In 1968 a New Hampshire father pulled his three daughters out of school, bought them instruments they couldn't play, and forced them to form a band because his dead mother had prophesied their stardom. The album they recorded is either the most incompetent record in history or a work of accidental genius — and Frank Zappa, Kurt Cobain, and NRBQ couldn't stop listening.
The definitive telling. Orlean turns the Wiggin sisters' story into a devastating meditation on a father's vicarious ambition and the strangeness of being famous for failing. Start here.
The only album the Shaggs ever made: badly tuned guitars, drums that never quite line up, time signatures that shift mid-phrase. Recorded in a single day because their father feared they'd 'get better' and lose their magic.
Hear it for yourself. Give it three tracks before you decide. Something in the wrongness starts to feel deliberate, hypnotic, almost impossible to fake.
Their most famous song — a wandering ode to a runaway cat that opens and closes with a drum solo and never once resolves. Covered by Deerhoof; homaged in Harmony Korine's 'Gummo.'
The Shaggs sit permanently near the top of every 'worst albums ever' list — yet critics keep using words like 'primitive genius' and 'outsider masterpiece.' How can both be true?
After their father died in 1975, the band broke up almost immediately. The tracks recorded before the end were released years later — a strange, sadder coda to the whole prophecy.
Half a century later, Ken Kwapis's SXSW documentary asks us not just to listen but to empathize — with three girls who never wanted the spotlight their father died believing they deserved.