Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa 1975-1980s)

[Dina Hornreich <dinahornreich AT earthlink.net>]

No really TG but still somewhat relevant/interesting...

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Outsider In
The Shaggs’ unworldly philosophy
by Steven Mikulan 

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/53/theater-mikulan.php


Joy Gregory’s new musical, The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, is about 
the New Hampshire sister-act rock band whose 1969 album, Philosophy of the 
World, sank without a trace, only to be discovered years later by the 
outsider-music underground. Thanks to fan Web sites, the reissued 
Philosophy’s liner notes and a 1999 New Yorker article by Susan Orlean, the 
highlights of the band’s strange career have passed into legend: how their 
mill-hand father suddenly pulled his daughters out of school upon deciding 
their destiny lay in rock & roll; how the girls, barely able to hold their 
instruments properly, let alone play them, reluctantly cut a dozen clangorous 
songs one afternoon for the album (most of whose copies would be stolen by a 
fly-by-night promoter) and how their tortuous apprenticeship mercifully ended 
only when their father died of a coronary in 1975.

Gregory’s heartfelt band biography, premiering at the John Anson Ford’s 
small indoor theater, shows all of this and more, presenting an endearing 
portrait that avoids the saccharine and, indeed, occasionally pricks the 
audience with some wry imagery. The story begins as a choir, wheeling about 
to Ken Roht’s choreography, recites various published opinions of the 
Shaggs while singing an ecclesiastical-toned version of the album’s title 
track. Then a puppet-theater curtain parts to reveal the girls, composed of 
kitchen utensils, playing a gig. We meet the Shaggs themselves when Brian 
Sidney Bembridge’s wonderfully versatile set metamorphoses into the Wiggin 
family’s old house, now abandoned and being viewed by the sisters before a 
fire crew burns it down for a training exercise. Dot (Jamey Hood), Helen 
(Hedy Burress) and Betty (Sarah Hays) bicker over whether to preserve the 
house, and this small argument nicely foreshadows a sibling debate that will 
burn for the rest of their lives: Was their band an idyllic memory or a 
terrible nightmare?

With the appearance of their father early in the play, that debate would seem 
to have been settled right off the bat. Austin Wiggin (Steven Patterson) 
abruptly emerges from darkness in the girls’ loft bedroom, a frightening 
apparition mournfully singing “Silent Night.” In this primal moment 
Patterson is unmistakably a gargoyle of gothic imagination; you’d have to 
rummage through film noir and opera villainy to find comparisons — the 
preacher, say, in Night of the Hunter or Samiel in Der Freischütz.

In Gregory’s treatment, however, Austin quickly mellows into a kind of 
Yankee Murray Wilson — the Beach Boys’ warped stage dad/manager. Turns 
out Austin’s just another bitter blue-collar for whom the American Dream is 
a cruel gag. That, and a man bent on fulfilling the prophecies of his dead 
mother, who had predicted the three girls would play in a band. Before long, 
the sisters are being home-schooled; Austin and their mother, Annie (Laura 
Lamson), spend their savings to pay for music and vocal lessons.

The girls go along with it in a stoic, bovine sort of way. Dot’s even game 
enough to write all the songs, which are easily distinguished from the rock 
canon by their atonality and lack of teen rebellion. While others of their 
generation were proclaiming about war, drugs and free love, the Shaggs sang 
paeans to their missing cat, parents, Halloween and Jesus. The sisters, like 
many misunderstood prophets before them, are rewarded with scorn and 
obscurity, even though they play regular gigs at town hall dances and at a 
rest home.

Gregory walks a middle line (or high wire) between the temptation to coo over 
the band and to dismiss it. Her musical does not pander to the faux-stupids 
who idolize the Shaggs; neither does she seek a darker truth in the Wiggin 
sisters’ story. And there is a case to be made for seeking that truth in 
what would require a much more stylized show. More reasonably, though, this 
biography could probably settle for a pinch more darkness by drawing out 
material that is currently muted. According to Orlean’s New Yorker article, 
Helen claims to have been intimate with her father, and there is a slight 
hint of that in Act 1, when she and Austin are sitting alone on a couch one 
night, drawing a little close; when Annie enters, the pair recoil an inch 
back, but the distance of guilt seems like miles.

Nevertheless, this is a solid and funny telling of pop history, and nowhere 
does Gregory better demarcate the schizophrenic divide between mainstream 
entertainment and neurotic expression than in Act 1’s recording-studio 
scene. When a spotlight illuminates the girls playing with carefree abandon, 
the music sounds, well, listenable; but when Lonnie Rafael Alcaraz’s 
lighting emphasizes the studio’s stunned engineers, we hear what they hear 
— the real-life Shaggs from their album. It’s a heartbreaking yet 
hilarious moment.

As The Shaggs makes abundantly clear, people either love or loathe the 
band’s music. “It is the ugly and misshapen third-grade ashtray of rock 
music history,” one fan, quoted in the show, wrote frankly of the reissued 
Philosophy. Or, as Gregory has Betty say, “We’re the only band that gets 
worse the more it practices.” Yet the group would eventually be hailed as 
one of modern rock’s most important influences, and Rolling Stone, 
improbably, ranked Philosophy Number 3 among “The Greatest Garage 
Recordings of the 20th Century.” Although the girls listened to the radio 
and liked such bands of the day as Herman’s Hermits and the Monkees, their 
album seems totally without influences. Completely unmarred by melody lines, 
all of its songs are presented in a kind of tone-deaf nursery rhyme chant as 
the sisters become acquainted with their instruments.

The show’s music is a mix of some of the album’s recordings and Gunnar 
Madsen’s original compositions, which carry the story neatly enough but 
sound a little generic in the blues-rock way many American musicals do. I 
suppose an obvious alternative would have been to write Shaggs-like songs, 
which would be no alternative at all.

The Shaggs’ commercial legacy represents the best and worst aspects of 
contemporary music. On the one hand, the Wiggin sisters’ plodding 
persistence reflected the optimism of folk art, and indeed, their rough-hewn 
music is celebrated precisely because it is so unvarnished. On the other 
hand, by all accounts the girls didn’t want to be performing — it was 
certainly never their idea to start a band, and they continued to play only 
at their domineering father’s insistence. Their rawness is not the 
unschooled genius of Mississippi bluesmen but the yowlings of untalented 
white girls. So the Shaggs weren’t really a band in any artistic sense, but 
more of a science experiment conducted by a mad doctor; and, reminiscent of 
the abused subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, their reward for 
obedience was a wasted youth and stunted adulthood.

This doesn’t matter to a large segment of hip music consumers, who listen 
to the Shaggs the way they collect Keane paintings or hail the oeuvre of 
filmmaker Ed Wood. To these people, the important thing about the Wiggin 
sisters is that they were sweet, unsophisticated and free of irony and 
double-entendre — all the things they can only dream of being. The 
Shaggs’ misery is their easy listening.

Director John Langs shows a keen understanding of the show’s shifting moods 
and gets outstanding performances from his principal actors: Hays is perfect 
as the rebel sister, Betty; while Hood, at times looking like a young Shelly 
Duvall, emerges as the writer-uniter of the group, Dot; Burress pulls off the 
difficult task of portraying the quiet Helen, whose eventual breakdown would 
result in a crippling depression. Perhaps her most compelling moment comes 
when she first encounters her new drum kit, her face a picture of bafflement 
and wonder. Patterson’s Austin, too, effortlessly straddles the fine line 
between psycho dad and beaten-down lug, his performance never losing its 
gleam of menace.

Listening to the Shaggs, you can hear prenatal stirrings of the Dils, 
Breeders and Angel Corpus Christie. The difference is that these later bands 
would be driven by some kind of vision, whereas the Shaggs were the 
proverbial roomful of monkeys pounding on typewriters — or rather, guitars. 
To Gore Vidal’s judgment of the Cockettes that “No talent is not 
enough,” Cockette partisans could reply that the gay performance troupe at 
least had enthusiasm. Watching Gregory’s musical, we conclude that the 
Shaggs did not even have that — although for good reason. Outsider music 
may sound as though it comes from out of nowhere, but as the Shaggs proved, 
it doesn’t come from nothing.

THE SHAGGS: PHILOSOPHY OF THE WORLD | Book and lyrics by JOY GREGORY | 
Original music by GUNNAR MADSEN | At the Powerhouse Theater Company at 
[Inside] the Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood; (323) 461-3673 | 
Through December 14 


-Dina

dinahornreich AT earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~dinahornreich/
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Ockhams Razor: Basic Scientific Principal
"All things being equal the simplest explanation 
and the simplest answer is probably the right one."
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