It's now October, which means it's time once again to drag out that classic cut, "It's Halloween" by The Shaggs. The Shaggs were three sisters that formed their own garage band in the late 60s and somehow managed to find their way into a recording studio and cut a number of tracks. The result is the essence of homemade / outsider music: utterly amateur and utterly fascinating. If you've never heard The Shaggs before, you're in for a treat. It's not just that they're bad: there are thousands of incompetent bands out there. It's that they're bad in such an intriguing way. It's as if you were to come across some Martians who had never heard music before and you handed them some instruments, gave them a five-minute lecture on what pop music was, told them to write a song and that you'd be back in an hour to see what they came up with. "It's Halloween" is a pretty fair sample of what you'd get.[only a 30-second clip seems to be available. But that may be all you can take anyway.]
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