The creation of singer John Wozniak (b. 19 January 1971, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA), this US post-grunge outfit was signed by EMI Records in the mid-90s on the strength of Wozniak’s demo album From The Marcy Playground, recorded under the name Zog BogBean. Shortly after the release of Marcy Playground’s self-titled debut album, EMI America closed its offices and Wozniak was forced to move to a new home at Capitol Records. Luckily, a single culled from the debut, ‘Sex And Candy’, was beginning to pick up radio and press attention, eventually reaching number 1 on Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart and number 8 on the Hot 100 singles chart. Capitol repressed the debut album under its own imprint. However, Wozniak was keen that the single’s success should not distract listeners from the other material on the album and considered leaving it off. Other stand-out tracks on the record included ‘Poppies’, which dealt with the opium wars, and ‘Saint Joe On The School Bus’, an endearing tale about school misfits. Other contributors to the project included drummer Dan Rieser, bass player Dylan Keefe (b. 11 April 1970, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA) and cellist Jen Handler, though Marcy Playground remains very much Wozniak’s creation.
A second album, Shapeshifter, was released in November 1999, but despite being another impressively consistent collection the lack of a stand-out track of the quality of ‘Sex And Candy’ hampered the album’s commercial reception. Rieser was then replaced by Gonzalo Martinez De La Cotera (b. 13 July 1962, Miami, Florida, USA) as Wozniak struggled to record a new Marcy Playground album. After ditching one set of songs, he finally completed work on the band’s third album. Released in 2004, the awkwardly titled MP3 did little to repair the band’s commercial and critical standing.
