Carl Cafarelli, who knows a lot more about popular music than I do, sent this message after he read this post…
Mark: regarding whatever scandalous notion your school administrator found in the innocuous lyrics of the Association's "Never My Love," I have the same conclusion I bet you have: he was hearing what he wanted to hear, not what they were actually singing.
But let's play devil's advocate. It's a stretch, but if we wanted to object to the song on moral grounds, I guess we could say it's a song of seduction rather than love, something seedier than the vow of potential wedded bliss you and I hear. If we position it as a belated answer song to, say, the Shirelles' "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" from 1960, then we can interpret it as a guy who's just saying anything that he think will help him get laid. "Will I love you tomorrow? Of course, I will, baby! How can you think love will end when I've asked you to spend your whole life with me? Say, isn't getting hot in here? Maybe we should get a little bit more comfortable….:
I do not for a second believe this was the song's intent. But maybe your faculty advisor did.
Or maybe — and I should have raised this as a possibility in my post — our faculty advisor was one of those "I'm in charge so I have to make someone change something" persons. You meet them in the entertainment industry…or at least, I have. They think that since they're kind of the boss, they have to boss someone around. Working on network TV shows, I always encountered at least one. Often they were called network liaisons and they felt a need to prove they were contributing something…whether they had a valid suggestion or not.
I had a couple of teachers in school whose definition of teaching seemed to flow from the premise that they, being teachers, knew everything and we, being students, knew nothing. Obviously, neither was true but when some student corrected them, no matter how politely, they got enormously huffy about it. I've worked for a couple of editors and a couple of producers in my day who felt threatened by a situation where there was nothing for them to correct or overrule.
And sometimes, they're just plain afraid of being accused of not doing the job they're being paid to do.
Taking the side of the faculty advisor for a moment, he might have been right in some sense about the lyrics to the other two songs to which he objected — "Young Girl" and "Light My Fire." Those titles I just typed link to the lyrics and if you read them, remember that we're talking about underage kids on stage…and the F.A. didn't object to them until he saw a rehearsal of how those kids were going to perform them for an audience that included parents. The actual live performance could have been — and indeed was — a little steamier.
I do not recall hearing of any objections following the show. Maybe there were some, maybe not. But I'm not sure in his position, I wouldn't have been worried. One thing I had to keep in mind when I argued with network censors on shows that I worked on was that their job was not to weed out what was offensive. Their job was to weed out what the kind of viewers who live to be outraged could get outraged about. There was one lady at ABC who saw her mission as protecting America but most of them understood their job was to protect the network.
They were almost always wrong about what those who live to be outraged would actually get outraged about…but that's another matter.
That Faculty Advisor's assignment was to not let the students do something on stage that would lead to angry phone calls from furious parents. If you view that as his only concern then I think I understand it somewhat. If someone had objected to the songs — which in 1968 seemed possible — he wanted to be able to say, "You should have heard what they wanted to do before I stopped them." Or he could have said, after they performed the lyrics unchanged, "Don't blame me. I ordered them to change those lyrics!"
I'm not defending what he did more than fifty-some-odd years ago. I just think I understand it a little better now.
Not to dwell on this too long — which of course, I've already done — here's a little thought experiment. Let's say you're the faculty advisor to a show like this…today. In 2022. Let's say a 16-year-old boy wants to get up on stage and sing, with great emotion and emphasis, "Young Girl." Read the lyrics if you didn't read them earlier. Would you not think allowing this could cause you some trouble?
You can be very strongly against censorship (which I like to think I am) but still say, "This could lead to a fight that's not worth fighting for." When Saturday Night Live started, Lorne Michaels reportedly told the writing staff something like, "If we're going to have trouble with the censors — and at some point, we will — make sure it's about something of substance, not just sneaking in the 'F word.'"
I think in this situation, I would ask that 16-year-old boy if he had any other songs he wanted to sing in the show. But I would have left "Never My Love" alone.