The Shaggs may be the unlikeliest group since the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll to have attracted a cult of hundreds of thousands or even millions of fans, all of whom take their place on different parts of the ironic-to-sincere appreciation scale. Were Dorothy, Betty and Helen Higgin, who comprised this late ’60s/early ’70s trio, so bad they were good? Or so good they were bad, if you want to look down that particular hall of mirrors? Childlike amateurs, or enfants terribles, worthy of the respect they got from admirers from Frank Zappa to Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain? To quote writer Susan Orlean, from her 1999 New Yorker profile of the long-bygone sister act: “Are the Shaggs referencing the heptatonic, angular microtones of Chinese ya-yueh court music and the atonal note clusters of Ornette Coleman, or are they just a bunch of kids playing badly on cheap, out-of-tune guitars?”
Whatever angle of delight or disdain you might arrive at the Shaggs from, there’s no doubt that the lone, crude album they released during the band’s lifespan, 1969’s “Philosophy of the World,” prompts a sense of deep intrigue among all those who listen to it, as to just how sounds this evasive of the norms of Western pop got created. The surviving Higgin sisters have done enough interviews over the years, that New Yorker article among them, that some of the mystery has gotten cleared up, for those who cared to plumb it. But it’s still not a moment or a decade too soon for filmmaker Ken Kwapis to have dug deeper still in delivering “We Are the Shaggs,” a delightful documentary that is premiering in the SXSW Film Festival’s 24 Beats Per Second division. It is a shaggy dog story (sorry) that asks a bunch of interesting questions about perceptions of art and how the rules of music or language accidentally get subverted. But mostly it’s a good human-interest tale about how these runts of the rock ‘n’ roll litter have kept on getting rediscovered, re-ridiculed and re-celebrated, mostly against their will, because it represents some weird combination of mundanity and the accidentally avant-garde we still haven’t completely wrapped our heads around. And maybe — just maybe (hot take incoming!) — because the songs are actually pretty strong, in their fashion?
The recent film that “We Are the Shaggs” most resembles in some ways is Edgar Wright’s “The Sparks Brothers,” partly because it’s about oddball siblings bound by unconventional musicality, but mostly because it’s a documentary custom-built to satisfy both hardcore cultists and utter newbies. Kwapis is a first-time documentary director but is famous for his TV comedy resume, most of all maybe his Emmy-nominated work on “The Office,” so it’s funny that he has gone from a series known for its pseudo-documentary “interview” flourishes to an actual documentary filled with for-real talking heads. He leaves the subjects and experts off-screen at the start of the movie so that he can begin it with a “focus group” of first-timers listening to the Shaggs on headphones and offering their immediate reactions. Their near-universal perplexity is a sympathetic way into the movie for newcomers to the Wiggins’ world, but will also provide some chuckles for cultists, who will know exactly how it feels to play a song like “My Pal Foot Foot” for one’s friends, and be told back that it sounds like “caveman stuff” or “like something you would hear in your nightmare over and over and over.”
Soon enough, a panel of experts is weighing in — some admitting their puzzlement, also, like producer Tony Berg, who says, “The first time I heard the Shaggs, it was like Martians had landed in my studio,” but most trying to make a case for why this music has more going on than first meets the (possibly distressed) ear. Comparisons are made, not all of them unreasonable, to Picasso’s cubist paintings, Ed Wood’s “Glen or Glenda,” the great free-range drummers of jazz and punk’s riot grrls. Musicians who have alternately formed a Shaggs tribute band or arranged their music for an instrumental duo speak to the odd intricacies of the music, which runs counter to the idea that it was just being made up in real time in the studio. It’s noted that the harmonies between Dorothy and Betty are indeed aligned, for example, which belies all the months and years of practice that went into the music, even if they are aligned a quarter-step off of where any other trained musician would have pitched them. This was a band that very purposely marched to its own drummer, in other words… even if that drummer, Helen, had a unique approach to tempo and liked to stick random fills in the middle of verses.
It might seem perverse to compare the Shaggs to the overt genius of the Beach Boys, but there are a couple of points where it’s apt. One is how well Dorothy’s lyrics capture the experience of being a lonely and contemplative teenager, like a primitivist version of the words Tony Asher wrote for “Pet Sounds.” But another, on a purely narrative level, is how the Wiggin sisters were driven by a domineering dad, Austin Wiggin, as much as the Wilson brothers were by the infamous Murray Wilson, as Pat Thomas notes in the movie (also bringing up Joe Jackson as an even scarier reference). Austin’s mother, an amateur psychic, had prophesied that her son would have three daughters who would form a famous girl group, and he was determined to make it come true, even if the “famous” part would have to wait till a few years after his mid-’70s death. With possibly tin ears, he home-schooled, cajoled and championed his girls into a four- or five-year Saturday night teen-dance residency at the local hall in their small New Hampshire town, and ultimately into a recording studio where the bar to entry was low enough to not even bar music this bizarre.
Their lone LP had 1000 copies pressed, of which 900 copies disappeared, possibly to a shady producer, and the other hundred of which went to DJs, with probably nearly all of them being tossed. (There has never been an original copy sell on Discogs, although right now someone is trying to unload one for $7,800.) Yet the music got out, with a WBCN free-form FM DJ in Boston being captivated enough to give their single nightly airplay, and to ultimately give his copy to Frank Zappa, who became the group’s first celebrity champion. Zappa called them “better than the Beatles” (ironically, duh) and, “to my ears, sound(ing) like the missing link between Fanny and Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band” (actually a pretty good unironic description). They were still destined to disappear between the cracks until a record store clerk who happened to play sax for NRBQ on the side happened across one of those lost LPs in a trade-in and handed it over to the boys, and the rest is kind of history, with NRBQ reissuing it on their Rounder-distributed vanity label in 1980. Suddenly the Shaggs were an ’80s dorm-room favorite, and suddenly — a personal aside here — fans like me were actually naming their cats Foot Foot.
Helen, the drummer, died in the 2000s (possibly by her own hand in a nursing home), but “Dot” and Betty are alive and, thankfully, chatty, as are some of the producers and engineers who worked on the original music. There is a recollection about how someone was brought in behind the young women’s back to tune the instruments, only to have to de-tune them back to what the ladies were used to when the subsequent tone sounded completely foreign to their ears. One of the talking heads on screen admits wondering if the Wiggins sisters had even been allowed to listen to music before they were dragged into creating it, but they put the lie to that; Dorothy, in particular, was a huge fan of Herman’s Hermits. (When playwright Joy Gregory, one of the experts in the movie, created an off-Broadway musical about the Shaggs, she cleverly invented a device where the music switched back and forth between the Hermit-like arrangements the group thought they were performing and recordings of the actual arrangements as engineers heard the in the studio.)
Life was not all peaches and cream for the Shaggs after they dissolved following the death of their father/manager. Animation portrays their chagrined faces as “Philosophy” is reissued in 1980 and immediately picks up “worst album of all time” press, including a Rolling Stone notice that said they were like a “lobotomized Von Trapp Family Singers.” But with the derision came waves of real praise, like Nirvana’s frontman citing their album in his journals as one of his favorite records, and the demand to participate in tribute concerts and, for Dorothy, even to record new material. One thing Kwapis avoid is asking Dorothy what she thinks of their old material, or what was going through her head when she deliberately composed slightly off-pitch material; you suspect maybe he did ask her and just didn’t want to quote her being in any way derogatory of the songs when so many experts have just insinuated there was a level of genius there. Betty is flagrantly dismissive, admitting that she has few positive memories of the Shaggs, surely due in part to it having been fairly forced upon her by their dad.
Dorothy Wiggins and Betty Wiggins of the Shaggs in ‘We Are the Shaggs’
Jeremy Seifert
So do the Shaggs represent the odd byproduct of parents putting compulsory labor upon their children — one expert likens the group’s pro-parent anthem as coming off “like a hostage video” — or is it the fulcrum of adolescent (or barely post-adolescent) self-expression and joy, as heard in Dorothy’s seemingly unfiltered songwriting? Not for the first or last time in dealing with all things Shaggs, it seems possible for it to be more than one thing at a time. The two surviving sisters don’t seem like the types to want to be considered feminist heroines, but Kwapis’ lovely film is able to capture them as some of the most improbable icons in rock history as well as average New Englanders forever captured in an extraordinary circumstance.
More than anything, though — and this is a case maybe a little different from the one Kwapis makes — the Shaggs’ endurance is testament to the power of a strong hook. However literally offbeat the material and arrangements were, every one of Dorothy Wiggin’s songs is high-concept in delivering a strongly identifiable theme, and a melody that you can sing along to if… well, if you’ve listened at least 10 or 12 times. She was not exactly the Taylor Swift of her day, except in relatability and determination, which are arguably two places where it really counts. Her band never got to play anywhere except a single town hall, but nearly six decades later, there are legions of Shaggies left in their incomparable wake. In lieu of an Eras Tour, or even having gotten to perform in the next-nearest township, Kwapis’ doc is giving them the sweet cinematic sendoff they deserve.