Peter Frampton: I'm In You : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Before the extraordinary success of Frampton Comes Alive!, Peter Frampton was known as a solid, if somewhat lightweight, English pop rocker. Seven million albums later, he had become a solid lightweight rocker who had set sales records and who would soon find himself welcoming Stevie Wonder and Mick Jagger into the studio for cameo spots on his followup album. The cover of Frampton Comes Alive! captured the Frampton mystique—the angelic, wide-eyed romantic with a guitar, an image which Frampton carried with such élan it obscured his status as a minor musical figure. As a performer, he is a mass artist of the second generation; if the Beatles' popularity promised cultural manifestations and delivered an enlarged record market, Frampton's breakthrough emphasizes that the culture has grown so large and become so institutionalized that penultimate rock stardom has become business as usual, inspiring nothing more revolutionary than increased record sales.

Frampton's primary virtue is that he's consistently pleasant. The music on I'm in You flows with the same easy-listening ease as the live set. The listener is neither challenged nor surprised, but left to drift in Frampton's sugary romanticism. His execution, both in composition and performance, is professionally smooth, but devoid of any truly creative fire. He is an artist of solid but limited talent (neither a stellar melodist nor a particularly compelling singer, his cleartoned guitar playing is strong though hardly virtuosic) who through hard work and luck produced a commercial masterstroke that all but made these limitations meaningless. Frampton's image is distinctively tied into the sedate Seventies; he is the Farrah Fawcett of rock.

The torchy ballad, "I'm in You," sets the tone for the album as well as emphasizing a more insipid aspect of Frampton's style. Though the simple melody is properly attractive, Frampton's whining tones in the upper registers leave a cloying, syrupy aftertaste. It is the lyrics, though, that inflict the most damage. "I can't feel any more than I'm singing," he says, and that's precisely the problem—his conception of romance is of the greeting-card variety, with the ultimate love described as simply the kind of love he never had. Such frothy sentiment can't hope to engage us beyond the teenage-crush level, and here I may be underestimating the emotions of a teenager in love.

"Rocky's Hot Club," a sprightly tune written about Frampton's dog (shades of Barry Manilow's "Mandy"), features a wonderful little Stevie Wonder harp solo and draws inevitable comparisons to the Beatles' "Rocky Raccoon." Not up to the type of wordplay that enlivened McCartney's playful fairy-tale tunes, "Rocky's Hot Club" is fanciful without being witty, and consequently only half the tune it could have been. Given these lyrical limitations, Frampton is most successful on midtempo rockers where a full-flowing accompaniment adds body to his slight but well-honed melodies and gives his lyrical guitar an attractive backdrop. "Saint Thomas (Don't You Know How I Feel)" is the best of the lot, with a particularly impressive solo spot in which Frampton's shimmering guitar lines spiral upward through the thick mix of acoustic rhythm. His patented synthesized guitar makes four appearances on the album, and while he effectively integrates it into his tunes—the exception is "(Putting My Heart) On the Line," where the effect needlessly clutters the simple melody—it's already perilously close to becoming clichéd.

Ironically, Frampton's tribute to Stevie Wonder and Motown—the medley of "(I'm a) Road Runner" and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours)"—points to the weakness of his craftsmanship. Frampton's versions of the Motown tunes are well executed but hardly definitive and yet the integrity of the songs makes them shine like beacons. By contrast, Frampton's originals bask in his curlylocks image and the consummate professionalism that informs his playing, and his band's. His is well-played music that has no impact beyond the sheltered fanzine world that it epitomizes.

The Peter Principle will never mean the same after Peter Frampton. How logical the premise originally seemed, with ambitious people naturally rising to the level of their incompetence. But in Peter Frampton, we have the epitome of the seasoned Seventies rock professional who has risen to the level of his competence but who is ultimately uninspired, who broke through to the mass audience (through sheer consistency and superb career orchestration) with a smiling, bare-chested vengeance. His constant touring paid off in the awesome success of Comes Alive!, and such mass acceptance has allowed for the hawking of fanclub trinkets in a booklet, included in the new record, that's so exhaustive and slick it's hard to believe you can't order an "I'm in You" bracelet or a Peter Frampton watch through Master Charge. Such popularity has also allowed for a record as constantly accessible and ultimately forgettable as I'm in You.