Maturing Disgracefully

Here’s a real oddity, a sex education album with a religious bent, issued in 1968 by Monsann Enterprises of New York.

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  must have seemed out of date in ’68 but you can’t knock the intention.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!