It’s a Wonderful Life (2006)

The 2006 version of Chris Stamey’s first solo album is what’s on offer on the internet today and that seems to be fine with Stamey, who remixed a couple of the songs from his curious 1982 release (the cover image above is from the ’82 LP), included three of the four songs from his 1984 Instant Excitement EP (minus the John Lennon cover, maybe a licensing issue), and for good measure added two alternate mixes of Wonderful Life songs and another from his 1991 LP Fireworks, “Something Came Over Me.” I was infatuated with the first version of It’s a Wonderful Life in the early ‘80s. Later my LP went missing and I never turned it up again. Thus, from memory, I must note that the remix of “Never Enters My Mind” seems inferior to the original, at least on first listens. I have no problem with the other remix from the original, “Face of the Crowd,” and, indeed, I’m already getting used to the new “Never Enters My Mind.” This 2006 release, which I somehow missed, is a reasonable approximation of a most peculiar solo album with a bunch of extra stuff. Stamey had gone from a sideman with Alex Chilton in the late ‘70s to playing in the band Sneakers with Mitch Easter to a principal with Peter Holsapple in the dBs, co-author of that band’s great first two albums. Stamey seemed to be working—and generally has all along—in a certain indie alternative pop mode where melody and the three-minute song are prized with smidges of feedback and noise (and sometimes smidges of sentiment, as on his Christmas albums). It’s a Wonderful Life—I think it’s just him overdubbing himself—suggests Stamey may have been more the force for racket in the dBs. It clunks and sprawls at slow pace like a New Orleans parade going down the line, with Stamey’s variously agonized vocals declaiming over it. The drumkit squats over it all, thundering. The album was early efforts by Stamey at production (the album is credited as “directed” by Stamey and recorded by Mitch Easter), so perhaps there’s some beginner’s luck at making all this work in almost a hypnotic way. You listen to it a few times and it gets to you. Stamey’s gift for melody does not fail him, as “Never Enters My Mind” (new and old), “Depth of Field,” and the title song are absolutely top of the line. I want to complain about “Get a Job,” which is not the Silhouettes 1957 sha-na-na hit but instead a cover of “Tobacco Road.” I’m still too scarred by too recently hearing the “Tobacco Road” cover by War with Eric Burdon. Points for prescience of a kind on “Brushfire in Hoboken,” where immigrants are blamed for a fire. The extra extras in the 2006 release are nice to have, notably the “Violin Version” of the title song with sawing and extra-added robot rhythms that somehow remind me of Harry Smith songs. I think it’s the shades of inexpertness. It’s a Wonderful Life—extremely odd, perhaps for fans only, but I found it worth the reunion revisit.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

#25: It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

This one kind of sneaked up on me. I don't recall it as ever being much of a holiday staple in my family when I was growing up, and by the time I had started to figure out how much I like Capra movies—Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and especially Meet John Doe did most of the heavy lifting there—I was still suspicious of the Christmas and angels theme. I saw bits and pieces of it over the years, enough to convince myself that it was worth continuing to avoid.

Then, somehow, I ended up watching a TV broadcast from beginning to end at some point in the late '80s. I was surprised by how dark it is, even the photography, which verges on noir in some sequences. It's not just that it's a story about a man who has decided suicide is his best option. It's that it's a portrait so dead-on believable that it's almost painful to watch, telling a story in excruciating detail of lifelong frustration and disappointment. George Bailey keeps seeing his (relatively modest) dreams so systematically denied that his interior life shrivels to the point where, in one of his darkest moments of despair, he can cry out to his wife, "Why do we have to have all these kids?"

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

USA, 130 minutes
Director: Frank Capra
Writers: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, Jo Swerling, Philip Van Doren Stern, Michael Wilson
Photography: Joseph F. Biroc, Joseph Walker, Victor Milner
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Editor: William Hornbeck
Cast: James Stewart, Henry Travers, Donna Reed, Lionel Barrymore, Thomas Mitchell, Beulah Bondi, Frank Faylen, Ward Bond, Gloria Grahame, H.B. Warner, Frank Albertson, Samuel S. Hinds, Mary Treen, Sheldon Leonard

Since coming to terms with how much I like and admire and value the cornball object known as It's a Wonderful Life, I have maintained that it's because the picture is essentially fearless, and not just "for its times," about going right at human depravity. For every saccharine declaration that, "Every time you hear a bell ring, it means that some angel's just got his wings," there's someone mean and surly like Sheldon Leonard standing there saying, "Hey, look, mister, we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast, and we don't need any characters around to give the joint atmosphere." It's almost like the call and response in gospel music, these extremes between whitest whites and blackest blacks, and it's one of the best things I know, short of The Wizard of Oz and Blue Velvet, at sharpening such contrasts and making you feel them viscerally.

I came to it late, finally catching a TV broadcast from beginning to end at some point in the late '80s. I was surprised by how dark it is, even the photography, which verges on pure noir in some sequences, and Universal-style horror in others. It's not just that it's a story about a man who has decided suicide is his best option (nor that it's unafraid to use the word "suicide" plain). The fact is it's just good all through, with a screenplay that expertly juggles its many extremities, and top-notch performances. It boldly rears back and lets loose a story in excruciating detail of lifelong frustration and disappointment, the story of George Bailey (played brilliantly by James Stewart in one of his greatest performances), who keeps seeing his dream denied of escaping the small upstate New York town in which he was born and has lived all his life, that dream so systematically denied that his interior life shrivels to the point where, in a moment of uncalculated despair, he can cry out to his wife, "You call this a happy family? Why do we have to have all these kids?"

It's a Wonderful Life (2001)

With a host of recognizable names on board making guest appearances, headed up by Tom Waits and PJ Harvey (and including John Parrish, Vic Chesnutt, Jane Scarpantoni, Nine Persson of the Cardigans, and others), this just might qualify as the highest-profile and maybe the single best album we ever got from Mark Linkous of Richmond, Virginia, aka Sparklehorse. It's my favorite, but it's also the one I know best, which might make it a kind of circular self-fulfilling prophecy. It's anyway usually my first impulse when inclined in the direction—warm and serious and plays like the night, starry and enveloping and good to return to every 24 hours or so. The songs are uniformly brave, lovely, allusive, often fragmentary, pointed toward single idealized moments of burnished beauty, and they are built out of strange materials that would occur to few others, strings and raw noise and lovely keyboards and acoustic guitar chords and random open spaces and Linkous's gentle wheedling vocal. After a career until then spent mostly working his songs out by himself alone in the studio the presence of a band and guests does provide a certain charge. "Dog Door," the relatively short song that Waits works on, certainly jumps out to the casual listener. Spend time with the album, however, and it becomes as much of a piece as all the rest here, and that's the real beauty. Harvey and the others are mostly integrated seamlessly, almost invisibly so. For a long time, before I got a look at the album credits, I thought the guitar and vocal harmonies on "Piano Fire," for example, sounded a lot like something I already knew. But I never guessed it was Harvey, provoking a kind of delicious forehead-smacking moment. I don't know why I'm going on about all this—I guess it's the easy thing to write about. The real thing is that this is some of Linkous's best songwriting, the kind of stuff that will stick with you a long time and come back in an instant every time you return, and if it sounds strange and even a little alienating the first time or two it only gets better. I know I keep a perhaps overly careful and tenuous distance from ongoing currencies in music, but his death last year reached even me, and I recognized it as the kind of loss that only grows in effect, a loss for all of us.