The Shaggs

Pity the poor Gen Xer. Screwed by the Boomers and inheritors of an earth even the meek would reject, the intelligent Xer had no choice but to embrace cynicism and irony. When everything is bad, you either embrace the bad or go insane. This was brought home to me when I was in England, visiting some friends of my wife’s for a couple of weeks. She had gone to school there for a year in college and we had the unusual opportunity of getting to pick up and go out of the country for a couple of weeks, so we ended up in London. One night we were sitting around talking and one of them asked us about LA and what it was like to live there. G immediately launched into a rhapsody about how great it was living in a place where everybody had guns and plastic surgery and you could just go down to the hardware store and pick up some illegal immigrants to do your dirty work and how beautiful the smog was in the late afternoon sun and how splendidly superficial everybody is and her friends just looked on aghast. And then it struck me, in England, they still had hope. We American Xers, living through a debilitating but very generational-specific depression, ravaged by Repulicans and aids and just say no had given up hope, so we embraced the last refuge of humanity, irony. In the peculiar worldview of the hardcore ironist, the worse something is, the better it is, and the more trivial, the more important.

I was recently watching one of those ‘80s nostalgia shows and the person they were interviewing was comparing the last scene in Footloose, where the town lifts its ban on dancing and all the repressed teenagers bust out with the latest moves, with the wall falling in Berlin, saying they were equivalent moments. Nobody but a bitter Xer would ever consider taking irony so far, but for me and my clan, it comes as natural as breathing.

Which brings me to the Shaggs. The Shaggs stand alone as perhaps the worst band in the entire history of recording. So, applying the algebra of irony, they are actually one of the greatest bands ever.

The Shaggs were the three Wiggan sisters, from New Hampshire (I theorize that the Simpsons’ incompetent police captain, Chief Wiggans, is named after the Shaggs, but I have no proof). For whatever reason, their overbearing father thought it would be great for them to form a band, so he bought them instruments and made them practice them, despite their clear lack of interest or ability. The Shaggs would occasionally play the local town hall, much to the delight and derision of their peers, and one day their father rushed them into a recording studio to get their unique sound on tape “while they were still hot”.

I can only imagine what that session must’ve been like. The poor bewildered engineer couldn’t have known what to make of the music because it was unlike anything he’d ever heard – unlike anything anybody had ever heard. He’d set them up and push record and watch and listen flabbergastedly and then look over at the Wiggans pere and he’d nod encouragingly. Every now and then, Mr. Wiggans would stop a take. The engineer, who was a Boomer and so was annoyed by this experience rather than entranced by it, would ask them why they stopped and the father would reply, mater-of-factly, that they had made a mistake. The great mystery, as anybody who’s heard a Shaggs recording can attest, is how did they know? It should become a new koan, an imponderable question, replacing the stale one hand clapping or tree falling in the forest chestnuts. Tell me, Zen master, how can you tell when the Shaggs make a mistake?

Because the Shaggs are so far outside of the norms of musical composition and performance that the usual rules and signposts don’t apply. There is such a bewildering cacophony and epileptic syncopation involved that it never really sounds like they’re not making mistakes, but they do it so consistently and so deliberately that it has to be intentional. Normal folk are quickly repelled by the Shaggs, but musicians are inevitably captivated, their jaws growing slack and their eyes widening. How can anybody play like that? How can three people stand in the same room and play their instruments at the same time and have it come out sounding like this? How could you stay just out of time with the other two players – who are just out of time with each other – for such a long time? It really does boggle the mind.

It must be because they are sisters. Something must’ve happened to that family (something dark and unpleasant, methinks) to make them come out like that. There is such a weirdness, but, most impressively, such a consistent weirdness, that there must be something genetic going on.

Immediately after they recorded their album, Philosophy of the World, nearly every one of the thousand copies they had pressed disappeared. But, somehow, one of the ones that survived made it into the hands of somebody, some fledgling Xer I’d wager, who recognized the treasure for what it was. Soon the disc was being passed around and taped and those tapes got passed around and a small but virulent cult grew around this strange audio artifact. Eventually the cult grew big enough that they were able to rerelease the album. Finally, years later, the cult achieved critical mass, and articles about the Shaggs started showing up in places like the New Yorker. I stumbled across a Shaggs tribute album at Ameoba not too long ago and LA recently hosted a Shaggs musical. Clearly, some corner has been turned.

Although briefly intrigued, I could not bring myself to purchase the Shaggs tribute CD. Perhaps I should have, for the novelty of it, but I just can’t imagine real musicians being able to play the Shaggs convincingly. They couldn’t help but play together, and that would show up the banality of the songs. The only way they could really do justice to the original sound of the Shaggs is if they recorded their parts in isolation, unable to hear what the other musicians were doing. But that would be cheating, for the glory of the Shaggs is that they were able to stand next to each other on stage or in the studio and somehow play these songs in this unearthly way.

Listen to this track, for example. An ode to their cat (?), My Pal Foot-Foot starts with the most rhythmically challenging drum solo I’ve ever heard. Starting a song with a long drum solo is ballsy enough, but playing that badly for that long is really quite an accomplishment. And somehow, the other girls know when to come in! It’s the most mystifying thing. They play almost together but not quite, almost in tune (well, not really) with some of the most awkward phrasing imaginable. It’s like animals from another planet who had never heard music before finding some instruments and banging away at them upside down.

For my obvious love of the Shaggs, I can only take them in very small doses. This song, the title track from their album, and the transplendant It’s Halloween are about all I need to hear of the Shaggs and, in fact, is just about all I can stand at one time. Perhaps, despite the great odds, there still burns a little hope in me. Perhaps being born right on the cusp of Boom and X has damaged my irony organ and kept me from truly embracing my generation’s destiny. Because for me, sometimes, the Shaggs are so bad that they’re just bad.