BOC: Marsha's Plan

[John A Swartz]

>I'd say that like most of the biggest failures BOC had this song was also
my fault.

And most of BOC's biggest successes too, other than the commercial
success of "the big 3" maybe.  But, when you write as much of the
material as you did, that's the price you pay I guess.

To me, "The Marshall Plan" is an o.k. song (when I was a teen myself, I
liked it a lot more - maybe I could identify with it better, having my
own dreams of rock stardom), but probably shouldn't have been released
as a single - because it was sort of not really representative of BOC.
I understand it was a different time, and record companies are looking
to get singles out, but CE had some many good heavy tunes that were
more in line with the classic BOC sound.

>We all knew that there wasn't anything commercial on the album

Probably true enough - too bad that "non-commercial" stuff doesn't
get played more often - people don't know what they're missing...

>It was fun making a video although I was disappointed with how
it came out a bit but at the time I'd have had no idea how to make it
better.

Yeah, considering when this was made, I thought it was a decent video -
not great, but for that time period, it was pretty good.

>there seemed to be so much squabbling about the
royalties we should try to write a song all together. Make a completely
democratic tune, improve morale, share the wealth, ya know, bond
artisticly

Hmm... care to elaborate?  Sounds like things weren't happy on the
good ship BOC around this time.  Were you all trying to get more of
your own songs on each record to get more royalties for yourselves
as individuals?  How were these things mediated?  I've often wondered
about Allen's contributions, or rather, lack of them after *Mirrors*.
Did he just stop writing, or did he just not fight enough to get his
stuff on the albums?  Even after you left, and BOC started struggling
to come up with songs, Allen didn't seem to contribute much in the
way of songwriting.  There were rumors a year or so ago to the effect
that "Allen is writing again", although I don't know if he has any
songwriting contributions to "the Wheel".


John