Dot showed Krakow the sheet music that was used by the Shaggs when they were active.

Dot showed Krakow the sheet music that was used by the Shaggs when they were active. “They had charts for everything,” he told me, “which was a total mind-fuck.” The melodies had been written by Dot, and she and Betty sang and played them together on their guitars with the sort of intuitive, spooky closeness that is a hallmark of sibling acts like the Delmore Brothers and the Blue Sky Boys. Their sister Helen, meanwhile, was in her own world, playing “rudiments of beats that she remembered from drills during her drum lessons in school” that had little or no relationship to what her sisters were playing.

“They knew exactly what they were doing,” Krakow said, though the changing and often odd-meter time signatures heard on “Philosophy” were mistakes. “Some of the songs sound like they’re in 1/1, with every beat feeling like a punch in the stomach.” The guitars were not in alternative tunings—they were simply out of tune. Though repeated listenings of Shaggs songs can reveal an order within the chaos, and the music’s unadorned authenticity builds into some sort of visceral, gutty celebration of total weirdness that some call genius, it’s probably more accurate to call the album accidental art. The Wiggins were not, as some would have it, “on to something.” They were embarrassed when they heard the results of the recording, and, as time passed, the ever-expanding numbers of devotees they inspired left them nonplussed. They did not feel related to outsider music at all, and wondered whether they were being made fun of.

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