“Sex and Candy” is a cipher wrapped in an enigma, smothered in secret sauce. It’s Marcy Playground’s first, last and only Billboard Hot 100 hit, spending a record-setting 15 weeks atop the industry trade publication’s Modern Rock Songs chart, yet despite the 1997 single’s cultural ubiquity, it is so opaque — so maddeningly inscrutable — that no one has any earthly idea what it’s about, including the song’s writer.
Marcy Playground takes its name from Minneapolis’ Marcy Open School, the alternative grade school attended by singer/guitarist John Wozniak. The family relocated to the Philadelphia area when Wozniak’s father accepted a teaching position at Bryn Mawr College, and there John recorded 1990’s self-released Zog BogBean — From the Marcy Playground in his bedroom studio, aided by then-girlfriend Sherry Fraser and her brother Scott. After graduating high school, Wozniak headed west to attend Olympia, Wa.’s Evergreen State College, the public liberal arts college famed for incubating some of the decade’s defining musical forces, including Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson and Sub Pop Records founder Bruce Pavitt. Wozniak split for New York City in 1994, forming Marcy Playground with multi-instrumentalist Jared Kotler; together with session pro Glenn Braver on bass, they recorded two albums’ worth of Wozniak’s songs at Roslyn, N.Y.’s Sabella Recording Studios. With the addition of bassist Dylan Keefe, Marcy Playground also began playing club dates across New York, eventually earning the notice of EMI America Records and signing to the label in 1995.
Wozniak authored “Sex and Candy” several years prior to the second round of Sabella Recording Studios sessions that yielded Marcy Playground’s self-titled debut LP, issued by EMI on Feb. 25, 1997. The song — which Wozniak claimed he wrote in his bedroom at 4:00 a.m. and completed in under an hour — was inspired by his relationship with a Bryn Mawr student: “I was probably 17 or something like that and she was like 18. I always liked the older girls,” he told Songfacts in 2010. “We were in her dorm room, and her roommate came in and she saw us there, and she was like, ‘Oh, it smells like sex and candy in here.’ And I always remembered that. And then when I was writing the song and I was coming up with all these weird disco-era references that I was making up — ‘platform double suede’ and all that business — I was like, ‘Hey, let’s just throw in that phrase that’s been sticking in my head for the last five years or whatever.’”
Kotler played played bass on “Sex and Candy” as well as two other tracks from Marcy Playground, “Sherry Fraser” (so named for Wozniak’s high school bandmate and muse) and “One More Suicide.” He additionally played drums on 11 of the album’s 12 songs. But tensions between Wozniak and Kotler increased as the sessions wore on, and Kotler ultimately quit the band prior to the album’s completion, with Braver playing bass on its first single, “Poppies,” and new Marcy Playground drummer Dan Rieser appearing on the follow-up, “Saint Joe on the School Bus,” which reached number 8 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks (now Alternative Airplay) chart, which ranks the 40 most-played songs on alternative and modern rock radio stations. Marcy Playground supported the album’s rollout by opening for alt-radio veterans Toad the Wet Sprocket, but midway through the tour, EMI America closed its doors; some former EMI staffers continued to work Marcy Playground’s album even after the label ceased operations, however, and the trio eventually landed with Capitol Records, then helmed by Gary Gersh, the golden-child executive who signed Nirvana and Everclear.
Capitol released “Sex and Candy” to radio on Sept. 15, 1997, three weeks before it reissued the Marcy Playground album. The single quickly caught on at active rock and modern rock stations across the country, in large part because there wasn’t anything on the airwaves quite like it. The terse melody and strangely sensuous production draw from across the periodic table of alt-rock elements — a dash of Nirvana, of course, as well as a tablespoon of Beck, a pinch of Sparklehorse and a dollop of Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So,” for starters — but Wozniak’s impressionistic lyrics and laconic vocals transform “Sex and Candy” into something much greater and more fascinating than the sum of its parts. While by no means a novelty tune, it is as strange and impregnable as any song ever to reach the Billboard Top 10, which it did in April 1988: you probably can’t imagine a place for “Sex and Candy” on radio if it dropped today, but you couldn’t really imagine a place for it on radio back then, either. Yet somehow, there it was, loitering around the same Top 40 playlists as Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” and Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply,” and it remains a staple on rock radio decades later. Both Maroon 5 and Slothrust have covered it over the years, too.
But “Sex and Candy” must mean something, right? “It means so many different things, and so many different parts of it came from so many different places,” Wozniak told Songfacts. “It’s just about seeing some sexy girl and then falling in love, and then asking a dumb question to yourself… well, it’s not even asking a question. It’s just — I don’t know! I don’t know. I’m just gonna be straight-up honest: I don’t know. I’m telling you, when I was very young I experimented with drugs, but when I was writing these songs, I wasn’t high. But it sounds like I was high.” The “Sex and Candy” music video, directed and conceptualized by Jamie Caliri, clarifies and confuses the matter in equal measure when it depicts Wozniak’s head protruding from holes inside of a mountain and a crawling spider. The clip is so rich with Freudian symbolism that Wozniak’s father, a developmental psychologist, felt compelled to weigh in. “He’s like ‘C’mon, that’s a wet dream,’ and I’m like ‘What are you talking about?’” Wozniak told MTV.com in 1998. “He gives me this rundown of all these visual things, like ‘When you’re in the hole in the beginning, it’s the womb, and the spider symbolizes your loss of innocence in that you’re afraid of it, yet you’re drawn to it.’” (“And you’re lying in a big puddle at the end,” bassist Keefe pointed out. “And we’re cleaning up after it.”)
Marcy Playground’s follow-up album, 1999’s Shapeshifter, flopped; the lead single, “It’s Saturday,” climbed no higher than number 25 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. “To our true fans, it’s our best record,” Keefe told the Bristol Herald Courier in 2023. “We thought we had a goldmine. Except the music industry was in chaos.” Marcy Playground’s request to leave Capitol was soon granted, and while Keefe took a job with National Public Radio, Rieser signed on to play with Norah Jones, and from 2009 to 2016, Wozniak owned and operated the legendary Mushroom Studios in Vancouver, British Columbia. Wozniak and Keefe also reconvened as Marcy Playground on multiple occasions, backed by different drummers. Even years later, Wozniak still couldn’t quite wrap his head around “Sex and Candy,” however.
“We were actually pretty frickin’ flabbergasted with the hugeness of it all,” he told MTV.com in 2006. “It was like going from playing fun little pickup games of grade-school tee-ball to, all of a sudden, being a major league baseball team in the pennant race for the World Series. If you listen to [‘Sex and Candy’], it’s pretty clear it wasn’t written to be a hit. It’s just a quirky little weird song. But it was too much. It’s literally on hundreds of compilations. It became a quintessential Nineties moment, and that’s cool and I’m happy about that, but we had to tone it down a bit.”
Sex and Candy (KORD-0045)
