smoe.org mailing lists
ivan@stellysee.de
| From | "Stewart Mason" <craigtorso@verizon.net> |
| Subject | Re: Wounded Bird (Holly and the Italians) |
| Date | Tue, 14 Dec 2004 02:25:58 -0500 |
[Part 1 text/plain iso-8859-1 (2.2 kilobytes)]
(View Text in a separate window)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Drew MacDonald" <drewmacdonald@comcast.net>
> Gotta love a label that features Tuff Darts, Rosemary Clooney,
> Jean-Luc Ponty and Root Boy Slim!
Big ups too for their rescue of two of my favorite near-forgotten
albums from the early '80s, THE RIGHT TO BE ITALIAN by Holly and the
Italians and HOLLY AND THE ITALIANS by Holly Beth Vincent, both of
which sound more than perfectly fine to me. In fact, the CD of HOLLY
AND THE ITALIANS sounds worlds better than the original US version of
the LP on Epic: for quite literally years, I was weirdly entranced by
the utterly crap sound of this album, which combines the ultra-muddy,
bottom-of-a-well sound of EXILE ON MAIN STREET with a weirdly distant,
disconnected mix. Have you ever listened to a turntable without
sending the signal through a preamp first? It sounds kinda like that.
I always imagined that this was a deliberate artistic choice (the
whole SISTER LOVERS idea of deliberately sabotaging a great batch of
songs), or that perhaps Holly was just too fucked up to notice how
awful her record sounded.
About four years ago, I found a UK copy of HOLLY AND THE ITALIANS at
Bow Wow Records in Albuquerque and noticed that it had both a couple
of track substitutions and an entirely different running order
(bizarrely, the original lacks "Dangerously," one of my favorite songs
on the entire album), and since it was only a couple bucks, I took it
home. Turns out that the miserable sound of the Epic version was
apparently some kind of transatlantic cock-up, because the Virgin LP
sounds entirely "normal"! Still a great album, though.
Incidentally, the Wounded Bird CD includes all the tracks from both
versions of the album, and also several bonus tracks including her
duet with Joey Ramone on "I Got You Babe," the 12-inch mix of "For
What It's Worth" and the original 7" mix of "Tell That Boy To Shut
Up," so don't believe the hype: Wounded Bird *do* occasionally do
bonus tracks! The CD of THE RIGHT TO BE ITALIAN also includes the
b-sides of all the singles and the original 7" version of the great
"Miles Away."
S
For assistance, please contact
the smoe.org administrators.