“I’m not sure why it hasn’t sold,” he says. Helen secretly married the first boyfriend she ever had—someone she had met at the dances. The Shaggs In 1968, three sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire strapped on their instruments and declared themselves The Shaggs. Betty had her two-year-old and eight-month-old granddaughters, Makayla and Kelsey, with her, and Makayla had squirmed away from the table and was playing with a plastic sign that read “Caution Wet Floor.” Betty often takes care of her grandchildren for her son and her daughter-in-law. I especially love the song “Philosophy of the World,” with its wrought-up, clattering guitars and chugging, cockeyed rhythm and the cheerfully pessimistic lyrics about how people are never happy with what they have. The Shaggs, thirty years late, may yet make it big, the way Austin saw it in his dreams.
The Shaggs Shaggs. It just shut down in 1975, on the day Austin, who was only forty-seven years old, died in bed of a massive heart attack—the same day, according to Helen, they had finally played a version of “Philosophy of the World” that he praised.Shortly after the newest rerelease of the Shaggs’ album, I went to New Hampshire to talk to the Wiggin sisters. They do it because they love it.The Wiggins returned to Fleetwood a few years later. He enrolled them in a Chicago mail-order outfit called American Home School, but he designed their schedule himself: practice in the morning and afternoon, rehearse songs for him after dinner, and then do calisthenics and jumping jacks and leg lifts or practice for another hour before going to bed. The Shaggs 1st record (you get both the 1st and the 2nd on this CD) Philosophy of the World is a milestone of Popular Music. The Shaggs are by far one of the most unusual stories in the history of rock music. . . Frank Zappa is said to have proclaimed that the Shaggs were “better than the Beatles.” More recently, though, a music fan who claimed to be in “the fetal position, writhing in pain,” declared on the Internet that the Shaggs were “hauntingly bad,” and added, “I would walk across the desert while eating charcoal briquettes soaked in Tabasco for forty days and forty nights,It seems as though the things I wonder most.Is this the colloquial ease and dislocated syntax of a James Schuyler poem or the awkward innermost thoughts of a speechless teen-ager?The Shaggs were three sisters, Helen, Betty, and Dorothy (Dot) Wiggin, from Fremont, New Hampshire. He believed his girls were going to be big stars, and in 1969 he took most of his savings and paid to record an album of their music. A few years after Austin died, Betty and Dot married and moved to their own houses, and eventually Annie sold the house on Beede Road and moved to an apartment nearby. Helen, sitting behind her drum set, is wearing flowered trousers and a white Nehru shirt; Betty and Dot, clutching their guitars, are wearing matching floral tunics, pleated plaid skirts, and square-heeled white pumps. He named them the Shaggs, and told them that they were not going to attend the local high school, because he didn’t want them travelling by bus and mixing with outsiders, and, more important, he wanted them to practice their music all day. “The,“I wonder where I put my copies of the album,” Betty said. In the picture, Helen is twenty-two, Dot is twenty-one, and Betty is eighteen. In 1988, the songs were repackaged and rereleased on compact disk and became celebrated by outsider-music mavens, who were taken with the Shaggs’ artless style. She and Betty have the same deep-blue eyes and thrusting chin and tiny teeth, but Dot’s hair is still long and wavy, and even now you can picture her as the girl with a guitar on the cover of the 1969 album. I just didn’t think we were good enough to be playing in concerts and making records. . He was strict and old-fashioned, not a hippie manqué, not a rebel, very disapproving of long hair and short skirts. The girls couldn’t decide which was worse, the days when he made them do calisthenics or the days when he’d make them practice again before bed. . Their music is different, it is theirs alone.

One of the earliest and most vivid examples of outsider rock & roll was the short-lived and deeply polarizing trio the Shaggs. They performed almost exclusively at the Fremont town hall and at a local nursing home, beginning in 1968 and ending in 1973.

Route 125, the main highway bisecting New Hampshire, just misses the east side of Fremont; Route 101 just misses the north; the town is neither in the mountains nor on the ocean; it is not quite in the thick of Boston’s outskirts, nor is it quite cosseted in the woods. But it absolutely intrigued me, the idea that people would make a record playing the way they do.”,The new “Philosophy of the World” was released last March. . Neither he nor his wife, Annie, was musical; she much preferred television to music, and he, at most, fooled around with a Jew’s harp. When he was young, she studied his palm and told him that in the future he would marry a strawberry blonde and would have two sons whom she would not live to see, and that his daughters would play in a band. The Shaggs were formed by Dot, Betty and Helen in 1968, on the insistence of their father, Austin Wiggin, who believed that his mother had predicted the band's rise to stardom. At that.If you like The Shaggs, you may also like:supported by 4 fans who also own “Shaggs’ Own Thing”,Essential Releases: Introspective Pop, Alternative Soul, Houston Funk, and More,Essential Releases: Avant-Garde Jazz, Shoegaze, Latin American Electronic and More,Essential Releases: Electronic Psych, Global Dance, Death Rock and More.Rad trumpter Takuya Kuroda, the righteous Free Radicals, and vintage sounds from Mainstream.Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.When The Shaggs’ Philosophy Of The World came out in 1969, some people couldn’t or wouldn’t understand it.