I was in my car this morning, listening to a local radio station, and the Billy Joel song "Captain Jack" came on.

This song, as Joel fans know, includes the line: "Your sister's gone out, she's on a date. You just sit at home and masturbate."

The version played by by this particular station muted the vocal when Joel got to the word "masturbate."

But two verses later, the line "So you play your albums, and you smoke your pot" was left untouched.

So I guess the message here is: Stimulating oneself sexually, bad. Using illegal drug, OK.

... unless the song in question is Tom Petty's "You Don't Know How it Feels," in which the version regularly played by the same station (and others, I'm sure) features Petty singing "So let's get to the point, let's hit another joint" instead of the original "So let's get to the point, let's roll another joint." (It appears Petty recorded two versions — with the revised line in the latter being a reference to going to a nightclub — knowing some radio stations would object to the original.)

So now, unlike in the version of "Captain Jack" played on the same station, the message in disallowing the phrase "roll another joint" appears to be "using illegal drug not OK."

I'm so confused. And I'm sure other listeners are, too.

So here's a suggestion for all the radio stations that play the edited versions of the Joel and Petty songs, and that long ago gave up playing the original version of the Who's "Who Are You?" because it includes the F word: If you find a song objectionable, don't play it. That's your prerogative. But if you are gonna play a song, play the original version — the way the it was intended. Anything else is disrespectful to the song, the writer, the performer and, most importantly, the listeners.