I missed the Shaggs. From 1969 until 1975, while the all-girl rock band was in its prime, I was attending college and wandering in Europe. To be honest, most people missed the Shaggs, what with Watergate, the moon walk and demise of the Beatles. But through much of that chaotic era, on Saturday nights, you could catch the red-haired Wiggin sisters — Helen, Dot, Betty, and sometimes Rachel–– playing their hearts out at the Fremont Town Hall. Outside Fremont, New Hampshire, a town of under 4,000 souls in the boondocks of rural Rockingham County, the Shaggs were largely unknown.
That changed in 1988 when the rhythm and blues band NRBQ discovered and reissued Shaggs’ only album, “Philosophy of the World.” Rounder Records then issued their version containing more early tracks.
It is a stunning album by any standard. Like most people who hear the Shaggs for the first time, I was speechless. At first, the music sounds atonal, like someone tuning rather than playing a guitar. The drummer beats on like a metronome, seemingly unmindful of the music going on around her. The girls sing in unison without a hint of harmony in one rote, practiced, nasal, and robotic song after another. They sing about their cat Foot-Foot, about their wonderful parents, about their radio, their Savior, and their philosophy of the world:
Oh the rich people want what the poor people’s got,
And the poor people want what the rich people’s got
It’s awful, and yet, there is something unforgettably good about the Shaggs’ music, written largely by the oldest sister Dorothy “Dot” Wiggin. She was born on March 24, 1948, in Portsmouth, NH. At this writing, in 2003, Dot lives in Epping with her husband and two sons.
Musician Frank Zappa reportedly called the Shaggs “better than the Beatles.” He was kidding, certainly, but their fame continues to grow. Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and The New Yorker have filled pages with Shaggy analysis. Critics remain uncertain whether the band is just bad or light-years ahead of everyone else. Later recordings like “You’re Somethin’ Special to Me” and “My Cutie” are included in the compact disc release, The Shaggs, by Rounder Records. These cuts are tighter, sweeter, and more coherent, but die-hards seem to favor the oddly syncopated proto-Shaggs sound.
No critic I know has captured this band in words. The Shaggs are unique, which is a word too often applied to musicians who are not. They were sincere, primitive, compelling, and definitely an acquired taste. No band before or since sounds like them. I hear a mixture of Bob Dylan, Herman’s Hermits, Sesame Street, bluegrass, the Carpenters, and a newly formed junior high school pep rally band.
“You’ll either see the Wiggin sisters as talent show no-talents,” one online reviewer wrote, “or harbingers of an entire new musical vocabulary.”
Another enthralled critic points to “some fiercely detailed and downright ingenious compositional skills beneath all of the Neanderthal strumming und drumming,”
Other listeners simply wince and walk away.
The web has been good to the Shaggs. The complete New Yorker article on the band by Susan Orlean is available. Their CDs, including a Shagg’s tribute album, and a few audio clips are available on Amazon.com. There are a couple of unauthorized fan sites, most notably, Shaggs.com . I wrote to the webmaster there, but no one wrote back.
“They really don’t have permission to do it,” Dot Wiggin told me when I called her. “The only official one that gets any information from us is by Tom Jordan, a fan from Texas.”
“He called me and said he was doing a job in Boston and wanted to meet us. We met at the Galley Hatch. And he treated us to dinner and we talked. He said he was honored to do it and I said — Go for it! He also started a fan club.”
The Shaggs Online was just one web page, part of Jordan’s free personal homepage on Prodigy, formerly FlashNet, now aligned with SBC Communications. If you run Jordan’s site onto a printer, it weighs in at 12 pages. According to Jordan’s site, he was a Kiss and Cheap Trick fanatic before joining a high school band called “The Potentials” and later a Texas band called “Temper Temper.”
Dot says only about a dozen readers have purchased the official Shaggs fan club package, available on the site. It includes a copy of the earliest Shagg photo from 1968, a custom-made Dot Wiggin guitar pick, and four Shagg stickers.
Royalties from the band’s CDs arrive twice a year, roughly $400 in each check, Dot Wiggin says, just enough for a little vacation with the family and a few Christmas presents. But true fame and wealth may still be on the horizon. A Shaggs movie may begin production in Nova Scotia this winter. Filming was scheduled for this year, and last year, but Dot remains hopeful. They sold “life rights” to their story to Artisan Entertainment who hired journalist, photographer and filmmaker Katherine Dieckman to oversee the project.
The original producers came to see the project as too costly and too risky, Dots says. The production has now moved to another company, although Dieckman is still involved.
“They keep dragging it out. They keep getting stumbling blocks,” Dot says. The Wiggins have so far spent their earnings on three lawyers who were helping sort out the music rights and advise them on the potential film. They will see an income only if the film goes into production. If it becomes a sleeper hit, there are potential royalties. Dot says she is too busy raising a family to spent time fretting over the process.
Anyone with half a brain can see this story has huge movie potential. It plays in my mind already like one of those ethereal Australian films in the genre of “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” built out of nuance and poignant glances with very little physical action. For years, the rural sisters were managed by their father, Austin Wiggin, Jr., a handsome and dominating Exeter factory worker. Austin dreamed his daughters would be famous. Their band had been predicted by a fortune teller. Austin Wiggin bought their equipment and pulled them out of school and told them to stay home and practice all the time. They did. According to Dot Wiggin, the girls rose late, practiced for two hours, then worked on their school correspondence courses. Then they did their calisthenics, rigidly prescribed by their father, and rehearsed two more hours in the evenings when he was home. This lasted from 1968 until their father died in 1975.
Their story explains how the sisters developed their automated, almost telepathic musical style. Father Wiggin struggled to pay for their recording sessions, the girl’s music lessons, the original album, and their funky mini-skirt outfits. They never wanted to be rock stars. He selected the name, probably thinking of “shag” haircuts, Dot suggests. He rented the Fremont Town Hall for the dances while his wife Annie collected tickets and sold sodas. The Wiggin sons helped out. The Shaggs were like the Jackson Five, except for the success and the talent. Orleans hints at a darker side to the tale in her article, but the daughter’s dedication to their father is unrelenting.
“We certainly had a sheltered life,” Dot says today. The sisters retain the legal right to review the movie script. So far, they have objected to some of the language used, but they understand that the film will be part fact, part fiction, and that they may not like everything they see on the silver screen.
“They told us If we took everything out we didn’t like, there wouldn’t be a movie,” Dot says with a gentle laugh.
Amazingly, two Shaggs movies are possible. Susan Orleans New Yorker article “Meet the Shaggs” has been optioned for film by a development company owned, in part, by actor Tom Cruise, Dot says. That film, should it be made, might not have access to the actual Shagg recordings. The Wiggins were not happy with their portrayal in the New Yorker article that helped kick start their evolving cult status.
“It was a good article, but if she’d only kept to the truth,” Dot says. “A lot of it was right and quite a lot of it was wrong.”
So the Wiggin sisters wait patiently, as they have for 30 years, to see if fame is just around the corner – and if their father was right after all.
Lyrics from “Philosophy of the World” by the Shaggs
Lyrics copyright Dorothy Wiggin. All rights reserved.
Published by Hi Varieties-du-Plent / ASCAP
Music © 1988 Rounder Records Corp
Photo of album cover courtesy of The Shaggs
Copyright J. Dennis Robinson.
The Slave Trade in New Hampshire