A "Living-Room suite" seems like a perfect idea for Harry Chapin, since he's tailor-made for family entertainment anyway: who else could have written such an innocuous song about a sniper that you wouldn't mind playing it for your grandmother? A born pedagogue, Chapin peddles big ideas' that invariably amount to no more than middlebrow homily, but his stage-Irishman's flamboyance gives them a flashy melodramatic gloss which—when he's at his best—can pass for tough-minded authenticity, even passion. This gritty, streetwise style is wackily, out of sync with the sentimental message, but he'd probably be lost without it.

Living Room Suite at first suggests an interesting new direction for Chapin. "Dancin' Boy," though it's a simple father-and-son tune, is unpretentious, capably sung and has some real feeling. Two of the love songs, "Jenny" and "Poor Damned Fool," work because for once Chapin isn't reaching for larger meanings where they don't exist. Elsewhere, however, his grandiose showmanship returns to drown the sentiments in a welter of pronunciamentos. The underlying notion of "Why Do Little Girls" ("...little girls grew crooked/While the little boys grow tall"—a bad business, the singer thinks) is hardly earthshaking, but Chapin pumps it up with swirling Byzantine horns and a vocal that sounds like he's going down with Moby Dick. Harry Chapin's peculiar genius is to make humanitarian platitudes sound like apocalyptic kitsch—he's Cecil B. DeMille gone Kennedy liberal.

The LP's virtues—apart from Chuck Plotkin's eminently clear-headed and intelligent production—are in those songs where Chapin gets off his pulpit and lives up to the intimacy of the album's title. Yet he can never stay there for long. It's not that he's without talent: he's got a nice flair for melody, and his sprawling verbal facility often leads him into images that are intriguing even when they don't go anywhere ("I've seen the City of Angels/With the names of its dead in the streets"). But some-how a man who treats the idea that there are bad people in the world as if it were a novel and disturbing thought just doesn't make a very convincing visionary. And that's what Harry Chapin wants us to believe he is. (RS 283)

TOM CARSON