Marcy Playground: Wet Dreams, Lollipops, and Tootsie Rolls

By Jace Howard

Marcy Playground is riding a huge wave of success on their current alternative offbeat love song, "Sex and Candy." The song is currently the #4 most played song in the country according to the Alternative Radio Airplay charts. I recently sat down with the band consisting of John Wozniak (guitar, voacals); Dylan Keefe (bass); and Dan Rieser (drums) and spoke to them about their past label problems, current success and future plans.

ARW: How did the band get started?

JOHN: We got started in New York when I met Dylan through Kurt Rosenwinkel, a buddy of both of ours, and he was playing bass in my band and he couldn't continue playing in my band once we got signed because he was already playing in another band signed to our label.

DYLAN: Yeah, he's got his own thing going, he is also in a jazz band.

JOHN: He's really busy, he's got two bands, not including our project, so he introduced Dylan to the mix and Dylan introduced me to Dan pretty soon after.

ARW: (Jokingly) Where did you get a band name like that from?

JOHN: It came from a school I went to from kindergarten all the way through to fourth grade, it was an open program, there were no grades, you call your teachers by their first name. There is no ceiling for learning you can learn at your own pace, things like that. That's where the name came from, I wrote a song in 91' called "From the Marcy Playground" which I actually decided after I had written that song, would be a better name for a band.

ARW: Dylan, you also went to an open school?

DYLAN: Yeah, I went to another open school in Minneapolis at about the same time. We didn't know each other than. It was the sister school to the Marcy, it was called Lake Harriet Open. So when I met John, we had like really similar backgrounds with that, it obviously really affected John's life and my life to go to such a different school and so anytime I meet anyone who went to an open school or meet up with someone who I went to school with, they always have sort of a different look on life, so we really bonded with that.

JOHN: Yeah, we bonded, man, we bonded!

ARW: Give me some of your musical influences?

JOHN: (As if he has been asked this question way too many times!) Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, writers really mostly, actually my main influences have been writers, like C.S. Lewis..Authors of children's fantasy books.

DYLAN: Bob Dylan, Bob Marley

JOHN: All the Bob's

DYLAN: All the Bob's when I was younger, cause that's what my parents were listening too. I listen to a lot of jazz later in high school and college, played a lot of jazz, Stevie Wonder, stuff like that.

JOHN: Hey, he's not named Bob.

ARW: Any covers the band likes to perform?

JOHN: Yeah, I do a cover of the "The Needle and the Damage Done" by Neil Young.

DYLAN: Solo!

JOHN: Solo, as it was meant to be so shall it be done.

ARW: You use to be on EMI, now you're on Capitol, give me some thoughts on that?

JOHN: EMI was like..

DYLAN: Our song wasn't on the radio and now it is on the radio.

JOHN: End of story! EMI was filled with really cool people and we were really sorry to see them go. Everyone lost their job and that sucked. We were never afraid that once EMI went under that we would never find another label.

DYLAN: Yeah, we had a lot of confidence in our manager and he thought it was actually a blessing for us to have our label go down. He was always sort of hoping for us to be on another label, not because.. I mean there were definitely people at EMI that worked really, really hard for us and totally loved us, and those are still people we keep in contact with who check up on us all the time. A lot of departments didn't really work well together and the radio promotion department didn't really work well for us.

JOHN: It did really well for a lot of the other acts, but for us, I don't think they really understood where we were coming from. Where as Capital is much more like an Alternative Rock.

ARW: John do you write a lot of material on the road?

JOHN: Yeah, it's funny, I just wrote something today which I want to race back to the hotel and figure out. Write it down, sketch it up, make it work.

ARW: John, where do these ideas come from?

JOHN: I don't know, just out of the air, things just sort of pop out of the air at me. I'll be by myself humming something. I'll wake up humming something and I'll write it down.

DYLAN: Sometimes it seems like you hear, or read something, like you read that thing, and were like I got to write something about that.

JOHN: I do read stuff, and I'll be like I got to write something about that. The odd thing though is right now, I've been reading a lot of computer magazines, so hopefully I don't end up writing a song about the new Intel Processor. (Dylan in the background making computer noises)

ARW: You have a web site, is that something you try and keep up?

JOHN: Yeah, we try and maintain that the best we can. We just put some new pictures up there and hopefully we will get some more pictures up there. It's just called touring, but I want to call it "The field trip page," you know make it fun.

DYLAN: Our manager has one guy working for him and the guy spends most of his time working on the web site

ARW: "Sex and Candy"?

JOHN: It's just a love song, but I figured if I was going to write a love song, I should write a love song that was unique and not stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before me. So I tried to do something a little more.

DYLAN: Like the Barry Manilow's that stood before you.

JOHN: Or the Cole Porter's, because those song writers may be gone, but certainly not forgotten as far as love songs. So I just wanted to do something a little different, create a vibe that was different than most love songs. Plain and simple, it's a pop tune, do you know what I mean.

ARW: And the Candy bit?

JOHN: Candy is just like candy. Lollipops and Tootsie Rolls.

ARW: What are some of your goals?

DYLAN and JOHN: Make more records.

DYLAN: Were real excited to make a second record, because we've been sitting with this record for quite a long time. We have so much more material and we've been playing a lot of material live so that people that come out to see us, have a bit more diversity than just the record. So we want to get in and record with this band, cause we've had a lot of time to grow.

JOHN: Play in front of as many people as possible. Continue to write well and perform well. God willing are health stays with us. We want to stay healthy because we want to be able to enjoy the fun we are having right now. ARW: John tell me a little about the video for "Sex and Candy."

JOHN: It's a wet dream. The video for Sex and Candy is a wet dream. It was devised by Jamie who did the "Super Bon Bon" video for Soul Coughing. He also did "Early to Bed" from Morphine. We hired him because he was available and really good. His idea was to do something that literally had nothing to do with the song, but had to do with the abstract imagery that is conjured by the song, not necessarily in the song. So a wet dream popped out of it... 16 Hours of shooting was kind of grueling, but it was a lot of fun.

Alt Rock World

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