Mind = Blown! It’s Halloween, and in that spirit we revisit the legacy of the Wiggin sisters - Dot, Betty and Helen - better known as The Shaggs, the oddest rock group America ever heard. Their 1969 album, “Philosophy of the World” was issued by their impresario father Austin Wiggin who had forced his daughters to form the band after his mother read his palm and predicted stardom for the girls. Raised almost entirely without access to music, the Wiggins’ output sounded nothing like the pop of the day – or the pop of any day. Unsurprisingly, “Philosophy” saw nearly no sales and when Austin died of a heart attack, The Shaggs disbanded in relief. The band might have been forgotten if a copy of their LP hadn’t been discovered by Frank Zappa, who declared it one of his favorite records of all time – as did Kurt Cobain. Examining the Shaggs decades later, Guitar Player magazine wrote, “One thing is for sure: The incredibly strange, atonal, arrhythmic tunes on Philosophy are completely devoid of cliché.”
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 16:16:34 +0000
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