The Shaggs

The Shaggs were an American all-female rock and outsider music band formed in Fremont, New Hampshire in 1968. The band was composed of sisters Dorothy "Dot" Wiggin (vocals/lead guitar), Betty Wiggin (vocals/rhythm guitar), Helen Wiggin (drums) and, later, Rachel Wiggin (bass).

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. The band's only studio album, Philosophy of the World, was released in 1969. The album failed to garner attention, though the band continued to exist as a locally popular live act. The Shaggs disbanded in 1975 after the death of Austin.

The band is primarily notable today for their perceived ineptitude at playing conventional rock music; the band was described in one Rolling Stone article as "sounding like lobotomized Trapp Family singers."Terry Adams of NRBQ compared the group's melodic lines and structures to the free jazz compositions of Ornette Coleman.

Philosophy of the World

Philosophy of The World is the first album by The Shaggs, released in 1969 by Third Word Records and rereleased in 1980 by Red Rooster Records/Rounder Records after the band NRBQ found it at a Massachusetts radio station in 1978. A CD version containing Shaggs' Own Thing was released in 1988 by Rounder, and another CD, this time without the latter record, was released by RCA Victor in 1999.

Recording of the album was financed by Austin Wiggin, father of the bandmembers.

Track listing

Reception

"Philosophy of the World is the sickest, most stunningly awful wonderful record I've heard in ages: the perfect mental purgative for doldrums of any kind," wrote Debra Rae Cohen for Rolling Stone in a review of the 1980 reissue. "Like a lobotomized Trapp Family Singers, the Shaggs warble earnest greeting-card lyrics (...) in happy, hapless quasi-unison along ostensible lines of melody while strumming their tinny guitars like someone worrying a zipper. The drummer pounds gamely to the call of a different muse, as if she had to guess which song they were playing - and missed every time." "Without exaggeration," Chris Connelly wrote in a later Rolling Stone article, "it may stand as the worst album ever recorded." In an article for The New Yorker, the album was described as "hauntingly bad".

Shaggs' Own Thing

Shaggs' Own Thing is a 1982 compilation album featuring the music of The Shaggs, containing tracks from a 1975 recording session that had gone unreleased due to the death of Austin Wiggin (the band members' father and manager) and the band's subsequent disbanding. The album includes a rerecording of the song "My Pal Foot Foot" from the band's first album, Philosophy of the World, which is in a decidedly more commercial arrangement.

Unlike Philosophy of the World, which contained all original content, Shaggs' Own Thing includes several covers of popular songs of the early 1970s, in addition to new original songs. In contrast to Philosophy of the World, in which the then-novice musicians performed in a distinctive, amateurish style, the songs on Shaggs' Own Thing were comparatively professional; as the band had been playing as a band for several years, had learned the basics of popular music, and had more physically mature voices by the time the session took place in 1975, they were able to more closely emulate pop music styles of the time. (For this reason, a large number of the band's fans, who had taken a liking to them for their earlier style, tended to disregard this album.)