A New Creation Resurrected from Obscurity

jonp72 — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:46:46 -0800

The New Creation was born in 1970 when Chris Towers, an unknown guitarist from Vancouver, decided to form a Christian rock group with his mother Lorna as lead singer and their neighbor Janet Tiessen on drums. Scared by reports of the hippie excesses of the Manson/Altamont era, Lorna Towers wrote doom-laden, apocalyptic lyrics for the New Creation's aptly titled album, Troubled. The band was unpolished, yet somehow captured a unique lo-fi sound comparable to a hybrid of the Velvet Underground and the Shaggs. The group might be totally forgotten today, if an aging hippie record dealer named Ty Scammel hadn't rescued a copy from a $1 bargain bin, leading to the album's rediscovery by collectors of Christian rock and outsider music. Companion Records released a reissue CD that proved popular enough that the band not only re-formed, but released A Unique Disaster, a sequel CD inspired by the Book of Revelations and the Left Behind series. Now that an impossibly rare original copy of the New Creation's Troubled has appeared on EBay, rediscover the band once again with a great article from the Canadian blog, Alienated in Vancouver. Sound clips can be found here, and a fan video of the Status Quo Song can be found on YouTube.

You can never please/any-boh-oh-dy/in, this, world!

not_on_display — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 21:22:53 -0800

In 1968, three sisters from Fremont, New Hampshire -- Dot, Helen, and Betty Wiggin -- started a band, under the encouragement, support, and management of their father, Austin. Dot recalls that the girls would rise late, practice for two hours, then work on their home-schooling. Then they did their calisthenics, rigidly prescribed by their father, and rehearsed two more hours in the evenings when Austin was home. Over the next 8 years, Austin would rent out the Fremont Town Hall many Saturday nights for a dance; the sisters, known collectively as "The Shaggs," would play their music, while their mother, Annie, would collect tickets and sell sodas (with help from more of the Wiggin siblings). In 1975, Austin Wiggins died; the sisters, without their father to spur them on, laid down their instruments and got on with the rest of their lives. And that would have been the last that anyone had heard the Wiggin Sisters' music. Except that, a year after the girls had started taking lessons, proud father that he was, Austin (a factory worker in nearby Exeter) paid for time in a recording studio for his daughters, and then paid more money to press the resulting album of songs. "Going into the recording studio was all my father's idea," Dot says. "We didn't feel like we were ready yet; we didn't feel that we knew that much about music. We were just getting started. He gave us a lot of support. He backed us up all the way." Still, that recording was almost just another Wiggin family story, as the guy whom Austin paid to press the album took off with his money and most of the records. The master tapes, stored in a chest in the attic, also eventually went missing. The few albums that remained somehow found their ways into the right hands, and in 1980 Rounder Records re-released The Shaggs' now-classic LP "Philosophy of the World". In the 9/27/1999 issue of the New Yorker, Susan Orleans wrote an article, "Meet the Shaggs." The article, and the Wiggins' story, caught the eye of Artisan Entertainment. A biopic seemed to be on the horizon, but that eventually morphed into an award-winning musical. "It was a good article, but if she’d only kept to the truth," Dot muses in the seacoastnh.com article. "A lot of it was right and quite a lot of it was wrong." Nobody can deny their own first reaction to The Shaggs' music: either you've found bliss, or a headache. It's a mixture of naive innocence, simplicity, chaos, confusion, and beauty. Lester Bangs, deeming the album "one of the landmarks of rock'n'roll history," describes the Shaggs' sound, "sorta like 14 pocket combs being run through a moose's dorsal, but very gently." Frank Zappa thought that the Shaggs were "better than the Beatles." If "outsider music" had a Mt. Rushmore, the Wiggin sisters would be standing there, 7 stories high, pawn-shop guitars in hand, smiling, ready to light up your world. You can listen to four of their songs on their MySpace page. There are also plenty of examples of their music (but sadly, no footage of them) on YouTube: - My Pal Foot Foot [previously on MeFi, a different version] - I Love - You're Something Special To Me two three four - Philosophy of the World - It's Halloween (Possibly one of the best Halloween songs ever.) - Gimme dat ding - I'm So Happy When You're Near (video features pandas!)

what will foot foot do?

pyramid termite — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 11:18:45 -0800

shaggs music video

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A New Creation Resurrected from Obscurity

You can never please/any-boh-oh-dy/in, this, world!

what will foot foot do?