‘We Are the Shaggs’ Review: The Band Is Awful, but the Movie Isn’t

Several decades ago, I used to get a big kick out of subjecting unsuspecting visitors to a record by an unusual musical trio called the Shaggs. This would usually happen after a few drinks or as a party was winding down, and I’d typically start the initiation with a song called “My Pal Foot Foot,” the sad tale of a lost cat who is found in the last verse (though not in real life).

The song lurches through a few different rhythms even before the out-of-tune voices of three young women come in and struggle (but fail) to mesh as they obliterate any and all considerations of good and bad in pop music.

It was (and still is) jaw-dropping music, fascinating and oddly compelling even if it is totally inept by any normal standard. And even before I would explain that it was made by three teenage girls whose father took them out of school so that they could concentrate on the music career he was sure would make them stars, the biggest kick for me would come from watching people’s faces as they first encountered the Shaggs and tried to figure out if what they were listening to was appalling, transfixing or some ungodly combination thereof.

And now, many years later, a documentary called “We Are the Shaggs” premiered at the South-by-Southwest Film Festival on Friday. It starts with an absolutely perfect first two minutes, as about two dozen different people listen to “My Pal Foot Foot” for the first time and try to figure out what the hell they’re hearing. It’s not a great opening sequence because it pretty much duplicates what I used to do; it’s a great opening sequence because if you’re gonna make a movie about the Shaggs, you simply must begin it by sitting people down and playing them “My Pal Foot Foot.” It’s the only way.

Fortunately, director Ken Kwapis (“The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” “The Office”) knows that. He would, because he’s been listening to the Shaggs since 1980, when he bought a copy of the first reissue of the uber-indie 1969 album “Philosophy of the World,” a slab of rudimentary and misshapen bashing and bleating that somehow manages to be both tuneless and timeless, baffling most listeners while it attracted fans as diverse as Frank Zappa, NRBQ’s Terry Adams and, later, Kurt Cobain.   

But the Shaggs – Dorothy (“Dot”), Helen and Betty Wiggin, from Fremont, New Hampshire – didn’t make music to impress Frank or Terry or Kurt or you or me. They made it because their dad told them to. Austin Wiggin Jr. was determined to fulfill a palm reading from his mother, who prophesied that he’d marry a strawberry blonde (he did) and have three girls who’d form a band (they did) and become successful and famous (well…). He enrolled his daughters in a mail-order home school, prevented them from having any kind of social life and designed a draconian schedule of  rehearsal and calisthenics.

The result was songs like “Who Are Parents?” (“Who are parents? / Parents are the ones who really care”), which “Philosophy of the World: The Shaggs” playwright Joy Gregory describes as “a hostage message.”

As the movie makes clear, the story doesn’t get any more normal from there. Austin Wiggin took his daughters into a small studio and paid for a one-day session to make a record, where the engineer told him their guitars were out of tune. “I got these guitars at Sears Roebuck,” Wiggin insisted. “They’re guaranteed. They don’t need to be tuned.”

One thousand copies of “Philosophy of the World” were pressed, and 900 of them promptly disappeared. A 45 rpm single of “My Pal Foot Foot” was pressed and misspelled their name. (“The Shags.”) Helen got married but was afraid to tell her father, so she continued living at home for three months until he found out. The band ended when their father died of a heart attack at the age of 47, then occasionally played again after a 1999 New Yorker story by Susan Orlean told the full story for the first time.

“We Are the Shaggs” tells the story, too, but Kwapis is after more than a biography, as entertaining as that might be. Beyond the befuddled listeners at the beginning of the film, he’s assembled a group of insiders, admirers and zealots to not only flesh out the tale, but also testify as to how awesome the Shaggs are and make the case for them as exemplars of outsider art.

Jesse Krakow, a “Shaggs absolutist” who recreates their songs with his Shaggs tribute band, testifies as to how difficult their music can be to play: “It’s like hieroglyphics. It never gets easier.” Composer Eric Lyon insists that the song “Philosophy of the World” (“Oh the rich people want what the poor people’s got / And the poor people want what the rich people’s got…”) is “if anything, a call to arms for anybody who thinks more empathy would make things better in the United States.” Musicologist Susan Rogers puts a feminist spin on the Shaggs conversation: “The knee-jerk assumption is we assume they don’t know what they’re doing, and that’s why this turned out like this,” she says. “And I wonder, if they had been brothers and not sisters, would we make the same assumption? Maybe we’d think, they’re punk. They know better. They’re just being contrarians. They’re being rock ’n’ roll.”

Are they reading too much into the music? The Wiggin sisters might think so. In Orlean’s article and in interviews done for the film, the surviving Shaggs, Dot and Betty, seem a little embarrassed by the attention they’ve gotten, and dismissive of any notion that the primitive genius some devotees have unearthed in their music was in any sense deliberate or even genuine. In the New Yorker article, Betty responded to Orlean listening to “Philosophy of the World” by saying, “God, it’s horrible.” And in the movie, when Kwapis asks her about her fondest memory of the Shaggs, she quietly says, “I don’t have a real lot of fond memories of it.”

But even if the film sometimes seems to overplay the Shaggs worship, it never loses sight of how weirdly fascinating this story is, and how strangely entertaining. “We Are the Shaggs” is also pretty persuasive in making the case that conventional definitions of quality are useless when you’re talking about this music, which Kwapis refers to as “the most head-scratching music ever committed to vinyl.”

So go ahead, pull up a chair, put on “My Pal Foot Foot” and keep an eye out for “We Are the Shaggs.” It’s got a bad beat and you can scratch your head to it.

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