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if you wanted to do it?’ I asked.
    ‘No!’ Dot and Betty laughed.
    ‘Did you sometimes think your father was nuts?’ I asked.
    There was a short silence. ‘Yeah, that would fit it,’ Betty said.
    ‘Obsessive,’ said Dot. ‘Very obsessive with the music.’ And with exercises too: ‘Jumping-jacks,’ said Dot. ‘Push-ups. We had to stay in shape in case we
ever got to be on
The Ed Sullivan Show
.’
    ‘When you think back on those rehearsals, what comes into your mind?’ I asked.
    ‘That I didn’t want to do it,’ said Betty.
    It lasted five years. And then, just as suddenly as Austin had announced the strategy, he one day declared them ready.
    ‘We didn’t think we were ready,’ Dot told me.
    Still, they drove to the recording studio – a girl group of Kaspar Hausers, out in the countryside, home-schooled, separated from society, pretty much inventing music from scratch. If
you’ve heard practically no music and then you’re told to create music, what would it sound like?
     
    It sounded, as Bonnie Raitt said of them decades later, like music performed by ‘castaways on their own musical desert island’. The singer in the band NRBQ, Terry Adams, later
described them to me as having ‘a different rhythmic approach, which acknowledges what’s going on but ignores it at the same time. There are no harmonies. It’s always unison
singing. Two voices and one guitar playing exactly the same melody at all times.’
    ‘Is that unusual?’ I asked him.
    ‘Very,’ he said.
    Their music is of course available online. I suggest the song ‘Philosophy of the World’ as a starting point. It sounds like space aliens pretending to be human. It sounds, too, I now
realized, like the music of abuse. And the cruelty only spread once the album came out and Austin forced his daughters to be the house band at the local dances.
    ‘We’d have soda cans shot at us on stage,’ Dot said, ‘kids telling us how bad we were, how our music was trash, how it hurt their ears, how we didn’t know what we
were doing . . .’
    But the music wasn’t trash – it was something altogether different. They were doing it against their will, they weren’t very good, they massively over-rehearsed, they had no
musical influences – it was like a child throwing a bunch of chemicals randomly into a Bunsen burner and the strangest bubbles ensuing.
    In 1975 Austin dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of forty-seven. The instant the sisters heard the news they disbanded The Shaggs, determined never to play again.
    And they never would have – their music would have been lost for ever – except that Terry Adams somehow came across a copy of
Philosophy of the World
some twenty years later,
was mesmerized by what he heard, and decided to drive to Fremont to try and convince them to let him re-release it.
    ‘My brother and my drummer and I got in the car and took a six-hour drive, just blindly,’ Terry Adams told me when I later contacted him. ‘We went to the library and asked
around until we could find them.’
    Eventually Dot and her then husband Fred agreed to a rendezvous at a local Pizza Hut. Terry and his brother and the band’s drummer sat on one side of the table, with Dot and Fred on the
other. Terry nervously gave them his pitch. Dot and Fred listened. And finally, when he was done, Fred leaned forward, businessman to businessman, and said, ‘Well how much is this going to
cost us?’
    There was a silence. ‘No,’ Terry explained. ‘
We’re
going to pay
you
.’
    Betty didn’t want anything to do with it. It was all just too painful. But then, when Terry Adams released the album and the reviews came in, even she began to doubt her
own inabilities. Kurt Cobain, in his list of fifty favourite albums of all time, put
Philosophy of the World
at number five (just below the Pixies and Iggy and the Stooges and above the Sex
Pistols and R.E.M.).
    Jonathan Richman said one Shaggs song was ‘worth ten