Naked Prey
Under the Blue Marlin

How much are you willing to pay for your freedom?

If I had known beforehand that Van Christian would have shouted such a question in my face, I would have shelled out much more than 15,000 lire to bring home «Under the Blue Marlin», the second album by Naked Prey released in 1986, so as to secure a much more substantial piece of freedom.

Who Van Christian and Naked Prey are, and the affection I have for them, I discussed elsewhere, and I assume that if you are taking the trouble to read these few lines, you know their life, death, and miracles.

Otherwise - and in extreme summary - it's enough to know that Naked Prey were fellow travelers and something more for Dream Syndicate and Green On Red at a time when star-spangled alt-rock was called Paisley Underground, except they played much harder and gained much less visibility.

And if Dream Syndicate plagiarized the cover for their debut album by merely changing the color from green to orange, claiming in their defense that the graphics guys at Down There weren't very imaginative, they took inspiration from Green On Red for the next one, so that the courtyard printed on the front and back of «Gravity Talks» resembled a bit too much the one on «Under the Blue Marlin»; then, whether Van lacked imagination or whether he intended to sincerely pay homage to talented friends and colleagues, was of little importance and hardly mattered, because sometimes it happened that the cover didn't make the vinyl.

And then, when it came to music, it was as true that Naked Prey didn't invent anything as it was true that from their debut album they drew a substantial handful of those seeds that they sowed in the fertile ground of Paisley and that in a few months sprouted into desert rock, just to stay in the subject of broad definitions of what was, is, and will forever be called Americana: to name the names, Giant Sand and Thin White Rope, and with Giant Sand, Naked Prey shared not only their native land but also some musicians.

It remains an important detail that Naked Prey played much harder, not only than Dream Syndicate and Green On Red but also compared to Giant Sand and Thin White Rope.

To grasp the sense of that "much harder," the only thing was to drop the needle on the initial groove of «Voodoo Godhead» and start headbanging for a couple of minutes, theorizing that maybe John Garcia and Josh Homme, when they later formed Kyuss, had permanently etched that riff in their minds.

That «Voodoo Godhead» was a take from Naked Prey's previous repertoire was again of little importance and hardly mattered, because that phenomenal drive pervaded every single track, whether they were ragged rock’n’roll numbers like «The Ride» or «Rawhead» not to mention the remake of «Dirt» — the very one by the Stooges — or energetic ballads like «A Stranger (Never Say Goodbye)», «Come On Down» and «Fly Away», or even strange hard-psycho-blues stuff as happened to listen in «How I Felt That Day».

True also that «Under the Blue Marlin» wasn't worth the debut, because here and there the rock’n’roll drive seemed more like a hail of stones off target, and in moments of repose, it sometimes lacked the cheerful exuberance that characterized «Billy The Kid III», to say.

But it was again of little importance and hardly mattered, once more and for the last time, at least for me it was always like that.

Because then, in the end, Van would come screaming in my face about how much I was willing to pay for my freedom and, for me, who was eighteen, freedom was those first car trips, with that track recorded over and over again on the cassette tape, and the cassette tape in the car stereo, pretending to be driving those convertibles down a desert road, and blablabla.

One of the greatest and bloodiest pieces of my heart.