The Shaggs lie at one extreme on the dimension of authenticity. Their music is termed "naïve": art born of no formal training or unsullied by pretension, vanity, artifice, or concern with musical rules and theories.#6528•
To a record maker's ears, this is the Shaggs' most intriguing quality. Chusid describes how the engineer who recorded Philosophy of the World observed the Shaggs stopping in mid-performance to correct one another, saying, "No, it should sound like this," demonstrating that they were all tuned in to the same cryptic target.
The legendary record producer Tony Berg admiringly raised the question "How is it possible for three people to be so perfectly wrong together?" while the blues singer Bonnie Raitt affectionately declared, "The Shaggs are like castaways on their own musical island." And like Darwin's finches on the remote Galápagos Islands who evolved their own unique birdsong, the Shaggs evolved their own musical language.#6526•
Like Emily Dickinson, the Wiggin sisters fashioned a collaborative poetry born out of isolation that followed its own peculiar rules and diction, converting their mutual loneliness into something beautiful and transcendent. Dickinson herself was a fan of naïve authenticity. The Amherst poet famously wrote, "Nature is a haunted house, but art is a house that tries to be haunted." What she meant was that, for her, self-conscious attempts at describing an interpretation of truth are never as appealing as the natural expression of those same truths.#6527•
Chapter 7
Achieving realism with magnetic tape recording was no easy feat. True masters of the art of high fidelity have always been few and far between. What separated the good engineers from the great ones was craftsmanship: the painstaking execution of hard-won tricks of the trade. High-fidelity techniques included, for example, the balanced capture of all forty-seven strings of a harp with just one microphone, as well as more creative tricks, such as placing a mic at the end of a garden hose with its other end in front of the kick drum or putting a mic and a loudspeaker in a cement stairwell for some do-it-yourself reverb.#6525•