[Rider]

I've been reading tons of stuff about outsider music the past few weeks, basically start with Jandek and The Residents and follow all the links on wikipedia 2 great reads today:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Meek

On February 3, 1967, the eighth anniversary of Buddy Holly's death, Meek killed his landlady Violet Shenton and then himself with a single barreled shotgun that he had confiscated from his protegé, former Tornados bassist and solo star Heinz Burt at his Holloway Road home/studio (Meek had flown into a rage and taken it from him when he informed Meek that he used it while on tour to shoot animals). Meek had kept it under his bed, along with the shells. As the gun had been registered to Burt, he was questioned intensively by police, before being eliminated from their enquiries. A blue plaque has since been placed at the location of the studio to commemorate Meek's life and work.

and then

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shaggs

According to an account recorded by Irwin Chusid, the idea of The Shaggs is older than the girls themselves. When the girls' father, Austin Wiggin, Jr., was young, his mother made three predictions: he would marry a strawberry blonde; he would have two sons she would not live to see; and his daughters would form a famous musical group. After the first two came true, Austin set out to make the third happen.

To call the album amateurish is an understatement. Cub Koda wrote, "There's an innocence to these songs and their performances that's both charming and unsettling. Hacked-at drumbeats, whacked-around chords, songs that seem to have little or no meter to them ... being played on out-of-tune, pawn-shop-quality guitars all converge, creating dissonance and beauty, chaos and tranquility, causing any listener coming to this music to rearrange any pre-existing notions about the relationships between talent, originality, and ability. There is no album you might own that sounds remotely like this one." (emphasis in original) [1] Reportedly during the recording sessions, the band would occasionally stop playing, claiming one of them had made a mistake and that they needed to start over, leaving the sound engineers to wonder how the girls could tell when a mistake had been made