One person’s view: “Quite possibly the worst piece of garbage I’ve ever had to listen to. The cover is surely a clue to the crap that lies within, and yet the crap within almost surpasses the cover for being total shit!” – Drummer1956 @ Rate Your Music, regarding the I’m in You LP
The public’s view: 2.65 / 5.00
“Wah. Wah wah wah wah wah. Wah WAH WAH WAH!” This was a ubiquitous battle cry of my 1970s childhood, courtesy of Peter Frampton’s “Show Me the Way”. I always enjoyed hearing Frampton’s unique guitar work on the radio, especially when his six-string sounded like it was talking, crying, or throwing up. But “I’m in You”, his biggest chart single, was a piano ballad whose brief guitar solo lacked any interesting talk box effects. Seven-Year-Old Me could find nothing of value in “I’m in You”, and even Fifty-Something Me has had to work hard to find good things to say for this review. (Eleven-Year-Old Me might have at least gotten an inappropriate laugh from the song’s title, but radio had moved on from Frampton by that time.) Today, Frampton’s huge hit beckons us to ponder its divisive legacy.
It’s important to consider the context of the I’m in You album. This was the successor to Frampton Comes Alive!, the biggest LP of 1976 and the best-selling live album ever at that point. Frampton felt the pressure to deliver another commercial smash, but Frampton Comes Alive! was not part of a formula that could be replicated. Building another album around the talk box gimmick would be like the Captain & Tennille putting out a second song about muskrats. Instead, to maximize its sales, Frampton’s follow-up record needed to attract new audiences who weren’t into guitar rock at all. For this reason, he included a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” and released it as the second single. This was a defensible move, but many fans preferred Frampton’s original music and didn’t see him as an R&B act. “I’m in You”, the first single, was even more controversial. It was soft enough to reach the easy listening chart, and that wasn’t exactly a badge of honor. Maybe the new album should have been called Frampton Goes to Sleep!
I’m in You went platinum, but the alienation of much of Frampton’s fan base might not have been worth it. Making matters worse, he was in the midst of a terrible streak of bad luck. First, his shirts all lost their buttons in a laundry mishap and would no longer close properly. This caused every photo of him to be marred by an unwanted glimpse of his chest, and people began to confuse him with Shaun Cassidy and Leif Garrett. Many folks walked into record stores to buy I’m in You and then walked right back out when they saw the album sleeve. Next, Frampton was badly injured in a car accident. After recovering well enough to go out on the road again, his South American tour was disrupted by the crash of a plane that was carrying his gear. He assumed that his favorite guitar had burned up in the disaster, but in fact someone had found it in the debris and taken it home. It wasn’t reunited with its owner until 31 years later after a guy at a music shop recognized it as the instrument on the cover of Frampton Comes Alive! It was the most famous talking guitar in the world, yet it never talked when it really needed to.
Then there was the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band project, in which Peter Frampton co-starred with the Bee Gees in a movie based on an old Beatles album. To explain this to readers under 30: this is like if Morgan Wallen co-starred with BTS in a movie based on an old Destiny’s Child album. Or like if you order orange juice and fabric softener from the grocery, and they arrive together in the same jug which the Instacart driver then dumps on your head. The Sgt. Pepper’s debacle ended Frampton’s second career as an actor just as it was beginning, but it isn’t as though Peter sank the film all on his own. It was a collaborative effort that squandered dozens of people’s talents to create one of the most enduring cinematic bombs of all time. Even the 2017 Blu-ray release of Sgt. Pepper’s, which allowed home video enthusiasts to savor Frampton’s toothy grin in high resolution, did not prompt a reassessment of the movie. Critic Matt Brunson noted that “its standing as a turkey for the ages remains undiminished.”
Although often cited as a power ballad, “I’m in You” sort of plods along without ever generating much power. There aren’t any poetic lyrics that might justify the effort of listening to it. I didn’t care for the song until I found a clip of it from a Frampton concert in 2024. He delivers superb vocals and pleasant guitar pluckin’ in this rendition, and forsakes the heavy synths that marred the 1977 studio version. This elder statesman’s stamina should give all of us hope that we will still be effectively plying our respective trades into our twilight years. I bet you’re looking forward to another two decades of reading my inane blog posts.
While “I’m in You” has aged gracefully along with its performer, Frampton is probably better known today for his GEICO commercial. And for those of us in Generation X, he is still remembered mainly for “Wah. Wah wah wah wah wah...” Those are words to live by, and they are a lot more insightful than “I’m in you, you’re in me.”
My rating: 4 / 10 (The live version from 2024 is a 6 / 10.)
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