Marcy Payground Concert Preview

This Sunday Marcy Playground will be playing The Red Devil Lounge on Polk St. in San Francisco. Marcy Playground may be best known for their 1998 radio smash hit “Sex and Candy” which was on their self titled debut album. “Sex and Candy” absolutely blew up the charts when it was first released, as it spent fifteen weeks at number 1 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks charts. Eventually Marcy Playground the album went platinum and two other hit singles were released, “St. Joe and His School Bus” and “Sherry Fraser.” Marcy Playground were highly influenced by nineties grunge music, especially their vocalist John Wozniac, who claims Kurt Cobain and Nirvana had a huge influence on him. Wozniac went to Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA at the height of when the Grunge movement was penetrating Seattle, so he was more than exposed to the great music coming out of the Northwest side of America.
Marcy Playground songs run in different styles and tones throughout their incredible debut album. Some of of Wozniac’s songs have a folk element to them, while others have undertones that they could be childrens songs. Some are just plain drug references, such as the first song on the album “Poppies,” and “Opium.” In “Ancient Walls Of Flowers” the sound of psychedelia makes an appearance as Wozniac sings,

“Ancient walls of flowers tumbling down, black cat petals and a smiling clown. I like to keep to keep them in a jar inside. Just enough to mess my mind inside. But I never heard you calling from the sun. Did you ever care to to shoot your silver gun. No one ever heard you calling from the moon. Did you ever care to sing your free love to.”

Such lyrics as these paint a picture that many of the songs Marcy Playground sound like. It is not surprising that the cover of the album featured a dummy face of a man with yellow flowers circling around his head in what vividly shows you what type of psychedelic songs will be on the album.

The Marcy Playground debut record cover.


While Marcy Playground may not have done much since the release of that 1998 debut album that promised so much for this future band, they should not be missed at The Red Devil Lounge. Their last two albums “Shapeshifter,” and “MP3” have not sold nearly as well as their debut album but something about this band still remains relevant today. Maybe it is because they are actually better than a lot of the other bands out there dominating the current pop music charts. They bring back good memories of a time in the late 90s when you could show up to a festival and Marcy Playground would be somewhere in the middle of the bill of a ton of great alternative acts and they were just one of a ton of great bands back then, but today we lack a lot of that great music that was coming out in that time in America.