Frank Zappa said they were better than the Beatles.
Kurt Cobain named them one of his favorites bands.
Maybe the praise was genuine. Maybe it was tongue in cheek.
But anybody who listens to the Shaggs finds their music either unbearably bad or sweetly naive or unintentionally hilarious.
The Shaggs were a band made up of three sisters - Betty, Helen, and Dorothy (known as Dot) - ages 18 to 22.
They all wore their hair long down their backs and with bangs in what was known as a shag hairdo - hence the band’s name.
Dot wrote and sang all the songs. Helen played drums. Betty played guitar.
They were from the small cow town of Fremont, New Hampshire, and they lived in near poverty.
Their father, Austin Wiggin, home schooled them. But instead of studying math or science, he bought them drums and electric guitars and made his daughters practice daily.
The girls had little musical aptitude, however. In an interview for Rolling Stone magazine years later, Dot said of their band, “Helen didn’t care one way or the other. Betty did it because we had to do it. It was my father’s dream, so we did it.”
Their father got them booked to play at town hall, the local county fair, and an assisted living facility. Nobody liked their music.
Regardless, Austin Wiggin believed his daughters were going places. So he booked a recording studio.
In 1969, he plunked down his life savings to record the Shaggs’ album Philosophy of the World.
An engineer who worked on the project felt sorry for the girls who clearly had little interest in making an album.
Among the tracks: My Pal Foot Foot, an ode to a pet cat; Who Are Parents?; and It’s Halloween.
One thousand copies of the record were supposed to be pressed to vinyl, but an unscrupulous businessman robbed them. Only 100 copies were delivered.
Nobody bought the records. But those 100 pressings later became rare collectors’ items.
Austin Wiggin, a tyrannical father, made his daughters keep performing at local dances even when the women didn’t want to anymore.
Helen secretly eloped. She waited months to tell her father that she was married, and when he found out Austin threatened to shoot Helen’s new husband.
The Shaggs kept performing under duress until 1975 when Austin died from heart failure. He was only 47.
Years later, a Boston radio station got ahold of a copy of Philosophy of the World and began playing the strange, discordant recordings on air.
Rock musicians clamored to hear the Shaggs’ music. Terry Adams of rock band NRBQ compared their sound to improvisational jazz.
Adams revived the Shaggs’ album from obscurity in 1980 on Rounder Records, and the sisters actually made some money as a result.
Music critics loved it and hated it - often in the same review. Some compared it to folk art.
Based on that “success,” a second album made up of previous studio outtakes was released in 1982: Shagg’s Own Thing.
Suddenly, the Shaggs had fans writing to them from all over the world. They became underground legends.
Documentaries were made about them. Articles appeared about them in Rolling Stone and the New Yorker.
In 1999, RCA re-released Philosophy of the World as a CD.
The Shaggs’ cult status carried on and still exists.
Helen passed away in 2006. The surviving sisters, Dot and Betty, performed at a music festival organized by the band Wilco in 2017 .
Despite their lasting cult following, the Shaggs’ sound is an acquired taste, to be polite. Listen and decide for yourself.
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