Former Guess Who mainstay Burton Cummings emerges on his first solo album as a nouveau riche smoothie with enough smarts to lay the groundwork for a lucrative MOR future. And to help effect the transition, he has found the ideal producer in Richard Perry, whose classy arrangements, with their punched up drums, add a dramatic backdrop to very ordinary songs and vocal performances. While Cummings' light, creamy voice and facile phrasing mark him as a professional, on the Richter Scale of emotional impact he registers about a 2.

Cummings' new songs glibly hybridize the Guess Who's polished bubblegum style with a more flowery Las Vegas approach. The most striking example of the latter is Cummings' first single, "Stand Tall," a well-crafted ballad combining the grandiosity of "Born Free" with the melodrama of "Solitaire." The runner-up, "I'm Scared," suggests that Cummings is about to get religion, since it deftly incorporates a fragment of "Silent Night."

Two of Cummings' choices of outside material, Gilbert O'Sullivan's whimsical "Nothing Rhymed," and Randy Bachman's "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet," add notes of humor to what is otherwise a blandly straightforward album. Cummings performs "Nothin'," which was a Number One hard-rock hit for BTO, as a slinky swing tune, making fun of the lyrics' repeated stutter of the letter b. Though the joke amusingly exploits the rift between Cummings and Bachman, as a musical put-down it merely shows that good hard-rock songs seldom translate comfortably into a softer style. The joke also suggests that inside this slimmed, coifed, made-over showboat, there still beats the heart of a wise guy. (RS 228)

STEPHEN HOLDEN