Frank: The True Story that Inspired the Movie Read online

  ‘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 “professional” songs. The Shaggs convince me that they’re the real thing when they sing.’ The jazz composer Carla Bley said, ‘They bring my mind to a complete halt.’ Nothing much happened after that. The album sold pretty well. They performed one or two shows. Susan Orlean wrote about them for the New Yorker. A stage musical – Philosophy of the World – was written and performed in New York and Los Angeles. Their film rights were bought, although no film has yet been made. I turned my meeting with them into a documentary for BBC Radio Four. But, basically, it was a just flurry and everything went back to normal for Dot and Betty.

  ‘When did you first listen to Philosophy of the World and think, “This is actually quite good?” ’ I asked Betty towards the end of my day with them.

  She looked at me and hesitated. ‘I still don’t think it’s good,’ she said.

  No trace of The Shaggs’ story made it to our Frank film, but something did: for all our mythologizing, the margins can be painful and some people are there because they have no choice.

  ***

  A week after I returned from Fremont, I saw Frank Sidebottom’s name trending on Twitter. I’d spent a couple of years living with the words Frank Sidebottom every day, so this didn’t seem at all odd. It was just his name on a screen like every day. I clicked on the link and it said ‘Frank Sidebottom dead’. I wondered why Chris had decided to kill off Frank and why Twitter cared enough to make it a trending topic. So I clicked on another link:

  Stars lead tributes as Frank Sidebottom comic dies at 54

  Chris Sievey, famous as his alter ego Frank Sidebottom, was found collapsed at his home in Hale early yesterday. It is understood that his girlfriend called an ambulance and he was taken to Wythenshawe Hospital, where his death was confirmed.

  Manchester Evening News, 22 June 2010

  When I’d told Chris at our last meeting in Kentish Town how thin he looked and he shrugged and said it was a mystery and he seemed pleased – he didn’t know it then, but it had been throat cancer.

  Frank Sidebottom comic faces pauper’s funeral

  The comic genius behind Mancunian legend Frank Sidebottom is facing a pauper’s funeral after dying virtually penniless. Chris Sievey had no assets and little money in the bank, his family have revealed.

  Manchester Evening News, 23 June 2010

  A pauper’s funeral? What did that involve? A journey back in time two hundred years? Later, Chris’s son Sterling told me that the hospital bereavement officer had described a pauper’s funeral to him as ‘not as bad as it sounded. There’d be a coffin but it wouldn’t be coffin shaped. It would be more like a rectangular box. Like a cargo crate or something.’

  ‘What about a service?’ I asked Sterling.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No real service. And there wouldn’t have been a gravestone.’

  I sent out a single tweet, saying that for a few thousand pounds Chris could be spared a pauper’s funeral. Within an hour 554 people had donated £6,950.03. An hour later it was 1,108 donors and £14,018.90. By the end of the day it was 1,632 donors raising a total of £21,631.55. One blogger wrote of the donors: ‘I found the speed of events breathtaking, and genuinely inspiring that so many people could reach into their pockets in tribute to a man who many won’t have met, spoken to, or even seen his face. It’s nice to know there are so many kind-hearted people out there & wonderful to see another example of how social networks can be used in a positive, inspirational way.’

  The money we raised that day was more than enough to bury and exhume and rebury Chris half a dozen times. The donations never stopped. We had to stop them. People still wanted to give but there was nothing to give for.

  A Timperley village councillor, Neil Taylor, started his own campaign to raise money for a memorial statue – Frank cast in bronze. He sent me photographs of its journey from the foundry in the Czech Republic to its final resting place outside Johnson’s the dry cleaners in Timperley. In the photographs Frank looked like he’d been disturbingly kidnapped but was fine with it.

  Frank statue.

  And then the unveiling:

  The unveiling.

  In eight weeks’ time our Frank film, starring Michael Fassbender, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Domhnall Gleeson, will be premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. As I prepare to go to it I remember something Chris once said to me. It was late one night, and we were in the van, reminiscing about a show we’d played a few weeks earlier at JB’s nightclub in Dudley, West Midlands. It was very poorly attended. There can’t have been more than fifteen people in the audience. One
of them produced a ball, the audience split into teams and, ignoring us, played a game. In the van Chris smiled wistfully.

  ‘That Dudley gig,’ he said.

  ‘Ah ha?’ I said.

  ‘Best show we ever played,’ he said.

  THE END

  Frank, the movie.

  Frank

  Jon Ronson is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He is the author of four bestsellers, Them: Adventures with Extremists, The Men Who Stare at Goats, The Psychopath Test and Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, and two collections, Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness and What I Do: More True Tales of Everyday Craziness. He lives in London and New York City.

  Also by Jon Ronson

  Them: Adventures with Extremists

  The Men Who Stare at Goats

  Out of the Ordinary: True Tales of Everyday Craziness

  What I Do: More True Tales of Everyday Craziness

  The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

  Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

  First published 2014 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-4472-6543-6

  Copyright © Jon Ronson 2014

  The right of Jon Ronson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Picture credits:

  Picture 1 courtesy of Element Pictures/Runaway Fridge Films. Photographer Jonathan Hession; Picture 2 courtesy of Linda Nylind; Picture 7 © Shirlaine Forrest; Picture 9 © Neil Taylor. With thanks to Neil Taylor; Picture 10 © Arfon Jones. With thanks to Arfon Jones; Picture 11 Picture courtesy of Element Pictures/Runaway Fridge Films. Photographer Jonathan Hession

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.picador.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.