I don't know what to say about this...yes I do...no I don't...yes I do. I hate to use a cliche, but #mindblown. HOLY-every expletive on the planet. A friend on YouTube sent a link to some songs and I really liked one band she sent. I told her that getting new music is really a gift for me. There's more great music out there than I could ever discover on my own so I really appreciate the turn-on. Usually when I hear new music that grabs me right off the bat I'm going "Yeah!" and bobbing my head. Sometimes I hear something that makes me laugh it's so cool. But VERY rarely does new music completely fuck me up. Apparently I'm not the only one.
The Shaggs popped up in my feed the other day. I'd heard about them many years ago and I'd seen this LP cover and I knew they sure did look about quirky as fuck but I never bothered to listen to their music. I wish I had. Occasionally I'd hear something about them because they'd been around for a long time. I thought this was a 70s album but it was recorded in 1969. The entire thing- the record, the story...the music...it's so out there that it's in. It completely rewrites the Physics of music, if you will. I always bitch about the categorization of music, which I get from the point of knowing which slot to put it in, but does more to confuse the issue than anything else. "Oh, he's not
Emo enough...he must be
Screamo. Give me a break.
Another vid came up called "The Worst LP ever Recorded?" and it was the Shaggs. I'd crashed for about an hour earlier that evening, which I hate to do because it spaces me out and makes it hard to go back to sleep sometimes. Last night I was extra-spacey and I had to hop right up and throw something together for dinner and take a walk and whatever else and I never woke completely back up. It turned out to be rather appropriate for hearing the Shaggs for the first time, although you most definitely wouldn't need to be in any altered condition to be tripped-out by this record. I can guarantee one thing- if you do listen to this LP in its entirety, be it sober, high or tripping balls, you'll be altered after you listen to it...if you dare. The term 'unique' is so overused but in this case it totally applies, as in truly a one-off. There's the Shaggs' music and then there's everything else. That's no joke.
I couldn't get back to sleep so about 3:30 I gave up and decided to make coffee and see the sunrise and basically piss-around like I usually do. I decided it was finally time to listen to the Shaggs, in glorious Mp3 quality on computer speakers. I'd truly love to hear this on the original vinyl, of which only about 100 copies are known to exist, on a rad stereo system, but listening to the Shaggs fot the first time I don't really think it mattered. The point came across loud and clear, whatever it was. It still trips me out and it will for the rest of my life. I'm still processing. It's that radical.
If you do listen to it your first reaction will probably be to turn it off immediately, which is completely understandable. I can say that the Shaggs' music isn't for everyone, and maybe it's there for no one. I want to start each sentence here with "Uhhh..." because my brain is spinning way faster that my non-typing ass can go. I don't know how anyone could categorize this music or WTF they'd call it, but I'll go with my friend Randy's term of "Quirkrock." I love that. I also love the Shaggs. Deeply. First listen. Man...this may be the craziest shit I've ever heard in my life. To the average listener it literally could be the worst thing they ever hear in their entire life. For someone who's possibly even a little over-adventurous in musical taste, this LP is a trip to another world...a world where the laws of music do not exist, and where things like the beat, melody, structure, time signature, scales and whatever else are hinted at, but beautifully ignored.
I said this was a mind-altering recording and it is. As someone who appreciates a musical adventure, the impact of this is comparable to what I read about people who go into the jungle or whatever and take psychedelic plants. They say you could never fully-prepare for the experience. Nobody could be fully-prepared for the Shaggs. No way. It literally had my head spinning within about 16 bars. It was a roller-coaster ride that slings your ass around and makes you dizzy. That's exactly what it felt like when I foolishly tried to hang with the drums for more than a measure or two. It was more-or-less the basic "Boom-boom, Bap" beat, but the drummer, a lefty, made it her own thing . She played her absolute heart out, only with a belligerent but beautiful disregard for time.
She'd be tooling along fine for a few measures and I'm going "You can do it, girl...hang in there," but then she'd just go off the rails and it's like "OHHHhhh, ohhhh, man, that's just
wrong." She'd hit the tenth snare hit or whatever and it'd be nearly a beat behind where you'd expect it to be, or it might be ahead of the beat like a roller-coaster going over the hill and suddenly gaining speed. It literally made me a little dizzy trying to follow the drumming, at least from the point of trying to establish a groove for this music in my head and trying to fit it to a grid or whatever, until I realized it was a useless thing to do. She didn't do any drum fills leading into the choruses because there were no choruses. or maybe the whole song was the chorus...it's hard to tell. She would randomly insert a sort-of fill to announce a "change" in the music or whatever it was. It brought tears to my eyes it was so funny. And cool. Her fills sounded like maybe a horse galloping at different speeds or someone who's drunk and weebling and wobbling and trying not to fall down the stairs, or someone falling down the stairs. It's just mind-warping and gorgeous.
You could call her drumming horrible, laughable and probably the worst drumming ever recorded in the entire history of music and it's understandable, but if you look at it from a point of breaking the "rules" of music, and you can't break them any more than she does, then somehow there's a brilliance there. It'd certainly make any drummer totally howl with laughter, which at 3am I had to stifle the urge to do when I heard the tunes. The endings of the songs, if you can call them that, made my jaw drop and I said "Oh" a few times out loud. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the endings. I want to bust out loud laughing right this minute just thinking about them. I just did, lol.
Most of the songs just sort of ended. They just sort of stopped when it was time to stop I guess. A couple of tunes ended with some little guitar lick or maybe a vocal deal, and one ended with a brilliantly-heinous drum solo that shoved time up its own ass, and it nearly made me piss myself. That tune was about 3/4 of the way through the album so I was musically-traumatized well before then. I might have dropped a deuce laughing if I hadn't at least heard the songs before it. I was somewhat ready for it. Shattered, but ready. Forget about Rock drumming, Speed Metal, whatever...when it comes to anarchy in drumming, she was in a class by herself. Yeah, technically she could be in Guinness for being the world's shittiest drummer to ever be recorded, but it's somehow transcendent, if only for the shittiness. There's more to the drumming than that, but at this point I couldn't describe it if I had to, except to say that it most definitely not right. That doesn't make it wrong though.
There's footage of them playing gigs at the local VFW or whatever, and at times it looks like the drummer is right on the beat for long periods of time. I know that playing for a crowd will juice you up and you can play beyond yourself so maybe she was jacked on that, but she certainly got into it. It's hard to tell though if she's just way into it or if it's something more, because later when I read about them there was pressure to perform from their father. She does look a bit bug-eyed but that would be normal for kids playing their first gigs. On the records there's no telling what her mindset was but the second you think she's going to hold it steady for 16 bars she drops a timewarp in there. She both loses the beat and creates a new one at the same time. I've never heard anything like it. Whatever the motivation her enthusiasm in the studio was real, for better or worse.
She had a simple kit with a bass drum, snare, hi-hat, a cymbal, floor tom and sometimes a mounted tom. She had all the elements of a drum kit, but just. The story goes that their father bought them crappy gear. Her cymbals are unknown but when you could see a brand on her drums they were Premier Drums out of England. They made really good drums back then and I think still do, and they weren't cheap. Shipping from the UK is expensive and added to the cost, so it's odd that that's the story. The guitars on the other hand are whack and I don't know what the hell they are. I'd guess Vox but that's probably wrong. They're uber-cool whatever they are. Aside from tuning, which apparently hadn't been paramount in their musical training, the guitars didn't sound expensive certainly, but again that could be considered beautiful. Given the nature of this music it didn't matter either.
I've never heard a guitar style like the two sisters' and I seriously doubt I will again, even close. I'm laughing again. Semi-aggressive strumming? Wheel-within-a-wheel? Wheel-within-a-square? Meek? Monstrous? Good? Bad? Ugly? The coolest shit you ever heard in your life? You can't describe it. I adore it but obviously I'm twisted. Somehow they were on the same wavelength in the midst of a drumming solar-storm. It didn't matter (nor did anything else) that the drums were on a different planet or the drummer was juking along in something resembling 4/4 time while they were playing in 3/4, or maybe it was 5/4, or 7/4, or maybe 127/4...who knows. There was absolutely no time signature anyway, but at times and probably totally by accident they were playing a perfect 4-against-3 and it was brilliant. The entire band and especially the drummer used standard 4/4 time as the vaguest of templates, but basically they played in "1" for most of the song.
Those "reaction" vids where someone listens to music that's generally out of their wheelhouse and mostly for the first time and "react" are a dime a dozen, but I'd love to see some guitar players try to analyze their playing. I know a tiny bit about guitar and I can't do it. As I said they play together so much it's almost creepy. Most of the time it sounds like a weird 12-string. Every now and then one will tweedle while the other one deedles, or they'll do a "solo" but otherwise they play exactly the same thing. It's fucked-up, man. The occasional guitar breaks that they do are completely unexpected and breathtaking, and more out-to-lunch than even the drum solos. You'd just have to hear them to understand. Once or twice they use a very surprising amount of distortion on a little featured part and it's amazing. Looking at their pics I'd have picked them for the clean-tone type. One break I swear sounded like Robert Fripp, only if he were tripping, eating downers and drinking heavily. They almost went Hendrix a few times. It was wonderful.
What was even weirder was their "picking" style. They didn't so much strum or pick...it was a weird combination of both. What they did that's completely unique, at least for every tune, was to basically mirror everything they sang on the guitars. Every little syllable had its own dedicated note-stab. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on. It was easy to see but so completely different at first I didn't understand it. Since the vocals, like the drums, weren't bound by any normal rhythms or phrasings or time signatures, neither were the guitars.
That's why it didn't really mater at all what the drummer was playing. They wouldn't have ever lined up at all with that going on anyway. It made me really appreciate the fact that while the drummer couldn't keep time in a bucket, there was nothing to keep time
to. She was more or less aware of what they were doing on guitar and I'm sure at first she tried to keep up or steer them toward some sort of a beat, but they were in their own dimension and didn't seem to be aware of the drums at all. It was a recipe for gorgeous fucking disaster.
The really old blues cats who'd strum an old guitar and sing the genuine Blues weren't necessarily locked into a perfectly-even amount of notes although they definitely kept the rhythm, and mostly played in the standard times of 4/4 and 3/4. They'd just sometimes drop or add a beat for no reason besides that's just how they felt it, and that's part of the beauty of that old stuff. This is something completely different. Not only were they not close to being locked in time, but they were in different realms altogether. It's like two solar systems orbiting each other in irregular orbits- they sort of drift apart and occasionally come back together.
There was a great old ride at the fair called the Tilt-a-Whirl. It had a circular track with hills and dips. Semicircular cars moved along the track and were also free to spin in either direction due to bearing mounts. The combination of going up or down and the car moving in a certain way plus inertia would randomly send the cars spinning around like a ballet dancer. Your buddy might be in the next car, and every now and then, whether you were moving very slowly or spinning around in different directions, every now and then you'd get close enough to reach out and touch hands. That's what their music was like, rhythm-wise anyway. A curious law of Quantum Physics and/or String Theory is that energy can be considered both a particle and a wave at once, and that certain particles can actually be in two different places at the same time. A particle can be where it is and also millions of miles away at the same time. They're somehow connected. There's another comparison.
I listened to the album start to finish and I barely moved except to gasp or laugh or try to stifle one. I was forever changed. I can tell you that the first tune will set the tone of the whole thing in five seconds. It starts going along as basically a 4/4 "Rock" beat with one guitar playing right with the drums. In one of the few times that the guitar-playing sisters actually do something different, the other guitar comes in with a bizarre "Swing" rhythm tha totally derails the song before it's barely begun. If you can make it past the first five seconds you're good go to go. You'll quickly realize that there's nothing remotely resembling rhythm, song-structure, time signature or anything else common to most music. Hopefully you'll understand as quickly that it doesn't matter. Otherwise it'll bug the shit out of you and maybe give you nightmares. It might anyway.
All I knew was that I'd just heard something amazing, terrifyingly-quirky yet beautiful, and music I'd never heard in my life. I almost wanted to check my vital signs. I literally sat there staring at the YT screen showing recommendations for other videos. I was at least in a state of musical shock. All the little preconceived notions of what music was supposed to be were smashed to shit. I had an entirely new appreciation for shittiness. That this was ever recorded, much less released is a miracle. I also gained an appreciation of just how vastly far apart people can be and still be considered together. I've heard crazy-ass music that plays crazy-ass time signatures against each other and it stretches like a motherfucker but it always snaps back like a rubber band, at least every now and then.
In one of the many paradoxes the album seemed both way to short and much longer than it actually was. It clocks in at around 33 minutes, but of course time stood still for the experience. The tunes were mercifully-short, but after about five had gone by my brain was so overworked that I thought surely the album was over, but there were several more songs. I welcomed each of them just as I knew I'd welcome the end of the record as well. Not to diss it but half an hour is about maximum for first listen. Still it was like discovering a great book where you get near the end so you savor each chapter because it's so good that you don't want it to end. There ears will never hear music in the same way again, and that's a beautiful thing.
The titles are beyond bizarre but the cake-taker and probably the craziest song on the record, if there is such a thing, would probably be "My Pal Foot Foot." I know, right? That's nuts. The songs were supposedly written by the young girls about their life-experiences up until then. That was curious because they lived a cloistered life for the most part and didn't really interact with other people much until later in life. More on that later. But My Pal Foot Foot? They must've spent some time in their imaginations. The song starts with an audacious and precocious drum solo that's beautifully in and out of time and thythm. I wanted to howl. There's a surreal guitar break in there somewhere, and at one point it sounds like it's going to end, with another sort of solo drum deal, but then it cranks back up. It ends with a breathtaking straight-eighths fill with the cymbal and tom, and it's
almost in unison. It ends with a barely-accented hit that's ahead of the beat for emphasis. It made my day.
I also have to mention their "stage show" and the little dance the guitars periodically broke into. It was ahead if its time. One girl would turn to face the other and take four steps toward her sister as she took four steps back. They were dressed alike and had the same hair so it looked like a strange mirror deal. They looked each other in the eye and took very slow and deliberate steps. I'm not sure if it went with the "beat" of the music but again it didn't matter. It was surreal. I've probably used that word a lot.
Last but not least in describing the music is the vocals. They're unique in all the world as well. Like the guitars, which are totally intertwined, except for a few spots like the "echo" or call-and-response part on "My Pal Foot Foot" they sing every song in unison. There's no harmony, ever. It's like the old days of physically double-tracking vocals where they'd simply sing the same line again on a separate track to make it sound bigger. It's really weird at first but like everything else it's just how it is. It's cool. Basically it's just two girls playing and singing the same thing at the same time. As I said they're somehow on the same wavelength so the vocals and guitars are usually very tight with each other, for what it's worth. I'd say that in their case the drums would be more of a hindrance, but I'm not sure how aware of the drums they are. Even though the guitars were heinously out of tune at times, almost as if by design, the vocals were crisp and on pitch.
I love a style of music that was called "Progressive" back in the day but's been shortened to "Prog" today. It basically means that it's in a weird time signature and people can't understand it, much less dance to it. Even the wildest Prog tune has a map of some sort. The craziest shit they can play eventually resolves and makes sense. Some of those proggers will take the craziest prime-number time signature they can think of, just because they can, like 37/4 against 4/4. It's almost like two different songs at once but both time signatures resolve to a common downbeat, or "1" in common every 37 measures. The Shaggs' music tore that deal a new one too. All proggers ever born should bow down and kiss the Shaggs' rings. They invented it.
But wait...there's more, and it gets even crazier, and a bit darker too. After I lay there for a few more minutes trying to understand what I'd just heard, I decided to learn a bit more about them, and lo and behold Frank Zappa's name pops up. Turns out the Shaggs were one of his favorite bands of all time and he thought they were cooler than the Beatles! Like the rest of the experience I was surprised/not surprised to see Frank's name come up. It certainly helped validate my opinion that this was really something special. Frank was into Classical, Jazz, Symphonic and all sorts of "proper" music as well as experimental too. For him to like the Shaggs is high praise. Then it said that "The Philosophy of the World" was Kurt Cobain's third-favorite record of all time. Only #3, Kurt? That's pretty cool too.
Other people like Vedder and all them mentioned the Shaggs, but then another of my musical heroes popped up...NRBQ's Terry Adams. He had an original copy of the LP and it flipped out so much that around 1980 I think, he convinced their then-label, Rounder Records to put it out. Terry already was cool and this is yet another reason. He needed their permission though but he didn't know how to get in touch with them, so he piled in the car (with Tom the late, great drummer I think) and headed for their last known location after the Shaggs. He went to the library and asked around until he found them. One sister wasn't really into it and the others were skeptical when Tom said he wanted to re-release their record. He said the first question they asked was "How much is it going to cost us?"
That's hilarious. There was already a buzz going around about them but Tom really put them back on the map and they've been playing at festivals and such here and there. Thanks, Terry.
Here they are today. That's one of the guitarists on the left and I believe the drummer. I couldn't find a pic showing the other guitarist but she looks nothing like her sisters. She has a groovy short hairdo that sort of comes to little points or curls here and there. It's both retro and futuristic at the same time. Imagine that. Apparently the sister on the left put down her guitar for good but the other one and the drummer still actually play.
They delegate some of the guitar playing to a couple of guys who might be their stepbrothers but I'm not sure. Somehow they manage to get a jangly, off-kilter thing that works well with the "reunion tour" band, but still they more or less fit their playing to somewhat of a grid. They may be more aware of the drumming that the guitar sisters in the original band, but for sure they have to follow the vocals, and maybe even have to ignore the drums altogether. I'm going to watch as much footage of their "comeback" stuff as I can and pay close attention to the drums. The little I heard I was still in shock from hearing the album so I didn't pay attention to the drums and that's the first thing I'd usually have done. I hope she hasn't been practicing.
Naturally the story about how they got started is as weird as everything else, and it gets to the roots of why they sounded like they did and how it could even be possible. Speaking of 'sounding like them,' there are at least one or two tribute bands, but I hear they fail miserably. I guess so because there's no fucking way in the world their music cold be duplicated with a million bands in a million years in their wildest dreams. That's true. I mean hats off to them for recognizing a uniquely-quirky band and paying tribute, if not trying to make a buck off the name, but some things simply can't be duplicated. I can only imagine a tribute band from a player's standpoint...holy moley it'd be a trip trying to learn that stuff. It's be an adventure for sure but never even close to authentic. It's not just about being shitty either. You could take new musicians, accomplished musicians, Muzak musicians who copy stuff anyway, weird-ass musicians, musicians who were high as a kite or even shitty musicians and you couldn't get in the same ballpark.
Anyway the father was an engineer or something and the mother was a psychic. Early-on she'd predicted girls in their family and that her husband would go on to remarry and have two sons after her death. Oddly she also predicted that the girls would form a band. hence the Shaggs. After he had the girls with her and then two boys with his next wife, but seeing that the girls had no inclination whatsoever to start a band, he decided to fulfill the prophecy and make it happen himself. He decided they needed to learn how to play, which was actually smart. They were already isolated socially but he basically locked them away into a regimented program of home-schooling in the morning, practice in the afternoon and calisthenics at night.
He bought them cheap instruments and sheet music and said "Learn to play," but he never thought to get a teacher, and that's the key to their sound. They'd been isolated already to the point that they weren't allowed to go to dances or parties, or even listen to music. It's about strange as fuck that he'd tell them to play music when he never let them listen to any, but damned if it doesn't fit perfectly. The kicker is,
they had no musical influences. That's incredible. Hearing that brought their music into focus, relatively speaking anyway, and it's what gave them their own special place in all of music. It almost made me want to cry, because what they did truly was to make pure music that had never been done before in the history of music.
I have to mention the sheet music because it was somehow central to their thing, and they never left home without it. Since they had no teacher, the sheet music (blank) was the first thing staring them in the face so in essence it became their first "teacher.' Their only, really. That's nuts. Their sheet music was with them from start to finish. i'd really love to have been able to have a look at it. There's no doubt that like everything else it surely must have been its own thing. Maybe they learned the real notes. They probably did but maybe they didn't. I'd love to see the score for Foot Foot. How in hell could anyone ever white that out?
It's just like in other cultures where learning an instrument is a unique process. Instead of getting traditional lessons, the student is handed the instrument, a supply of food and water and told to go out into the jungle for a week or whatever and learn to play by themselves. The idea is that the instrument itself will "teach" the owner how to play it. Of course you could figure anything out on your own eventually, but it seems to take a much shorter time, especially playing it somewhat in the proper manner. I think there's something to it but one thing's for sure. Learning to play an instrument completely by yourself and with no reference points will create something completely individual. It's reinventing the wheel. Apply that to three people playing in a band at the same time, which also is totally unheard of, and you get magic.
Sure there were Punk bands and such who basically picked up their instruments and signed a record deal before they could even play a note and learned on the job, but they had music to listen to to at least give them a starting point. The Shaggs got their inspiration from the ether. That brought it home for me. Their music was created from the purest of sources- vocals, guitars, drums and certainly the music. I'm sure they'd heard a few kids songs or maybe some old stuff. I think the drummer must've heard some marching bands too because sometimes she'll go "Fa-fa-fa-fa-Fap Fap, Fa-da-dop Fap." It's so damn cool. You might want to say they might have heard some Gospel but there isn't a trace of that in their music. Gospel has a lot of soul and groove and feeling to it and the girls, God bless 'em, played about as "white" as you can. Funky they weren't.
What was sad and a bit sinister was the fact that they never wanted anything to do with music; much less a band, but their father forced it on them. It was just another piece of the puzzle though. If they'd been into it, they'd have found a way to hear other stuff to at least get ideas, and their music wouldn't have existed as it did. To their credit they did learn music, or some form of it;apparently from the sheet music and a few music books. I remember those old music books. They learned you the notes and all but certainly taught nothing about feel or playing with other people. The two sisters played and sang exactly together because they learned the exact same thing from the same page at the same time together. It's like a real-life clone deal or something. It's sad but it makes me grin at the same time. Yet again, imagine that.
Parents try to force their kids into shit they don't want to do all the time, but it's rarely music. Their father had no musical talent himself. Apparently he also didn't have a sense of humor and he was all-business. That accounts for the boot-camp environment. They put in maybe three hours a day practicing. All they knew was that he expected them to get better however they did it, and in fact get good enough to be in a band yet they were given no direction of any kind except "Learn to play." It must've been incredibly rough on them, especially not being into it in the first place. They didn't even get to enjoy the usual notoriety among their peers for being in a band because they never saw any other kids outside of their live shows. And then there's the live shows. Bless their hearts.
This is one of their early live shows at a town hall. There's bits of footage from this show I believe plus a few others. Most of it isn't synced but a few things are. I think there's a version of Foot Foot live. I hope so anyway. There's footage with no sound mixed with audio from other shows, and some of it is really sad. The other kids couldn't relate to it at all, and on some of the tapes the heckling is louder than the band. I felt so bad for them. What's extra-crazy about that is since they never had any reference points to anything including what's good, they didn't know they sucked.
At their first show the reaction left them mortified and embarrassed beyond belief, and understandably so. They went home with the full intention of giving up the music business forever, but their father wouldn't hear of it and made them practice even harder. They really put their hearts into it but they just never knew what they were doing. They went through more shaming and most likely didn't enjoy a single minute of being onstage, at least until the reunions. That's awful. Finally their father decided it was time for them to record an album and become famous. It's a shame they didn't have their album before they did most of their live concerts. Maybe the other kids might've cut them some slack.
I have to say it was funny watching the other kids try to dance to music that had no real beat and was nothing like anything they'd ever heard. The "1" is very important if music is to be danced to, Dancers need it to anchor to and be able to know how and when to move. The Shaggs obliterated the "1" in such a way that'd make any Jazz, beat-displacement expert green with envy. Or red with laughter maybe. Finally the kids just gave up and joined hands and did a big circle dance. It was hilarious.
The father booked some studio time and off they went. In a doc I saw they interviewed the guys who did the session. They said that the girls came in looking like it was the last place they wanted to be, which fits the narrative. They didn't say much. After they set up and did a soundcheck, the guys told them that they weren't ready to record just yet and that they should go home and practice some more and come back, but of course the father wouldn't hear of it. He wanted to record them while they were "hot." The studio hated to take their money but they recorded the album, thank God. That's the one decision the father got right. As long as he was doing that to those poor girls they might as well have gotten a product out of it, and without the LP and the admiration of several key people down the road, they'd have never known that they were actually loved by so many people. It's only fitting, and they absolutely deserve it for having to go through the other side of it. Wow.
The story goes that the engineers were literally ducking down behind the recording console while the girls were playing so they wouldn't see them cracking up. I have no idear why they didn't at least get the gals to tune their guitars, because it's really painful at times, but I suppose they figured out that like everything else, it didn't matter. With this music, or whatever it is, the guitars might jolly well fucking be out of tune. Why not? Tuning is just a state of mind, and semitones are cool. Just ask Cage and all those atonal cats. I'm betting they'd find this album brilliant, if accidentally. After the sessions pops had 10,000 copies printed. Supposedly about 1,000 were "released" or given away or whatever. What happened to the other 9,000 copies is anybody's guess, but the general consensus is that the studio threw them away. Totally. Interestingly when Terry Adams met the sisters and cleared everything for the re-release, the original master tapes were just sitting there on one of their shelves. Of course they were. It's the Cinderella Story.
The ending of the Shaggs was just as unorthodox as everything but maybe not as crazy. One day out of the blue their father dropped-ass dead from a heart attack. Before he'd even achieved room temperature they'd disbanded the band and vowed never to play music again. Never say never. They moved out of the house and started families of their own. I listened to one interview that originally was on NPR I think but it was just the audio. They'd gone back to where the house had stood until it burned in a fire some years after they left. There was much talk about seeing a "ghost" in a window that was presumed to be their father. It was either they when they originally lived in the home, or I think the new owners of the property who reported the place being haunted. Interestingly the grass never grew back in a perfect outline of where the original house stood. There were hints of other things going on, and sometimes in cases like this there are, but the girls seemed to come out of it okay.
As is befitting the story, they have only the barest concept of the incredible thing they inadvertently created, and if they do they probably can't understand why it trips so many people out. One of the sisters quipped "I didn't think we were any good back then and I
still don't, ha-ha." They have no reference point to anything related to music but the fact that they played it. The Shaggs. Holy sh*t. It's too much.
