----- 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