The People Tree Sessions: 9.03.02: The Shaggs – Philosophy Of The World

Posted by Claire Flynn Boyle on 09.03.2002

There really is no describing this album. Curio doesn’t do it justice. The tempo is wrong, the melodies are awful and the whole thing seems faintly wrong.

The People Tree Sessions
By Claire Flynn Boyle

Celebrating the finer moments of aural exotica

#1 – The Shaggs – Philosophy Of The World

In a Fremont, New Hampshire farmhouse, so legend has
it, a boy received a prophecy from his mother, a woman
prone to studying the future and making predictions,
predictions that to her family were absolute gospel.
The boy was told that he would marry a strawberry
blonde, have two sons that would out live their palm
reading grandmother, and that when his daughters were
older they would study rock and roll and form a band.
From that moment on, there was no debate. The Shaggs
were born.

Austin Wiggins was determined that his daughters would
fulfil the third part of his mother’s accurate
prophecy. He did indeed marry a strawberry blonde,
Annie, and he did have two sons who outlived their
grandmother. It was therefore not open to debate that
Helen, Dot and Betty (and sometimes other sister
Rachel) would not be heading to school, or their
potentially simple suburban lives with kids and steady
roles in the community. They were going to practice,
and practice, and practice some more until they were
rock stars. After being pulled from school, the girls
began being schooled by correspondence, so they
wouldn’t be distracted from their calling, and they
went through hours of gruelling exercises and
rehearsals, some of them intensely cruel, demeaning
and demanding, with the only allowed trip out of
Fremont being for music lessons.

In 1968 the Shaggs (so named after their shaggy
haircuts) performed at a local talent show in Exeter.
For all the hours of rehearsal, they still couldn’t
play their instruments, and played a terrible cover
version of a country standard, a version they wouldn’t
get through because of a hostile bottle and can
throwing audience. Another booking at a local nursing
home gained a more polite reception, and Austin
organised a booking at the Fremont Town Hall, a show
in which all seven kids dutifully played a part in the
show, from selling drinks to printing tickets to
playing the maracas, but the reception remained
hostile from the local population, even though a
decent crowd usually showed up. Town gossip suggested
intense cruelty, beatings and even incest were
involved in the Wiggins family band, but the gossip
made Austin Wiggins even more determined to prove
everyone wrong, fulfil the family destiny, and make
his shy, plain daughters into national rock and roll
stars, bigger than that Beatles.

When it became clear that the Shaggs weren’t making
progress, it was time for action. The Shaggs went into
the Fleetwood studios in Boston to record the album
“Philosophy Of The World” in 1969. Austin had bought
recording time for the girls, based on a deep disgust
that things weren’t happening quickly enough for his
band. The studio engineer, who’s name is lost to
history, reportedly took Austin to one side and
expressed deep horror at the girls abilities, but
Austin wanted to strike while the iron was hot, and an
album of his daughters work was duly recorded.

Philosophy Of The World is unlike any album ever
recorded, mainly because it lacks any concepts of
tune, rhythm, key or structure. It is performed with
enthusiasm and gusto, and is as close to the
punk-anyone-can-do-it-ethos as can be imagined. Drums,
guitars and vocals come in and out at random moments,
creating a gigantic racket that is either the worst
thing ever recorded or an extraordinary gem, depending
on your point of view. The track listing for the album
is as follows

#1 – Philosophy Of The World (Sample Lyric: “Oh the
poor people want what the rich people got/and the rich
people want what the poor people got/and the skinny
people want what the fat people got/and the fat people
want what the skinny people got”)

#2 – The Little Sports Car (Sample Lyric: “The Little
Sports Car was slippery as an oyster/Following it was
like riding a roller coaster”)

#3 – Who Are Parents? (Sample Lyric: “Some kids do as
they please/They don’t know what life really
means/They don’t listen to what the ones who really
care have to say/They just go and do things their
way”)

#4 - My Pal Foot Foot (Foot Foot being a lost cat,
badly drawn on the back of the liner notes. Sample
Lyric: “I’ve looked here, I’ve looked there, Oh Foot
Foot, Why Can’t I find you?”) This song might be the
worst song in the history of the world, or the best,
again depending on your point of view.

#5 – My Companion (Sample Lyric: “My Companion is with
me wherever I go/Even when I go to a show/My
Companion, of course/Is my radio)

#6 – I’m So Happy When You’re Near (Sample Lyric: “So
until we find the right door/You’ll have to leave
again/And once more our lives will be/very dim”)

#7 – Things I Wonder (Sample Lyric: “I wonder about
the stars above/I wonder about the birds that fly/I
wonder about your love/But most of all I wonder why
you make me cry”)

#8 – Sweet Thing (Sample Lyric: “You think you’ll fool
me/So go and have your fun/I’ll play it cool and go
along with you”)

#9 – Halloween (Sample Lyric: “The ghosts will
spook/the spooks will scare/Why, even Dracula will be
there!”)

#10 – Why Do I Feel? (Sample Lyric: “Why Do I Do The
Things I Do/Why do I feel the way I feel/Why do I do
the things I do?”)
#11 – What Should I Do? (Sample Lyric: “What Should I
do? /What should I do? /Tell me, Tell me/What should I
do?”

#12 – We Have A Saviour (Sample Lyric: “Don’t they
know we have a saviour/All we have to do is believe
and pray”)

There really is no describing this album. Curio
doesn’t do it justice. The tempo is wrong, the
melodies are awful and the whole thing seems faintly
wrong. On the other hand, in the sanitised age we live
in musically, the Shaggs could be ideal listening, and
the lyrics might be regarded as poetic, and on “Who
Are Parents”, maybe bitingly ironic. The entire album
is always on the verge of totally collapsing as each
girl plays at their own tempo and come in at any
moment they feel like. Either way, the music is a must
listen to, as no-one is likely to ever come away from
it without a strong, strong opinion of some sort. One
critic described the album as so bad that poking your
eyes out with sharpened sticks made for a pleasant
change of pace, another critic advised not listening
to the album for the first time while driving a car.
Frank Zappa on the other hand said the album was
better than anything the Beatles have ever done, and
famous rock critic Lester Bangs was equally
enthusiastic about the album.

The Shaggs never did make it to fame and fortune. The
man in charge of pressing 1000 copies of the album
vanished with 900, the remaining albums being shipped
to radio stations to virtually no interest. In time,
the town hall shows were cancelled for a multitude of
reasons, the girls grew apart from their father’s
fanaticism and rebelled, and further practice sessions
and recording time failed to improve the quality of
their playing, or their commercial prospects. Hundreds
of hours of practice didn’t make a difference. The
remaining 100 albums did eventually attract something
of a cult following, band NRBQ got it’s record label
to re-issue Shaggs material, and academic papers,
re-union concerts, unheard material and internet
interest (positive and negative) have given the band
and their album at least some measure of fame (or
infamy). In 1996 Rolling Stone Magazine named the
album one of the 100 most influential alternative
releases of all time.

In an ironic twist their father, Austin, didn’t live
to see this mini-revival of interest. He died in 1975
of a massive heart attack. Rumour has it he died on
the same his daughters finally played him a version of
“Philosophy Of The World” that met with total
approval….