It was John Heim aka Big Mo’s last show last night. Dennis Green was there to shake his hand. Big Mo got a box of memorabilia. And he got a ton of posts and calls. He talked to Dennis about starting a new show at KCCK and he sounded more than half-serious. Retirement is hard.
He spun a slug of great songs and one of them struck me as having a meaning I’ve never caught before. I’ve heard The Codetalkers number “Body in the Lake” a few times, always on Big Mo’s show. It sounds dark. But I’ve come to regard it in a different light.
The first challenge is to find the right song, because it turns out there’s at least a couple of songs that have the same title but have very different lyrics. You have to find the number by the Codetalkers.
There’s some background about the musicians and the group’s name that I probably won’t do much justice to because I’m basically not a musician, but I tried to dig up what I could about it. There’s not much on the web but bits and pieces because the group is not around anymore. One person called the song “a sickly hilarious story of dead body disposal” and alluded to the bands dark humor themes.
Another reviewer had this to say about lyrics of “Body in the Lake):
“When you get right down to it, what the Codetalkers are about — besides sweet, stinging blues licks and a swaggering attitude — is storytelling. This disc overflows with memorable backwoods characters like the homicidal antagonist of “Body In The Lake,” a jaunty little number about a lakeside-vacation-cum-carjacking-cum-vehicular-manslaughter. As the shaken narrator says, “Sometimes just to stay alive, you gotta make a few mistakes.”-Jason Warburg, The Daily Vault 2005.
There’s a Wikipedia article about the Codetalkers. And there’s a handy link to the other very important subject of codetalkers. They were Native American soldiers who used little known native languages as a way to communicate secret messages, notably during World War II.
But the music group was formed by a music professor, Bobby Lee Rodgers, who wrote most of the band’s songs after he met with a musician named Colonel Bruce Hampton, Ret. Hampton was a mentor to many musicians and fostered the development of combinations of different music styles including jazz, blues, rock, fusion and the like.
Anyway, the Codetalkers group performed between 1999 and 2009 and the members often changed. They featured dazzling stars in their live performances, among them the legendary Chicago blues vocalist and guitarist, Hubert Sumlin. The group disbanded in 2009.
Anyway, with that quick overview, I like to think that the use of the name “codetalkers” by the band might have had a connection to the lyrics of some of their songs, like “Body In The Lake.” While I can’t find the lyrics on the web, the nice thing about the vocalist’s performance is that the lyrics are clear. I know this is going to sound crazy, but what if they’re code, in the sense of metaphor?
The short story is that this guy’s life was threatened by a desperate little old man. The guy managed to kill the little old man and threw his body in the lake. Later he finds out that the little old man was a murderer. Up to that time, he was carrying a burden of guilt. Despite throwing one physical burden away (like the body), he carried a psychological burden of guilt and fear of his crime being found out. Could you say he reframed the burden by thinking that the world might be better off without that little old man?
Sure, it’s a twisted sense of justice that allows you to throw off the guilt of a crime, but say this “crime” was not literally a murder. Say your conscience beats you up about something you did resulting from a string of circumstances or bad decisions over which you had no control. Are your choices sometimes made for you? Does it make sense to beat yourself up over them for the rest of your life?
Maybe pushing something painful way to the back of your mind is like throwing the body in the lake. They have a way of washing back up on shore. Like the song says, sometimes in life, just to stay alive, you have to make a few mistakes.
Anyway, I would not have had this train of thought before I heard “Body In The Lake” on the Big Mo Blues Show. Good luck, Big Mo!
Go Retire Psychiatrist 