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When Austin Wiggin Jr was a boy, his mother read his palm. She foretold that Austin would have two sons she wouldn’t live to see; he’d marry a strawberry blonde; and his daughters would play in a popular band. By 1965, the first two omens had come true. Austin felt this was reason enough to pull Dorothy, Betty and Helen Wiggin from school in pursuit of musical superstardom.
Austin’s domineering daily regime began immediately: mail-order homework, calisthenics, and constant band practice under his watch. Whether they liked it or not, the sisters were now the Shaggs – and barred from being anything else. They were rarely permitted to leave their home, save for church, shopping, and a gig every Saturday at the town hall in Fremont, New Hampshire, where for five years they played to peers they never got to know.
“We missed out on a lot,” says rhythm guitarist and vocalist, Betty Wiggin, 75. “I grieve that a little bit. When you hear people talk about high school – ‘You know how it was in gym class’, this and that – well, I have no idea, you know?” As for their mother, Dot says: “She supported what our father wanted and went along with it.” Betty adds: “She never really said how she felt.”
The final prophecy did come to pass and the sisters eventually found fame, but, as a new documentary film We Are the Shaggs explores, not necessarily the fame anyone expected.
With their accidentally avant-garde style and seeming naivety about the basic rules of music such as tuning and timing, the Shaggs became one of the most divisive bands in rock history, provoking wonder and horror in equal measure. A critic at LA weekly Album Network later compared their sole studio LP, 1969’s Philosophy of the World, to “a mass murder, too horrible to comprehend, yet it really happened” – but Kurt Cobain named it as one of his five favourite albums.
Packed with perplexing beats and motifs, Philosophy of the World sounds as if the sisters are playing different songs all at once. “We thought our guitars were in tune,” says lead guitarist, singer and songwriter, Dorothy “Dot” Wiggin, 77. “I guess that shows how much we didn’t know.”
“The Shaggs were doing all these crazy, interlocking things – they just weren’t conscious of it,” says musician Jesse Krakow, a “Shaggs purist” who has painstakingly covered the band, strange tunings and all, and recorded with Dot. According to Krakow, Philosophy of the World is filled with hemiola, decrescendos and ritardandos, strange musical forms reminiscent of Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Stravinsky.
But the Shaggs never really wanted to make music, so when Austin died of a heart attack in 1975, they immediately split. Helen, who died in 2006, had already been kicked out for marrying behind Austin’s back, even though she was 28: “She was stronger than most of us because she’s the one that went out and found a boyfriend,” says Betty.
Though the sisters say they feel “respectful” towards their dad for “what he did for our music,” Betty adds it was only after his death that they felt free. “We could do whatever we wanted, then,” Betty says. “We couldn’t do much before.” The sisters sold most of their gear and rarely talked about their time in the band. They took on cleaning and caretaker work, and had families of their own. “It was different, trying to start without music, because we didn’t have that many friends or anything,” Betty says, “but we did go to work and meet people, got married.”
If fate hadn’t intervened, the final prophecy might have died with Austin: 900 of the 1,000 copies of Philosophy of the World had gone missing soon after release. But Boston’s WBCN radio had a copy, and when Frank Zappa showed up for a session while on tour, he took the album with him and declared the Shaggs “better than the Beatles”.
Yet they remained basically unknown until the saxophonist in blues-rock group NRBQ, Keith Spring, chanced upon the album at the record store where he worked. He introduced the record to the band, who, in 1980, reissued it on their Red Rooster label, and later a compilation of unreleased recordings, Shaggs’ Own Thing, featuring Betty’s one and only song, Painful Memories. “I was thinking I’d like to write another one but nothing ever came to my mind,” says Betty.
The Village Voice labelled Philosophy of the World a “landmark of rock’n’roll history”; Rolling Stone said it was “the most stunningly awful wonderful record”. Patti Smith liked the Shaggs so much she and bandmate Lenny Kaye called each other Foot Foot, after Dorothy’s cat in My Pal Foot Foot. Cobain’s guitar solo on Come As You Are has echoes of the Shaggs, says Krakow, in that it repeats the song’s melody. “It’s amazing, really,” says Betty of the Shaggs’ many admirers. “We wouldn’t have expected that – we didn’t even know until years later.”
Dot and Betty now tell their extraordinary story in We Are the Shaggs, in which director Ken Kwapis aims to “humanise and dignify” the sisters, while musicologists and collaborators reflect on their legacy. “When I first heard the Shaggs in 1980, it was an odd experience,” says Kwapis. “It came from such a sincere place.” The lyrics, which he compares to Brian Wilson’s, were “heartfelt and personal”, yet “the musical texture was so unusual. Making the film taught me to check my prejudices at the door. And not just when it comes to the arts.”
Dot and Betty reunited twice for gigs, playing their songs together again for the first time in years. In 1999 they shared a billing with space-jazz master Sun Ra, where to their surprise they were mobbed by fans, and appeared at Wilco’s Solid Sound festival in 2017. Today, their songs have millions of listens on Spotify and their unusual origin story has inspired an off-Broadway play.
But given the choice to go back in time and repeat her musical career, Betty says: “Truthfully, I don’t think I would have done any of it.” If they hadn’t been forced into music by their father, she says, “we would have just had a normal life.”
“I might have still wrote lyrics but I’m not sure I would have wrote music,” adds Dorothy. “We probably would have gone to high school and socialised. But I feel proud as to what it’s become and all the followers and fans that we have.”
English (US)