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We're waiting for the movie on pins and needles. Rarely in the history of rock and roll has a band like this -- four sisters from Fremont, NH -- graced a stage and let fly a tune. THe Shaggs are an acquired taste, to be sure. But their story is like none other.

VISIT the Shaggs official web site

Somehow I missed the Shaggs. From 1969 until 1975 while the all-girl rock band was in its prime, I was attending college and wandering in Europe. To be honest, most people missed the hey-day of the Shaggs, what with Watergate and the moon walk and the demise of the Beatles. But through much of that chaotic era, every Saturday night, you could catch the red-haired Wiggin sisters -- Helen, Dot, Betty and sometimes Rachel – playing their heart out at the Fremont Town Hall. Outside of Fremont, New Hampshire, a town of under 4,000 souls in the boondocks of rural Rockingham County, the Shaggs were pretty much unknown.

That changed in 1988 when the rhythm and blues band NRBQ discovered and reissued the Shagg’s only album. "Philosophy of the World" and Rounder records then issued their version containing more early tracks. It is a stunning album by any standard. Like most people who hear the Shagg’s for the first time, I was rendered speechless. At first the music sounds atonal, like someone tuning rather than playing a guitar. The drummer beats on like a metronome, seemingly unmindful of the music going on around her. The girls sing in unison without a hint of harmony in practiced, nasal, almost robotic melodies. They sing about their cat Foot-Foot, about their wonderful parents, about their radio, their Savior and their philosophy of the world:

Oh the rich people want what the poor people’s got,
And the poor people want what the rich people’s got
And the skinny people want what the fat people’s got
And the fat people want what the skinny people’s got.
You can never please anybody in this world

And yet, there is something unforgettably good about the Shaggs music written largely by oldest sister Dot Wiggin, now 55 and living in Epping with her husband and two sons. Musician Frank Zappa once reportedly called the Shaggs "better than the Beatles." He was kidding, certainly, but their fame continues to grow. Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and The New Yorker have filled pages with Shaggy analysis. Critics remain uncertain whether the band is just bad or lightyears ahead of everyone else. Later recordings like "You’re Somethin’ Special to Me" and "My Cutie" – included in the compact disk release "The Shaggs" by Rounder Records -- are tighter, sweeter and more coherent, but die-hards seem to favor the oddly syncopated proto-Shaggs sound.

No one I’ve read has fully captured this band in words. There’s a reason for that. The Shaggs are unique, which is a word too often applied to musicians who are not. They are sincere, primitive, compelling and definitely an acquired taste. No band before or since sounds like them. I hear a mixture of Bob Dylan, Herman’s Hermits, Sesame Street, bluegrass, the Carpenters and a junior high school pep rally band.

"You'll either see the Wiggin sisters as talent show no-talents," one online reviewer writes, "or harbingers of an entire new musical vocabulary."

Another enthralled critic points to "some fiercely detailed and down-right ingenious compositional skills beneath all of the Neanderthal strum und drumming".

Other listeners simply laugh and walk away.

You will find a lot about the Shaggs by Googling the Internet. The complete New Yorker article on the band by Susan Orlean is available on the author’s web site. The CDs, including a Shagg’s tribute album, and a few audio clips are available on Amazon.com. There are a couple of unauthorized fan sites, most notably, Shaggs.com . I wrote to the webmaster there, but no one wrote back.

"They really don’t have permission to do it," Dot Wiggin told me this week. "The only official one that gets any information from us is by Tom Jordan, a fan from Texas."

"He called me and said he was doing a job in Boston and wanted to meet us. We met at the Galley Hatch. And he treated us to dinner and we talked. He said he was honored to do it and I said -- Go for it! He also started a fan club."

The Shaggs Online is currently just one web page, part of Jordan’s free personal homepage on Prodigy, formerly FlashNet, now aligned with SBC Communications. In the Web world, Prodigy is as grassroots as it gets. If you run Jordan’s site onto a printer, it weighs in at 12 paper pages. According to Jordan’s site he was a Kiss and Cheap Tricks fanatic before joining a high school band called "The Potentials" and later a Texas band called "Temper Temper". He also devotes space online to his favorite Sumo wrestlers besides his newest obsession – The Shaggs.

Dot says only about a dozen readers have purchased the official Shaggs fan club package available on the site. It includes a copy of the earliest Shagg photo from 1968, a custom made Dot Wiggin guitar pick and four shagg stickers.

Royalties from the band’s CDs arrive twice a year, roughly $400 in each check, Dot Wiggin says, just enough for a little vacation with the family and a few Christmas presents. But true fame and wealth may still be on the horizon. A Shaggs movie may begin production in Nova Scotia this winter. Filming was scheduled for this year, and last year, but Dot remains hopeful. They sold "life rights" to their story to Artisan Entertainment who hired journalist, photographer and filmmaker Katherine Dieckman to oversee the project.

The original producers came to see the project as too costly and too risky, Dots says. The production has now moved to another company, although Dieckman is still involved.

"They keep dragging it out. They keep getting stumbling blocks," Dot says. The Wiggins have so far spent any earnings on three lawyers who were helping sort out the music rights and advise them on the potential film. They will see some income only if the film goes into production. If it becomes a sleeper hit, there are potential royalties. Dot says she is too busy raising a family to spent time fretting over the process.

Anyone with half a brain can see this story has huge movie potential. It plays in my mind already like one of those ethereal Australian films in the genre of "Picnic at Hanging Rock," built out of nuance and poignant glances with very little real action. For years the rural sisters were managed by their father Austin Wiggin, Jr., a handsome and dominating Exeter factory worker who dreamed his daughters would be famous. Their band had been predicted by a fortune teller. Austin Wiggin bought their equipment and pulled them out of school and told them to stay home and practice all the time. They did. According to Dot Wiggin, the girls rose late, practiced for two hours, then worked on their school correspondence courses. Then they did their calisthenics, rigidly prescribed by their father, and rehearsed two more hours in the evenings when he was home. This lasted from 1968 until Austin Wiggin’s death in 1975.

If that’s not a good story, I’ve never heard one. It explains how the sisters developed their automated, almost telepathic musical style. Father Wiggin struggled to pay for their recording sessions, the girl’s music lessons, the original album, and their funky mini-skirt outfits. They never really wanted to be rock stars. He selected the name, probably thinking of "shag" haircuts, Dot suggests. He rented the Fremont Town Hall for the dances while his wife Annie collected tickets and sold sodas and the Wiggin sons helped out. The Shaggs were like the Jackson Five, except for the success. Orleans hints at a darker side to the tale in her article, but the daughter’s dedication to their father is unrelenting. A photo of him recently appeared on the official web site.

"We certainly had a sheltered life," Dot says today. The sisters retain the legal right to review the movie script. So far they have objected to some of the language used, but they understand that the film will be part fact, part fiction, and that they may not like everything they see on the silver screen.

"They told us If we took everything out we didn’t like, there wouldn’t be a movie," she says with a gentle laugh.

Amazingly, two Shaggs movies are possible. Susan Orleans New Yorker article "Meet the Shaggs" has been optioned for film by a development company owned, in part, by actor Tom Cruise, Dot says. That film, should it be made, might not have access to the actual Shagg recordings. The Wiggins were not happy with their portrayal in the New Yorker article that helped kick start their evolving cult status.

"It was a good article, but if she’d only kept to the truth," Dot says. "A lot of it was right and quite a lot of it was wrong."

So the Wiggin sisters wait patiently, as they have for 30 years, to see if fame is just around the corner – and if their father was right after all.

Lyrics from "Philosophy of the World" by the Shaggs
Lyrics copyright Dorothy Wiggin. All rights reserved.
published by Hi Varieties-du-Plent / ASCAP
Music © 1988 Rounder Records Corp
Photo of album cover courtesy of The Shaggs