, The Shaggs were suddenly embraced as pioneers and the most extreme outliers of "outsider music".

In the decades that followed, The Shaggs would resurface for a couple of reunions with sisters Dot and Betty, with Dot even forming a new group, Dot Wiggin Band, and releasing an album of new songs in 2013, still retaining that distinctive quirky sound. Rounder Records also cobbled together a second Shaggs album in 1982, Shaggs Own Thing, gathering together any unreleased recordings that they could find that were made after the sessions for the first album, including an unsettling ditty with vocals by father Austin and brother 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 re-released by Rounder Records as the CD compilation The Shaggs.

In some respects, the process of creating The Shaggs disturbingly reminds me of the ancient practice of creating human "oddities" by placing a young child in a ceramic vase, with only their head and feet sticking out, where they would then be forced to grow inside it until they were warped into stunted and grotesque curiosities and sold for exhibition. As horrifying as that sounds, it seems like a rather similar analogue to what these three sisters endured and what could have caused them to create something so entirely distant from traditional music, even with the endless hours of practice they were forced to perform. The fact it NEVER resulted in musical ability, in a traditional sense, is something that may speak to the constraints to which they were subjected. In that sense, it creates a conundrum for those who seek out the unique and distinctive in the realm of art. The Shaggs are an established part of the pantheon of outsider artists, celebrated for their distinctiveness, though I have to consider, at what cost? If you were to ask Dot, Betty and Helen if they'd do it all again, I'm certain they'd offer up a resounding and emphatic "NO"!