Lake Marie
notes
"It's an actual place along the Illinois-Wisconsin
border. There's an entire chain of lakes along there,
small lakes, and I remember as a teenager growing up in
Chicago, a lot of the teenagers would go to these lakes
and in the summer time kind of get away from the city.
Lake Marie, was kind of just one that stuck out in my
mind.
About '59, '60, '61, I grew up in Maywood - it's
a western suburb of Chicago, and we started hearing
about murders that weren't related to the mob. You know,
John Wayne Gacy was like, about two towns away from me
and you just hear about it. The suburbs were kind of
thought to be a pretty safe place at the time, and then
some of these unexplained murders would show up every
once in a while, where they'd find people in the woods
somewhere. I just kind of took any one of them, not one
in particular, and put it as if it was in a TV newscast.
It was a sharp left turn to take in a song, but when I
got done with it, I kind of felt like it's what the song
needed right then." ~John Prine