aunt mary says...

Marcy Playground was one of those 1990's more-or-less Seattle-based bands (the group actually coalesced and began recording in NYC) of which Nirvana and Pearl Jam are the best known. They scored big with their first album, one of whose titles, "Sex and Candy," spent 15 weeks at number one on the Billboard modern rock tracks chart. That was followed by the only slightly less successful single release of a much rockier tune, "St. Joe on the Schoolbus," from the same album.

I never listened much to "Sex and Candy," but I'll never forget "St. Joe." In the fall of 1997 when the single was first released on AM radio, my daughter heard it one night as she and I were driving around Orange County in her old wreck of a red Nissan Sentra. She stopped at a Tower store (remember Tower?) and bought the tape. We spent the rest of the evening going here and there -- first to Diedrich's Coffee and then somewhere else, running into people she knew (Rachel always knows everybody) and in between, cruising up and down 17th Avenue East listening to "St. Joe on the Schoolbus" turned up loud. We couldn't get enough of it, and must have heard it twenty times that night.

It's a great, great tune. The video is here.


Marcy Playground has never really been a band so much as it's simply John Wozniak, the singer, guitarist, and songwriter, and a couple of sidemen. He's the only member of the group that appeared on every track in the band's debut album, and I noticed that on "St. Joe" the group's regular drummer sat out, and Wozniak brought in a hired gun to play just on that one song. It was a good call, considering the nature of the tune, and I've always believed that finding that "just right" drummer is one of the essential keys to success for any band, and failure to do so condemns many otherwise-outstanding groups to obscurity.

My daughter was 25 at this time, and her career had not yet blossomed into the breakthrough stage she would later experience. She was still laboring away in obscurity down in SoCal, the land of milk and money, while I was living in Bakersfield, a couple hours away. I used to try to get down there to see her once a month or so, and I don't know whether she realizes how valuable and necessary those times were for me. Going to Orange County to hang out with Rachel gave me a chance to escape from the weight of an often stressful life at home -- to escape from the classroom and taking work home and from the television which was constantly on at my house, and from endless piles of meat and potatoes on the table every night. When I was with my daughter we kicked back, drank gallons of coffee and chain smoked cigarettes, listened to the latest sounds, and had intelligent conversations. It wasn't every day I got to do those things.

These are memories I have stored up in my heart of hearts, and "St. Joe" is permanently inscribed there.