by Susan Orlean
I’m So Happy When You’re Near (2:12)
“Through the years, this author as town historian has received numerous requests from fans around the country looking for information on ‘The Shaggs’ and the town they came from,” Matthew Thomas wrote in his section about the band. “They definitely have a cult following, and deservedly so, because the Wiggin sisters worked hard and with humble resources to gain respect and acceptance as musicians. To their surprise they succeeded. After all, what other New Hampshire band . . . has a record album worth $300–$500?”
The Beatles’ arrival in America piqued Austin. He disliked their moppy hair but was stirred by their success. If they could make it, why couldn’t his girls? He wanted to see the Shaggs on television, and on concert tours. Things weren’t happening quickly enough for him, though, and this made him unhappy. He started making tapes and home movies of the town hall shows. In March 1969, he took the girls to Fleetwood Studios, outside Boston, to make a record. According to the magazine Cool and Strange Music!, the studio engineer listened to the Shaggs rehearse and suggested that they weren’t quite ready to record. But Austin insisted on going forward, reportedly telling the engineer, “I want to get them while they’re hot.” In the album’s liner notes, Austin wrote:
The Shaggs are real, pure, unaffected by outside influences. Their music is different, it is theirs alone. They believe in it, live it. . . . Of all contemporary acts in the world today, perhaps only the Shaggs do what others would like to do, and that is perform only what they believe in, what they feel, not what others think the Shaggs should feel. The Shaggs love you. . . . They will not change their music or style to meet the whims of a frustrated world. You should appreciate this because you know they are pure what more can you ask? . . . They are sisters and members of a large family where mutual respect and love for each other is at an unbelievable high . . . in an atmosphere which has encouraged them to develop their music unaffected by outside influences. They are happy people and love what they are doing. They do it because they love it.
The Wiggins returned to Fleetwood a few years later. By then, the girls were more proficient—they had practiced hundreds of hours since the first recording session—but their playing still inspired the engineer to write, “As the day progressed, I overcame my disappointment and started feeling sorry for this family paying sixty dollars an hour for studio time to record—this?”
I once asked Annie Wiggin if she thought Austin was a dreamer, and after sitting quietly for a few moments she said, “Well, probably. Must have been.” If he was, it no doubt got harder to dream as the years went on. In 1973, the Fremont town supervisors decided to end the Saturday night concerts, because—well, no one really remembers why anymore, but there was talk of fights breaking out and drugs circulating in the crowd, and wear and tear on the town hall’s wooden floors, although the girls scrubbed the scuff marks off every Sunday. Austin was furious, but the girls were relieved to end the grind of playing every Saturday night. They were getting older and had begun to chafe at his authority. Helen secretly married the first boyfriend she ever had—someone she had met at the dances. She continued living at home for three months after the wedding because she was too terrified to tell Austin what she had done. On the night that she finally screwed up the courage to give him the news, he got out a shotgun and went after her husband. The police joined in and told Helen to choose one man or the other. She left with her husband, and it was months before Austin spoke to her. She was twenty-eight years old.
The Shaggs continued to play at local fairs and at the nursing home. Austin still believed they were going to make it, and the band never broke up. It just shut down in 1975, on the day Austin, who was only forty-seven years old, died in bed of a massive heart attack—the same day, according to Helen, they had finally played a version of “Philosophy of the World” that he praised.
Philosophy of the World (2:56)
Shortly after the newest rerelease of the Shaggs’ album, I went to New Hampshire to talk to the Wiggin sisters. A few years after Austin died, Betty and Dot married and moved to their own houses, and eventually Annie sold the house on Beede Road and moved to an apartment nearby. After a while, the house’s new owner complained to people in town that Austin’s ghost haunted the property. As soon as he could afford it, the new owner built something bigger and nicer farther back on the property, and allowed the Fremont Fire Department to burn the old Wiggin house down for fire-fighting practice.
Dot and Betty live a few miles down the road from Fremont, in the town of Epping, and Helen lives a few miles farther, in Exeter. They don’t play music anymore. After Austin died, they sold much of their equipment and let their kids horse around with whatever was left. Dot hung on to her guitar for a while, just in case, but a few years ago she lent it to one of her brothers and hasn’t gotten it back. Dot, who is now fifty, cleans houses for a living. Betty, forty-eight, was a school janitor until recently, when she took a better job, in the stockroom of a kitchen goods warehouse. Helen, who suffers from serious depression, lives on disability.
Dot and Betty arranged to meet me at Dunkin’ Donuts, in Epping, and I went early so that I could read the local papers. It was a soggy, warm morning in southern New Hampshire; the sky was chalky, and the sun was as gray as gunmetal. Long tractor-trailers idled in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and then rumbled to life and lumbered onto the road. A few people were lined up to buy Pick 4 lottery tickets. The clerk behind the doughnut counter was discussing her wedding shower with a girl wearing a fuzzy halter top and platform sneakers. In the meantime, the coffee burned.
That day’s Exeter News-Letter reported that the recreation commission’s kickoff concert would feature Beatle Juice, a Beatles tribute band led by “Brad Delp, former front man of ‘Boston,’ one of the biggest rock bands New England has ever produced.” Southern New Hampshire has regular outbreaks of tribute bands and reunion tours, as if it were in a time zone all its own, one in which the past keeps reappearing, familiar but essentially changed. Some time ago, Dot and her husband and their two sons went to see a revived version of Herman’s Hermits. The concert was a huge disappointment for Dot, because her favorite Hermit, Peter (Herman) Noone, is no longer with the band, and because the Hermits’ act now includes dirty jokes and crude references.
The Shaggs never made any money from their album until years later, when members of the band NRBQ heard “Philosophy of the World” and were thrilled by its strange innocence. NRBQ’s own record label, Red Rooster, released records by such idiosyncratic bands as Jake & the Family Jewels, and they asked the Wiggins if they could compile a selection of songs from the group’s two recording sessions. The resulting album, The Shaggs’ Own Thing, includes the second session at Fleetwood Studios and some live and home recordings. Red Rooster’s reissue of Philosophy of the World was reviewed in Rolling Stone twice in 1980 and was described as “priceless and timeless.” The articles introduced the Shaggs to the world.
Three years ago, Irwin Chusid, the author of the forthcoming book Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music, discovered that a company he worked with had bought the rights to the Shaggs’ songs, which had been bundled with other obscure music-publishing rights. Chusid wanted to reissue Philosophy of the World as it was in 1969, with the original cover and the original song sequence. He suggested the project to Joe Mozian, a vice president of marketing at RCA Victor, who had never heard the band. Mozian was interested in unusual ventures; he had just released some Belgian lounge music from the sixties, which featured such songs as “The Frère Jacques Conga.” Mozian says, “The Shaggs were beyond my wildest dreams. I couldn’t comprehend that music like that existed. It’s so basic and innocent, the way the music business used to be. Their timing, musically, was . . . fascinating. Their lyrics were . . . amazing. It is kind of a bad record—that’s so obvious, it’s a given. But it absolutely intrigued me, the idea that people would make a record playing the way they do.”
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sp; The new Philosophy of the World was released last March. Even though the record is being played on college radio stations and the reviews have been enthusiastic and outsider art has been in vogue for several years, RCA Victor has sold only a few thousand copies of Philosophy so far. Mozian admits that he is disappointed. “I’m not sure why it hasn’t sold,” he says. “I think people are a little afraid of having the Shaggs in their record collections.”
While I was waiting for the Wiggins, I went out to my car to listen to the CD again. I especially love the song “Philosophy of the World,” with its wrought-up, clattering guitars and chugging, cockeyed rhythm and the cheerfully pessimistic lyrics about how people are never happy with what they have. I was right in the middle of the verse about how rich people want what poor people have, and how girls with long hair want short hair, when Betty pulled up and opened the door of my car. As soon as she recognized the song, she gasped, “Do you like this?” I said yes, and she said, “God, it’s horrible.” She shook her head. Her hair no longer rippled down to her waist and no longer had a shelf of shaggy bangs that touched the bridge of her nose; it was short and springy, just to the nape of her neck, the hair of a grown woman without time to bother too much about her appearance.
A few minutes later, Dot drove in. She was wearing a flowered housedress and a Rugrats watch, and had a thin silver band on her thumb. On her middle finger was a chunky ring that spelled “Elvis” in block letters. She and Betty have the same deep blue eyes and thrusting chin and tiny teeth, but Dot’s hair is still long and wavy, and even now you can picture her as the girl with a guitar on the cover of the 1969 album. She asked what we were listening to. “What do you think?” Betty said to her. “The Shaggs.” They both listened for another minute, so rapt that it seemed as if they had never heard the song before. “I never play the record on my own anymore,” Dot said. “My son Matt plays it sometimes. He likes it. I don’t think I get sentimental when I hear it—I just don’t think about playing it.”
“I wonder where I put my copies of the album,” Betty said. “I know I have one copy of the CD. I think I have some of the albums somewhere.”
The Wiggins have received fan letters from Switzerland and Texas, been interviewed for a documentary film, and inspired a dozen Web sites, bulletin boards, and forums on the Internet, but it’s hard to see how this could matter much, once their childhood had been scratched out and rewritten as endless days of practicing guitar, and their father, who believed that their success was fated, died before they got any recognition. They are wise enough to realize that some of the long-standing interest in their music is ironic—sheer marvel that anything so unpolished could ever have made it onto a record. “We might have felt special at the time we made the record,” Dot said uncertainly. “The really cool part, to me, is that it’s thirty years later and we’re still talking about it. I never thought we’d really be famous. I never thought we’d even be as famous as we are. I met a girl at the Shop ’n Save the other day who used to come to the dances, and she said she wanted to go out now and buy the CD. And I saw a guy at a fair recently and talked to him for about half an hour about the Shaggs. And people call and ask if they can come up and meet us—that’s amazing to me.”
Yet when I asked Dot and Betty for the names of people who could describe the town hall shows, they couldn’t think of any for days. “We missed out on a lot,” Betty said. “I can’t say we didn’t have fun, but we missed a social life, we missed out on having friends, we missed everything except our music and our exercises. I just didn’t think we were good enough to be playing in concerts and making records. At one point, I thought maybe we would make it, but it wasn’t really my fantasy.” Her fantasy, she said, was to climb into a car with plenty of gas and just drive—not to get anywhere in particular, just to go.
We ordered our coffee and doughnuts and sat at a table near the window. Betty had her two-year-old and eight-month-old granddaughters, Makayla and Kelsey, with her, and Makayla had squirmed away from the table and was playing with a plastic sign that read CAUTION WET FLOOR. Betty often takes care of her grandchildren for her son and her daughter-in-law. Things are tight. The little windfall from their recordings helps, especially since Dot’s husband is in poor health and can’t work, and Betty’s husband was killed in a motorcycle accident six years ago, and Helen is unable to work because of her depression.
For the Wiggins, music was never simple and carefree, and it still isn’t. Helen doesn’t go out much, so I spoke with her on the phone, and she told me that she hadn’t played music since her father died but that country and western echoed in her head all the time, maddeningly so, and so loud that it made it hard for her to talk. When I asked Betty if she still liked music, she thought for a moment and then said that her husband’s death had drawn her to country music. Whenever she feels bereft, she sings brokenhearted songs along with the radio. Just then, Makayla began hollering. Betty shushed her and said, “She really does have some kind of voice.” A look flickered across her face. “I think, well, maybe she’ll take voice lessons someday.”
Dot is the only one who is still attached to her father’s dream. She played the handbells in her church choir until recently, when she began taking care of one of Helen’s children in addition to her own two sons and no longer had the time. She said that she’s been writing lyrics for the last two years and hopes to finish them, and to compose the music for them. In the meantime, Terry Adams, of NRBQ, says he has enough material left from the Fleetwood Studio recording sessions for a few more CDs, and he has films of the town hall concerts that he plans to synchronize with sound. The Shaggs, thirty years late, may yet make it big, the way Austin saw it in his dreams. But even that might not have been enough to sate him. The Shaggs must have known this all along. In “Philosophy of the World,” the song they never could play to his satisfaction, they sang:
It doesn’t matter what you do
It doesn’t matter what you say
There will always be one who wants things the opposite way
We do our best, we try to please
But we’re like the rest we’re never at ease
You can never please
Anybody
In this world.
SHOW DOG
IF I WERE A BITCH, I’D BE IN LOVE WITH BIFF Truesdale. Biff is perfect. He’s friendly, good looking, rich, famous, and in excellent physical condition. He almost never drools. He’s not afraid of commitment. He wants children—actually, he already has children and wants a lot more. He works hard and is a consummate professional, but he also knows how to have fun.
What Biff likes most is food and sex. This makes him sound boorish, which he is not—he’s just elemental. Food he likes even better than sex. His favorite things to eat are cookies, mints, and hotel soap, but he will eat just about anything. Richard Krieger, a friend of Biff’s who occasionally drives him to appointments, said not long ago, “When we’re driving on I-95, we’ll usually pull over at McDonald’s. Even if Biff is napping, he always wakes up when we’re getting close. I get him a few plain hamburgers with buns—no ketchup, no mustard, and no pickles. He loves hamburgers. I don’t get him his own French fries, but if I get myself fries I always flip a few for him into the back.”
If you’re ever around Biff while you’re eating something he wants to taste—cold roast beef, a Wheatables cracker, chocolate, pasta, aspirin, whatever—he will stare at you across the pleated bridge of his nose and let his eyes sag and his lips tremble and allow a little bead of drool to percolate at the edge of his mouth until you feel so crummy that you give him some. This routine puts the people who know him in a quandary, because Biff has to watch his weight. Usually, he is as skinny as Kate Moss, but he can put on three pounds in an instant. The holidays can be tough. He takes time off at Christmas and spends it at home, in Attleboro, Massachusetts, where there’s a lot of food around and no pressure and no schedule and it’s easy to eat all day. The extra weight goes to his neck. Luckily, Biff likes
working out. He runs for fifteen or twenty minutes twice a day, either outside or on his Jog-Master. When he’s feeling heavy, he runs longer, and skips snacks, until he’s back down to his ideal weight of seventy-five pounds.
Biff is a boxer. He is a show dog—he performs under the name Champion Hi-Tech’s Arbitrage—and so looking good is not mere vanity; it’s business. A show dog’s career is short, and judges are unforgiving. Each breed is judged by an explicit standard for appearance and temperament, and then there’s the incalculable element of charisma in the ring. When a show dog is fat or lazy or sullen, he doesn’t win; when he doesn’t win, he doesn’t enjoy the ancillary benefits of being a winner, like appearing as the celebrity spokesmodel on packages of Pedigree Mealtime with Lamb and Rice, which Biff will be doing soon, or picking the best-looking bitches and charging them six hundred dollars or so for his sexual favors, which Biff does three or four times a month. Another ancillary benefit of being a winner is that almost every single weekend of the year, as he travels to shows around the country, he gets to hear people applaud for him and yell his name and tell him what a good boy he is, which is something he seems to enjoy at least as much as eating a bar of soap.
PRETTY SOON, Biff won’t have to be so vigilant about his diet. After he appears at the Westminster Kennel Club’s show, this week, he will retire from active show life and work full time as a stud. It’s a good moment for him to retire. Last year, he won more shows than any other boxer, and also more than any other dog in the purebred category known as Working Dogs, which also includes Akitas, Alaskan malamutes, Bernese mountain dogs, bullmastiffs, Doberman pinschers, giant schnauzers, Great Danes, Great Pyrenees, komondors, kuvaszok, mastiffs, Newfoundlands, Portuguese water dogs, Rottweilers, Saint Bernards, Samoyeds, Siberian huskies, and standard schnauzers. Boxers were named for their habit of standing on their hind legs and punching with their front paws when they fight. They were originally bred to be chaperons—to look forbidding while being pleasant to spend time with. Except for show dogs like Biff, most boxers lead a life of relative leisure. Last year at Westminster, Biff was named Best Boxer and Best Working Dog, and he was a serious contender for Best in Show, the highest honor any show dog can hope for. He is a contender to win his breed and group again this year, and is a serious contender once again for Best in Show, although the odds are against him, because this year’s judge is known as a poodle person.