Featuring well-known session musicians including jazz
guitarist Eric Gale, bassist Chuck Rainey, trumpeter Joe Newman and harp player
Corky Hale, For Mature Adults Only is an
attempt to ‘bridge the generation gap by letting the teenager have his own say
about life, faith and love’, well according to the sleeve notes it is, anyway. For
Mature Adults Only began life as a stage
show, first presented in March 1968 in St. Louis. The album, which was intended
to be used in schools, churches and youth groups, features re-recordings of
songs and monologues from the show and was originally accompanied by a book and
lesson plan.
For Mature Adults Only
was the brainchild of Doctor Norman C. Habel. Born in 1932 and still with us
today, Dr Habel is a noted Australian Old Testament scholar and author. At the
time For Mature Adults Only came
out he was a professor at the Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, which train
pastors, deaconesses, missionaries, chaplains, and church leaders for the
Lutheran Church. A prolific author, among Dr Habel’s other works are A
Bloke Called Jesus and two volumes of ‘Habel
Hymns’.
Subtitled ‘honest teenage cries, poems and prayers collected
and narrated by Norman Habel with music by Richard Koehneke’ and featuring The
Martin Luther High School Choir, the album was reissued by Fortress Records of
Philadelphia in 1974. It’s a fun, albeit listen and very much of its time: the
naïve plea for equal rights contained in the monologue Willie - about ‘a quiet Negro kid’ who was blamed for ‘the
rats and the riots and the rubbish of the city’ – and the song Adam
Was a Man (‘why blame the Negro
for so many things?’) must
have seemed out of date in ’68 but you can’t knock the intention.
Enjoy!
The mono narration interrupting the stereo singing on the first track was very unusual and annoying.
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