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 bo