The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in the faded industrial town of North Adams, is a place where everything on offer seems worthy of investigation, its buildings and grounds a kind of sprawling candy shop of coolness. The Solid Sound Festival, with its farm-to-table food trucks, mindful attitude toward families and the environment, and eclectic roster of performers, fits right in. This year’s edition featured an appearance by the Shaggs, a band whose members the music historian Irwin Chusid once called “the unwitting godmothers of outsider music.” The band was scheduled to play at 1:30 P.M. on a Saturday afternoon. As with most everything surrounding the world of the Shaggs, this was a head-scratcher. Given the legendary status of the band, and the fact that it was about to play its first full set in more than forty years, why had it been programmed in the early afternoon, and on the smallest of the festival’s three outdoor stages?
Thirty minutes to showtime, there were still only a handful of people staking their claim to space in front of the stage. Two young men in their twenties, with beards and tattoos, were clearly thrilled to be there. “I have no idea what we’re about to hear,” one said, with a grin. “But where is everyone?” An older man with a long gray beard chimed in, “Don’t people know that this is the Shaggs?” Solid Sound is curated by the band Wilco, whose front man, Jeff Tweedy, first became aware of the Shaggs decades ago, while working as a record-store clerk. Hearing their music “was like discovering a strange, new kind of tree,” he told me. “You can tell that it’s a tree, but it’s not like any other tree you’ve ever known.” Tweedy and his sons were discussing outsider music when Tweedy asked if they’d ever heard the Shaggs. They hadn’t. Tweedy cued up “Philosophy of the World.” Playing that record for the uninitiated can have a sort of entertainment value of its own—it’s kind of like planting a sonic whoopee cushion. Susan Orlean, writing about the Shaggs in the pages of this magazine, in 1999, quoted one music fan describing them as “hauntingly bad.” Tweedy’s sons loved it.
The three sisters who made up the original Shaggs—Betty, Dot, and Helen Wiggin—last made music together in 1975, but Tweedy was aware that Dot Wiggin had recently been coaxed out of retirement by a group of Shaggs-loving musicians from New York, and that she was again writing, recording, and performing music. Helen passed away in 2006, but Betty had made a couple of personal appearances at Dot’s shows, to sign autographs. Might it be possible, Tweedy wondered, to engineer a Shaggs reunion for Solid Sound? “The Shaggs can never be replicated,” Chusid told me. “If Dot and Betty are onstage, sure, the genetic threads of the original band are there, in the same way that if Paul and Ringo get up there and play Beatles songs, you can say, ‘Yeah, that’s them. Those are the guys.’ But the Shaggs can never happen again.” Nevertheless, the Shaggs were announced for Solid Sound 2017. Betty and Dot Wiggin would sing (they no longer play their instruments), accompanied by members of Dot’s backup band, who had faithfully transcribed the music as heard on the original recordings.
What gives the Shaggs’ music its power has something to do with the clash between its deficits in what is commonly understood as standard musicality and the palpable earnestness—even vulnerability—of the performers. The Wiggins grew up in a repressive household in New Hampshire. They were social misfits who wrote brooding songs about disconnection that did not adhere to the musical styles of the day. They were not trying to be mavericks; there was no sophisticated, artistic vision being pursued. The Wiggins made music because their father, Austin Wiggin, Jr., forced them to, and they did so with a sort of primitive, grim resolve. When their father died, in 1975, they stopped.
Their music, however, lived on. A year after they disbanded, Frank Zappa declared in an interview that the Shaggs was one of his all-time favorite bands. (He would later suggest that the band ought to perform at the next Presidential Inauguration.) Lester Bangs wrote that they were “better than the Beatles.” A quarter century later, Orlean’s essay brought them renewed attention. The piece was optioned for a film, which remains in development, and the writer Joy Gregory conceived of a Shaggs musical, which had its première in 2011. In 2012, the musician Jesse Krakow organized a Shaggs tribute show in Brooklyn. Dot and Betty were invited as guests of honor, and they agreed to do a short talk-back after the show—during which it was revealed that Dot possessed other, unrecorded Shaggs songs in various states of completion. Krakow was stunned. What were these songs? Could he help get them out into the world?
A new partnership was born, one that led to the unlikely formation of the Dot Wiggin Band, fronted by Dot on vocals, with Krakow and his musical compatriots backing her up. The group recorded an album (“Ready! Get! Go!,” from 2013) and was invited to open for Neutral Milk Hotel on its 2015 tour. During the process of helping Dot become acclimated to making music again, Krakow spent time with her and her family in New Hampshire, slept on their floor, and attended church services with them. “They’re like my family,” he said. Tattooed on his right arm is a rendering of Dot’s drawing of the lost cat that the Shaggs sang about in the song “My Pal Foot Foot.” Her drawing does not really look like a cat; “it’s half cat, half whale,” Dot explained.
Dot showed Krakow the sheet music that was used by the Shaggs when they were active. “They had charts for everything,” he told me, “which was a total mind-fuck.” The melodies had been written by Dot, and she and Betty sang and played them together on their guitars with the sort of intuitive, spooky closeness that is a hallmark of sibling acts like the Delmore Brothers and the Blue Sky Boys. Their sister Helen, meanwhile, was in her own world, playing “rudiments of beats that she remembered from drills during her drum lessons in school” that had little or no relationship to what her sisters were playing.
“They knew exactly what they were doing,” Krakow said, though the changing and often odd-meter time signatures heard on “Philosophy” were mistakes. “Some of the songs sound like they’re in 1/1, with every beat feeling like a punch in the stomach.” The guitars were not in alternative tunings—they were simply out of tune. Though repeated listenings of Shaggs songs can reveal an order within the chaos, and the music’s unadorned authenticity builds into some sort of visceral, gutty celebration of total weirdness that some call genius, it’s probably more accurate to call the album accidental art. The Wiggins were not, as some would have it, “on to something.” They were embarrassed when they heard the results of the recording, and, as time passed, the ever-expanding numbers of devotees they inspired left them nonplussed. They did not feel related to outsider music at all, and wondered whether they were being made fun of.
Krakow considers himself to be a “Shaggs purist,” and when performing these songs his goal is to remain absolutely faithful to the recordings. “Everybody says the Shaggs are impossible to play, but we’re going to do it as is,” he said, describing his approach. When asked whether he’d ever considered straightening the songs out, he laughed. “No way,” he said. “I don’t know how you could.”
The courtyard at Solid Sound had begun to fill up. The Berkshire skies were clear and blue, a light breeze was in the air, and temperatures hovered at around seventy degrees. People smiled in anticipation. Though the energy stopped short of what might be called a buzz, there was what seemed to be a sort of relaxed, even goofy feeling among the assembled.
Krakow and the rest of the band took the stage first, and played the Wiggins on. A cheer rose up as Betty and Dot slowly made their way to the front of the stage—Betty’s smile genuine, if a little pinched, as though still unsure of her decision to participate; Dot’s face like a desolate Greek mask of tragedy. The band launched into the unmistakable opening strains of “Philosophy of the World,” just as off-kilter and destabilizing as it sounded on the original recording. Dot’s lyrics seemed more poignant than ever:
Filling in for the late Helen Wiggin, the drummer Laura Cromwell had perhaps the most challenging task of anyone else in the band. She’d clearly worked out the original, at times almost arrhythmic parts and played them with unabashed gusto. (Dot calls her “Helen, Jr.”) Cromwell told me that she had spent “countless hours listening to Helen’s playing, trying to get inside her head and figure out the logic behind what she was doing. What was she hearing? Why did she choose to come in with her fill here, three-quarters of the way through the verse? I hear so much joy in her drumming—it’s like her sisters are over there playing, and she’s off in a field somewhere, happy and free to do her own thing.” Cromwell disagrees with the idea that what the Shaggs recorded was only accidentally brilliant. “When you start to break it down, you start to realize that they’re really fucking tight,” she said.
The Wiggins primarily kept their eyes down, glued to the music stand they shared in front of them. They did not seem at ease. Were they experiencing flashbacks to episodes, decades past, when they would allegedly be heckled and even had things thrown at them? Bootleg footage of one of the Shaggs’ shows in the early seventies at the town hall in Fremont, New Hampshire, can be found online. The silent Super-8 footage has been given a soundtrack of old Shaggs music, but with the sound turned off it takes on an even more palpable, David Lynchian sort of wildness. Perhaps this was in the latter stage of the band’s history, when the members had become more proficient musicians. The band and its audience of dancing teens seem to be having a good time. “The dances kept the kids off the streets,” Dot said, though what temptations the streets of Fremont offered were not clear.
Cromwell told me that she hears pathos behind the music. “Their music is so guileless, and it has this exuberance mixed with this really heavy sadness, probably stemming from the circumstances under which the music was created,” she said. During the process of collaborating with Dot and Betty, both of whom she adores, she was privy to what she perceived as a “deep heaviness” around the process. Cromwell said that although Dot was generally game to rehearse the songs again for Solid Sound, Betty was more passive and sometimes even bewildered by the process.
At Solid Sound, Dot matter-of-factly introduced each song, as though she were back in time, addressing the Fremont kids: “If you know it, sing along with us” (which sounded more like “If you’d like a bucket of old food dumped on your head, raise your hand”). Watching the Wiggins being led through a zealous re-creation of music they’d never been particularly proud of was a jarring experience. Was it fair to even call this band the Shaggs? Or was it, rather, a Shaggs cover band providing a live karaoke soundtrack for the Wiggins to sing along with? Krakow’s band had gone so far as to acquire reissues of the cheap guitars that the Wiggins are shown holding on the cover of “Philosophy.” Though it was clear that Krakow and his cohorts deeply respect and love this music, what did it mean to celebrate a mistake? If accidental art is re-created on purpose, what is it?
Asked about the larger, philosophical implications of re-creating the music of the Shaggs and, essentially, directing the Wiggin sisters musically, Cromwell said that she, Krakow, and the rest of the band “have had long, almost Talmudic discussions” about that. With neither of the Wiggins playing her instrument, it was left to the band to cue them on how to come in at exactly the wrong time in their attempt to re-create the sound of the record. It may be fair to say that Krakow and company seem to know the recording far better than the Wiggins themselves do, though, as Cromwell told me, “in a sense, there has always been someone directing them.” The music writer Jim Macnie disagreed. “There is something instinctively odd about them being told how to play their own music this late in the game,” he told me. “ ‘The Philosophy of the World’ was a happy accident that could never happen again.” He described the original album’s brilliance as the chance turn of a kaleidoscope revealing beautiful, accidental patterns. Once the kaleidoscope turns again, ever so slightly, the beauty is lost.
About halfway through the set, Betty took the lead on her composition “Painful Memories.” Her vocals, complete with old-fashioned spoken interlude, were vulnerable and seemed deeply felt. The song had not been recorded for “Philosophy” but was part of a later, less-celebrated batch of Shaggs recordings. It was played straight, and provided for the most honest performance of the afternoon. Krakow likens performing “Philosophy,” as recorded, to presenting a work by Messiaen, though performances of classical music are generally interpretations of the original music; tempos, accents, even intentions vary greatly from conductor to conductor, and ensemble to ensemble. Krakow’s goal is to re-create the original without variation (though, to be fair, Cromwell says that she uses her transcriptions of Helen Wiggin’s original drum parts and fills as a guide, and does not play them note for note). None of this gave Jeff Tweedy a moment’s pause. “Nobody has control over their record once it goes out into the world,” he said. “It seems like an appropriate way to honor their unique and wonderful creation.”
The band closed with “Who Are Parents?” (Answer: “Parents are the ones who are always there.”) After four decades, they were still honoring the man who had forced them to make music. As the Wiggins left the stage, followed by the band, the crowd spontaneously began to shout in unison, “Foot Foot! Foot Foot! Foot Foot!,” prompting an encore of “My Pal Foot Foot.” And then, just like that, the two surviving members of the original Shaggs trio walked offstage together, likely for the last time. It was left to the audience to process what it had just seen and heard.
“The Shaggs represent a kind of innocence and authenticity that music often lacks, and it’s really encouraging to see that quality recognized and appreciated,” Susan Orlean told me. “I think what we all love about the Shaggs is the unself-consciousness and the pure innocence of what they did . . . so ‘re-creating’ it will never be the same as hearing those recordings of teen-age girls fumbling through their music. It’s a tribute, perhaps, more than it is a revival, since the essence of the Shaggs is about being earnest and struggling and naïve, which you just can’t duplicate.”
Orlean’s essay is still a sore spot for the Wiggins. “We liked her when we met her, but we didn’t like the article,” they told me. “She wrote that Betty’s hair was not in place.” The sisters are anything but typical rock stars; they’re humble, quiet, and kind. They look and comport themselves like ordinary people, “like the ladies who work at my local post office,” as one festivalgoer observed. Fame and mainstream-media attention may have been part of their father’s dream for them, but the Wiggins have never aspired to that, even now, when it seems that they could reach a new generation of fans. The Solid Sound set would be, in all likelihood, a one-and-done phenomenon. Dot is having a series of surgeries, and is also intensely devoted to her two elderly, handicapped rescue dogs, who need constant care. Betty has no interest in performing again. “I’m just not really into it,” she said. “I lost interest years ago.”
I asked the Wiggins if at Solid Sound they’d considered playing the music as it was meant to be heard—correcting the mistakes on the recording, once and for all. Though Dot was surprised and disappointed that Krakow and his bandmates had chosen to intentionally play out of tune, “everybody seems to like it the way it was,” she said, with a shrug that seemed like surrender.
