The Shaggs may be the most unlikely group to have attracted a cult of hundreds of thousands, even millions, of fans since the dawn of rock and roll. Fans all fall on different parts of the sarcastic-to-honest scale. Were Dorothy, Betty and Helen Higgin, who made up this trio in the late ’60s and early ’70s, so bad that they were good? Or, if you want to look down into that particular hall of mirrors, too good but bad? Were they childlike amateurs or fearsome children worthy of the respect of admirers ranging from Frank Zappa to Patti Smith to Kurt Cobain? To quote writer Susan Orlin’s profile of the late sister band in The New Yorker in 1999: “Are the Shaggs referencing the angular twang of the seven-note scale of the court music of China’s Ya Yue or the atonal assemblages of Ornette Coleman, or are they just a bunch of kids playing horribly on cheap, out-of-tune guitars?”
No matter how much you admire or despise the Shaggs, 1969’s Philosophy of the World, the only scrappy album they released during their lifetime, leaves everyone who listens deeply curious about how their sound, which eschews the norms of Western pop, was created. The surviving Higgin sisters have given enough interviews over the years, including an article in the New Yorker magazine, that some of the mystery has been revealed for those looking to unravel it. But it’s not a moment or a decade too early for filmmaker Ken Kwapis to dig deeper into his entertaining documentary “We Are the Shaggs,” which premieres in the SXSW Film Festival’s 24 Beats Per Second section. This is a shaggy dog story (sorry) that asks a lot of interesting questions about the perception of art and how the rules of music and language can be accidentally subverted. But mostly, it’s an interesting human story about how rock’n’roll detritus has been rediscovered, re-derided, and, almost against their will, re-celebrated. Because this work represents a strange combination of the mundane and an accidental avant-garde that we do not yet fully understand. And maybe, just maybe – just maybe (hot take has arrived!) – because the song is actually pretty strong in their style?
The recent film that “We Are the Shags” most closely resembles in some respects is Edgar Wright’s “The Sparks Brothers.” Partly because it’s a story about eccentric brothers bound by unconventional musicality, but most importantly because it’s a documentary made specifically to satisfy both hardcore enthusiasts and complete novices. Kwapis is a first-time documentary director, but he’s known for his TV comedy resume, most notably for the Emmy-nominated The Office, so it’s interesting that he’s transitioned from a series known for its pseudo-documentary “interviews” to a real documentary full of real banter. He left his subjects and experts off-screen at the beginning of the film so that he could begin the film with a “focus group” of novices listening to Shaggs on headphones for the first time and reacting immediately. Their near-universal bewilderment makes for a sympathetic introduction to the film for those new to Wiggins’ world, but it’s also a source of laughs for die-hard fans who know exactly what it feels like to play a song like “My Pal Foot Foot” for a friend and be told it “sounds like something out of a caveman” or “that sounds like something you’d hear over and over again in your nightmares.”
It wasn’t long before a panel of experts began voicing their opinions, and while some, like producer Tony Berg, admitted to bewilderment – “When I first heard the Shaggs, it was like Martians landing in the studio” – most experts tried to make the case for why there was more going on with this music than first met their (presumably suffering) ears. Comparisons have been drawn to Picasso’s cubist paintings, Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda, and the great free-range drummers of jazz and punk riot groups, and not all of them are unwarranted. The musicians, who have taken turns forming Shaggs tribute bands and arranging their music for instrumental duos, speak to a strange complexity of music that belies the idea that it was simply created in real time in a studio. Notice, for example, that Dorothy and Betty actually harmonize together. I couldn’t believe the months and years of practice I had put into this music, even if it was a quarter tone off the harmonies that other trained musicians would have pitched. This was a band that very purposefully marched to its own drummer. In other words, even if that drummer, Helen, has a unique approach to tempo and likes to stick random fills in the middle of verses.
It may seem perverse to compare the Shaggs to the obvious genius of the Beach Boys, but there are several points in which it is apt. One is how well Dorothy’s lyrics capture the experience of a lonely, reflective teenager, like a primitivist version of the words Tony Asher wrote for Pet Sounds. But another issue on a purely narrative level, as Pat Thomas points out in the film, is how the Wiggin sisters were driven by their domineering father, Austin Wiggin, just as the Wilson brothers were driven by the infamous Murray Wilson (also bringing up Joe Jackson as an even more frightening reference). Austin’s mother, an amateur psychic, predicted that her son would have three daughters who would form a famous girl group, and Austin was determined to make that happen, even if he had to wait until several years after the “famous” part died in the mid-’70s. Possibly deaf, he trained his daughters at home for four or five years to perform Saturday night teen dances at local halls in small New Hampshire towns, cajoled and championed them, and eventually got them admitted into recording studios where the bar was so low that even such strange music could not be made.
Their only LP was pressed in 1,000 copies, 900 of which disappeared, probably in the hands of shady producers, the remaining 100 in the hands of DJs, and most likely all thrown away. (No original copy was ever sold on Discogs, but someone is currently trying to download it for $7,800.) Still, the music caught on, captivating Boston’s WBCN Freeform FM DJ to play it on the air nightly and eventually gifting his copy to Frank Zappa, the group’s first celebrity champion. Zappa described them as “better than the Beatles” (a well-deserved irony) and “to my ears they sound like the missing link between Fanny and Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band” (a pretty good sarcasm, actually). They were still doomed to disappear into the void, until a record store clerk who happened to be playing saxophone with NRBQ happened upon one of the LPs lost in a trade-in and handed it to the boys. NRBQ reissued it on Rounder’s Vanity label in 1980, and the rest is history. Suddenly, Shaggs became an ’80s dorm room favorite, and suddenly — and here’s a personal aside — fans like me were actually naming their cats Footfoot.
Drummer Helen passed away in the 2000s (possibly by her own hands in a nursing home), but “Dot” and Betty are still alive and, thankfully, chatty, as are some of the producers and engineers who worked on the original music. There are recollections that someone was brought in behind the young women to tune their instruments, but the subsequent sound sounded so foreign to their ears that they had to retune them back to the sounds they were accustomed to. One of the talking heads on screen admitted that he wondered if the Wiggins sisters were even allowed to listen to the music before making it, but they lied to it. Dorothy, in particular, was a big fan of Herman’s Hermits. (When one of the film’s experts, the playwright Joy Gregory, created an off-Broadway musical about the Shaggs family, she cleverly invented a device that moved the music back and forth between the hermit-like arrangements she thought the group was playing and the recordings of the actual arrangements that engineers heard in the studio.)
Life wasn’t always smooth sailing for the Shaggs, who disbanded following the death of their father and manager. In the animation, when “Philosophy” was reissued in 1980, it was immediately hailed by the press as “the worst album of all time,” and the group’s frustrated expressions are depicted when Rolling Stone magazine teases that they were like “the lobotomized Von Trapp Family Singers.” But alongside the ridicule, there was also a wave of genuine praise, with Nirvana’s frontman citing their album in his diary as one of his favorites, attending a tribute concert, and even requesting that they record new songs for Dorothy. One thing the Kwapis avoid is asking Dorothy what she thinks of their old songs, or what they were thinking when they deliberately composed songs that were a little off pitch. One wonders if perhaps he asked her and didn’t want her to make any disparaging remarks about the song, even though many experts have hinted there is a level of genius there. Betty is decidedly negative, admitting that she has few positive memories of the Shagg family, perhaps due to being heavily pushed by her father.
Dorothy Wiggins and Betty Wiggins of the Shaggs in “We Are the Shaggs”
Jeremy Seifert
So do the Shaggs represent a strange byproduct of parents subjecting their children to forced labor — one expert likens the group’s pro-parental anthems to being “like a hostage video” — or are they, as Dorothy’s seemingly unfiltered songwriting sounds, a fulcrum of adolescent (or slightly post-adolescent) self-expression and joy? This isn’t the first or last time we’ll deal with all the Shaggs, but it looks like we might be dealing with more than one at a time. The two surviving sisters don’t seem like the type of feminist heroines one would want to see, but Kwapis’ lovely film manages to cast them both as rock’s most unlikely icons and as average New Englanders forever caught in extraordinary circumstances.
But above all, although this may be a little different from Kwapis’ case, Shaggs’ staying power is evidence of the power of a powerful hook. Literally, no matter how outlandish the material or arrangement, every Dorothy Wiggin song is high-concept, offering a strongly recognizable theme and a melody that anyone who has heard it at least 10 or 12 times can sing along to. She wasn’t exactly the Taylor Swift of her time, except for her relatability and determination, but there’s no doubt that those two things are really important. Her band never played more than one city hall, but now, almost 60 years later, countless Shaggys are left in its unparalleled wake. In lieu of an Eras tour, or a performance in the next nearest town, Kwapis’ Doctors are giving them the sweet cinematic send-off they deserve.
