The Shaggs

The Shaggs was an American all-women band. The group has been many times considered the worst rock and roll band in the world (or the "best worst" by the New York Times), and this title made the band's first, last, and only album a sort of collector's item. The group members were:

• Betty Wiggin Porter - rhythm guitar
• Dorothy Wiggin Semprini -lead guitar and vocals
• Helen Wiggin - drums
• Rachel Wiggin - bass guitar

The idea of the Shaggs is older than the girls themselves. When the girls' father, Austin Wiggin, Jr., was young, his mother made three predictions: he'd marry a strawberry blonde, he'd have two sons she would not live to see, and his daughters would form a famous musical group. After the first two came true, Austin set out to make the third happen.

In the mid-1960s, Austin pulled his daughters out of school, bought them instruments, and got them music lessons. They named themselves the Shaggs after the contemporary hairstyle. In 1968, Austin arranged for the girls to play a regular Saturday night gig at the Fremont, New Hampshire Town Hall. The next year, the girls went into the studio and recorded their album, Philosophy of the World. It is clear from the sound that the band wasn't ready to capture their performance on tape, but Austin persisted.

In fact, listening to the record, the band seems to have no sense of melody, harmony, or rhythm. It's as though the drums were recorded in a separate room from the guitars and neither could hear what the other was doing. During the recording sessions, the band would occasionally stop playing, claiming one of them had made a mistake and that they needed to start over, leaving the sound engineers to wonder how the girls could tell. Despite this, the record has a captivating quality.

Reviews of Philosophy of the World range from "innocent and beautiful" on the positive side to "stop the haunting sound of these banshees" [1] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/B00000I0QQ/ref=cm_rev_next/103-9743005-6921463?%5Fencoding=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort%5Fby=-SubmissionDate&n=5174&customer-reviews.start=81&me=ATVPDKIKX0DER) on the negative.

At this point, the man who'd promised to press 1000 copies of Philosophy of the World absconded with 900 of them. The rest were circulated to New England radio stations but attracted little attention, and the girls' dreams of superstardom were dashed.

In 1975, Austin Wiggin arranged one last recording session for his daughters, but died of a heart attack, which seemed to put an end to his ambitions. But the corpse of the Shaggs refused to rest. In 1978, the group NRBQ found one of the original 1000 copies at a Boston radio station and got their label, Rounder Records, to rerelease Philosophy of the World. They published songs from the 1975 tapes on the 1982 record Shaggs' Own Thing, but its closer approximation to conventional music causes some to disregard this collection. In 1988 Dorothy Wiggin rediscovered the lost masters of Philosophy of the World in a closet; these and Shaggs' Own Thing were remastered and released on an eponymous CD. RCA Victor also released Philosophy of the World on CD in 1999, whereupon it was hailed as something of an avant-garde cult classic.

In 2000, NRBQ celebrated their thirtieth anniversary with a concert in New York City. Their opening act was the Shaggs. Helen, who had been suffering from depression for years, declined to attend, so NRBQ's drummer was faced with the challenging task of attempting to play Helen's parts.

That same year, Artisan Entertainment bought the movie rights to the band's story. A stage musical about the Shaggs, Philosophy of the World by Joy Gregory, opened at the prestigious John Anson Ford Theatre in Los Angeles in November 2003.

Reference

• Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music by Irwin Chusid ISBN 1556523726

External link

• The Shaggs Online (official site) (http://www.theshaggsonline.com/)