One Place Short: The Battles Behind The Cars’ ‘Since You’re Gone’
Every long career has a song like this: the one the reference books file under “almost”. “Since You’re Gone” opened the Cars’ fourth album, anchored its campaign as the follow-up single to the biggest hit of the band’s life, earned reviews that ranged from admiring to baffled to faintly scandalized, and then stopped — stopped dead — at No. 41 on the Billboard Hot 100, one single place below the line that separates a Top 40 hit from a footnote. One place. The distance between “Since You’re Gone” and immortality-by-definition was smaller than the margin of error in the chart department’s arithmetic, and the song has spent forty years living on the wrong side of it, accumulating admirers the way cult records do: slowly, and then all at once.
The battles around it were never about quality. They were about temperature. Was Ric Ocasek’s performance a masterclass in restraint or a man refusing to feel his own song? Was the lyric literate wit or a wordsmith showing off over a broken heart? Was this a power ballad rebuilt by futurists or a heartbreak song smothered by machinery? The hometown paper declared the band stalled. An activist columnist declared the song dangerous. The video put the singer in an empty apartment with a mannequin. And through all of it, the song just kept its strange, level gaze — the sound of a man reporting on his own devastation like a weather system passing over a town he used to live in.
Opening an Album That Had to Work
Position is destiny in pop, and “Since You’re Gone” held the most exposed position on Shake It Up: track one, side one, the first thing a listener heard. The placement was a statement of intent. The Cars’ previous album, Panorama (1980), had been their deliberate difficult record — colder, more experimental, received by much of the press as a band testing how far its audience would follow. It reached No. 5 and produced one Top 40 single, “Touch and Go”, but the narrative around the band had curdled: the hit machine of 1978 and 1979 was now, supposedly, an art project with a parking problem.
Shake It Up, released November 6, 1981, was the correction. It was not a retreat — the band was constitutionally incapable of retreat — but it was a record built to reconnect: brighter, dancier, with the title track, an old Ocasek song finally finished, riding point. The album reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200 and went double Platinum, and the title track became the biggest single of the band’s career to that point, peaking at No. 4 on the Hot 100 in early 1982. All of which made the choice of “Since You’re Gone” as the album’s opener and its second single a particular kind of wager. Open the comeback with a heartbreak song. Follow a No. 4 smash with a power ballad in which the singer sounds like he is reading the weather. The Cars were not playing safe with this record. They were playing themselves.
There is a pleasing symmetry in the album’s construction that the sequencing made plain. The hit, “Shake It Up”, was one of Ocasek’s antiques — a song that had lingered unfinished for years before the band finally completed it, an old idea polished into a smash. The opener was the opposite: a new composition, written for this record, carrying its most current thinking about what a Cars song could hold. Old song as the door to radio, new song as the door to the album. Listeners who bought Shake It Up for the single met “Since You’re Gone” first, and the band clearly intended the meeting: this, the sequencing says, is who we are now — the hit is merely who we also are. When the campaign later flipped the order and sent the opener out as the follow-up single, it was only completing the logic. The album’s thesis statement was asked to do the hit’s job too. That double duty is the first of the song’s battles, and it was assigned, not accidental.
The Method: Irony as Armor
To hear why the band made these choices, it helps to recall their stated philosophy, which Hawkes articulated when discussing the band’s beginnings: “There was definitely a little self-conscious irony in there. We started out wanting to be electric and straight-ahead rock, and it kind of turned into an artier kind of thing.” Self-conscious irony — the phrase could stand as the Cars’ coat of arms. From the debut onward, their great subject was the gap between what their songs’ narrators said and what those narrators felt, and their great technique was engineering: every element — Robinson’s drum patterns, Hawkes’ synth figures, the stacked harmonies — machined to keep that gap audible and exact.
“Since You’re Gone” is the method applied to the most conventional assignment in pop: the post-breakup single. A conventional band feels it. The Cars diagram it. The chant-like verses are a man reciting the facts to keep them at a distance; the ascending bridge is the distance collapsing; the Dylan mask is the narrator trying on another identity because his own has stopped working; the Fripp homage is the guitarist smuggling high seriousness into a pop single because the band’s contract with its audience permitted difficulty so long as it was beautifully finished. Every battle the song fought in public — too cold, too clever, too weird, not weird enough to be art, too arty to be a hit — was a skirmish over that method. The song did not fail to be a conventional hit because the band fell short. It declined to be one, at the exact moment its career most rewarded convention, and the declining is the artistry the later critics came back to praise.
A Studio of Their Own
The album was also the sound of a band that had stopped traveling to its own life. The debut had been made in London, Candy-O and Panorama in Los Angeles and New York. For Shake It Up, the Cars bought the studio instead: they acquired the Boston facility formerly known as Intermedia Sound, renamed it Syncro Sound, and recorded the album at home in 1981, in their own rooms, on their own clock. “Since You’re Gone” was cut there — a song about emptiness, tracked in a building the band owned outright.
Home recording changed the politics of the sessions in one subtle way: nobody could send them home. Producer Roy Thomas Baker was back for his fourth and, as it turned out, final album with the band — the partnership that had defined the Cars’ sound since 1978 would end with this record, and Heartbeat City would be handed to Robert John “Mutt” Lange and a whole new scale of ambition. So Shake It Up is a hinge in the catalogue: the last Baker record, the first Syncro Sound record, the end of the band’s first phase disguised as a return to form. “Since You’re Gone”, sitting at the front of it, is where the hinge squeaks loudest — classic Cars construction, classic Cars subject, but a new looseness in the frame, a song allowed to sway where the old ones marched.
The Baker partnership deserves its weight in the song’s story. Baker had produced all four of the band’s albums, and his signature — harmonies stacked to a lacquered gleam, every surface buffed — was by 1981 both the Cars’ trademark and the thing critics reached for when they wanted to accuse the band of sterility. Recording at Syncro Sound shifted the balance of that partnership. On the road albums, Baker’s studio craft had been the senior discipline; in the band’s own building, the band’s habits ruled, and you can hear the difference in this track’s willingness to let Easton’s solo sprawl and Ocasek’s vocal wander into impersonation. It is the loosest the Baker-era Cars ever sounded on a single, which is another way of saying the partnership ended not in exhaustion but in a kind of negotiated freedom — the producer letting the band be stranger in its own house, the band letting the producer polish the strangeness for radio. The polish and the strangeness would go to different addresses after this. Here, for one more album, they shared a roof the band owned.
Heartbreak in Perfect Tense
AllMusic critic Donald A. Guarisco, in the most careful contemporary-minded reading the song has received, called it a power ballad about the breakup of a relationship — and then had to reckon with the fact that Ocasek had written a breakup song the way other men write crossword puzzles. Guarisco praised the “inspired wordplay” of the lyric, its yoking of opposites — treachery and tenderness in the same breath — while noting the genuinely heartfelt lines smuggled inside the cleverness. Music critic Jim Bohen singled out the line “Since you’re gone everything’s in perfect tense” as an example of Ocasek’s “literate wit”: a grammar joke that is also, on inspection, a real observation — after a departure, everything the lost person did recedes into the past tense, and the language itself starts to grieve.
Guarisco heard the music keeping faith with that doubleness: an unconventional melody that “marries chant-like verses to a bridge built on ascending phrases that tug at the heart”. The verses chant because the singer is numb; the bridge ascends because the numbness keeps failing. That is the song’s whole mechanism, and it is why the “power ballad” label fits and doesn’t. The power is there — the arrangement swells where a ballad should swell — but the balladry is delivered by a man holding the emotion at arm’s length with both hands, and the strain of the holding is the most emotional thing in the record.
Guarisco’s final verdict on the experiment deserves quoting whole, because it is the sentence the song’s defenders have been paraphrasing ever since: he called it “a solid fusion of rock ballad bombast and new wave futurism”, praising its “high-tech arrangement and new wave irony” for breathing “new life into the power ballad”. Consider what that claims. The power ballad in 1982 was rock’s most exhausted form — the lighter-raising, key-changing plea for forgiveness that every arena band kept in a drawer. Ocasek’s innovation was to refuse the plea. His singer does not ask her to come back, does not promise to change, does not even raise his voice. He reports. The bombast is in the arrangement; the futurism is in the withholding; and the irony Guarisco names is the gap between the two, which is exactly where the heartbreak lives. It took a critic writing a reference-guide entry, not a headline review, to put that in print — the song’s appreciation was always going to be a long game.
The Dylan in the Room
Then there is the vocal, and the joke hiding inside it. The liner notes to Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology, the band’s career retrospective, identify a “more playful quality … in Ocasek’s writing” on this song and point to a Bob Dylan impersonation woven into the delivery — the stretched, nasal emphasis on a word like “treacher-ess“, Dylan’s phrasing worn as a mask. Boston Globe critic Steve Morse noticed the same thing at the time: Ocasek aping Dylan’s vocal phrasing, drawing the syllables out into that familiar Minnesota whine.
An impersonation inside a heartbreak song is a very Ocasek maneuver, and it opens the song’s central argument. To its admirers, the Dylan mask is wit with a function: the singer is trying on another man’s way of hurting because his own way — the Cars way, frost and deadpan — is failing him. To its detractors, and Morse was partly one, it was a writer amusing himself at his own song’s expense. Either way, no other single released by a major American band in the spring of 1982 contained a Bob Dylan impersonation as an emotional device. The Cars were strange, and this was the song where they let the strangeness show on a would-be hit.
The Hometown Paper Declares a Stall
The Boston Globe’s verdict arrived in the album’s first weeks, and it stung in the way only hometown verdicts can. Steve Morse’s review of Shake It Up, published November 29, 1981, ran under an architecture of local rivalry: “Geils accelerates, while the Cars stall.” The J. Geils Band — Boston’s other arena rock institution, then riding Freeze-Frame toward a No. 1 album and the six-week chart reign of “Centerfold” — was the stick to beat the Cars with, and Morse swung it. Lines in “Since You’re Gone” that other critics heard as wit, Morse heard as “trite”, the nights getting strange and everything a mess adding up, in his account, to a lyricist coasting.
The review mattered beyond one Sunday’s paper because it named the suspicion that followed the band for the rest of its career: that the Cars’ control was a form of hiding, that the machine had begun to run on habit. It was unfair to this song in particular — “Since You’re Gone” is many things, but coasting is not one of them; nobody coasts into a Dylan impersonation and a Fripp homage — yet the charge explains the record’s reception pattern. Again and again, the song was reviewed as a symptom of the band rather than as itself. It took the later critics, with the band’s story complete, to hear it plain.
The rivalry frame deserves a moment of its own, because it distorted the song’s first hearing. Boston in the winter of 1981–82 had two hometown bands at the center of American rock, and they were temperamental opposites: the J. Geils Band, a sweat-and-harmonica bar band a decade into its climb, finally detonating with Freeze-Frame and “Centerfold”, and the Cars, the art-school minimalists who had arrived fully formed in 1978 and were now suspected of having nowhere left to go. A Boston critic comparing the two in November 1981 was writing about civic pride as much as music — which band would carry the city into the new decade? Geils had the momentum, the sweat and the narrative of dues paid. The Cars had the burden of having been perfect first. In that contest, a nuanced, mid-tempo heartbreak song with a Dylan impersonation in it was never going to read as acceleration. It read as stall. The song was not really being reviewed; the city’s pecking order was, and the song was standing in the wrong place in the queue.
Easton Tips His Hat to Fripp
If you want the band’s own verdict on the song’s seriousness, listen to the guitar solo. Elliot Easton — the Cars’ resident virtuoso, a left-handed Berklee graduate who could play any style the records required and usually played three — built his solo in “Since You’re Gone” as an explicit homage to Robert Fripp, the King Crimson leader whose sustained, keening guitar lines had redefined what a solo could be a decade earlier. The anthology’s liner notes document the tribute, and it reframes the track: inside this bright pop album, in its opening song, the guitarist is saluting the high priest of progressive rock’s darkest band.
Knight-Ridder critic Keith Thomas heard the result as “gutsy” guitars against “winding” synthesizers, and the combination is the song’s signature weather — Easton’s Fripp-flavored lines keening over Greg Hawkes’ synth figures, human wail and machine pattern locked together. Easton’s solos were always the Cars’ licensed emotion, the place feeling was permitted to overflow, and the Fripp salute tells you what he thought this song was: not filler, not a formula ballad, but a piece worth signing with his most serious influence. The battles behind “Since You’re Gone” were fought by critics in print. Inside the record, the band had already settled them.
The Empty Apartment
MTV had launched in August 1981, three months before Shake It Up appeared, and the Cars — a band designed by a drummer with a pop-art eye, fronted by two of the most visually striking men in rock — were built for the medium before the medium existed. The video for “Since You’re Gone” is the early proof. It starred Ocasek, in Guarisco’s summary, “moping around an empty apartment”: the singer wandering a set of rooms as the furniture of a shared life is removed, until the departed girlfriend is herself replaced by a dead-eyed mannequin — the video’s famous, quietly horrifying central image, the Cars’ frost aesthetic rendered as literal set design.
The clip received adequate airplay on MTV, which in 1982 meant it entered the rotation of the only channel that mattered to the band’s demographic, and it aged better than most of its peers. Context matters here: MTV’s first years were a seller’s market for any act that arrived with usable footage, because the channel had hours to fill and a thin library of clips to fill them with. A band with the Cars’ visual discipline — art-directed covers, a drummer who thought like a designer, two frontmen who looked like magazine illustrations — was positioned to own that library, and the Shake It Up campaign was the band’s first full step into the video economy. The title track got the dancers and the bounce. “Since You’re Gone” got the apartment and the mannequin, which is to say it got the better film, because it had the better idea: a breakup visualized not as an argument but as a removal, movers carrying a life out of a flat while its owner wanders the rooms in a daze. It remains the visual the song is remembered by, the rare early video that interprets rather than illustrates. Keith Thomas, surveying the band’s videos in 1985, judged it one of the Cars’ best. It is easy to see why. The early MTV era is littered with performance clips and literal-minded storylines, but the “Since You’re Gone” video understands its song: detachment as staging, a man underplaying his grief in a room being emptied around him, and the beloved reduced to a display dummy — present, perfect, and not alive. It is the lyric’s argument made visible, and it made the song’s strangeness legible to an audience that might otherwise have heard only a pleasant midtempo single.
Out of the Blocks
Elektra released “Since You’re Gone” as a single on March 8, 1982, with “Think It Over” on the American B-side and “Maybe Baby” in Britain — both, characteristically, album tracks strong enough to be singles for other bands. The trade press was kind. Billboard‘s Top Single Picks, in its March 20 issue, called it “a crafty uptempo track that has a catchy hook” — crafty being the operative compliment, the industry’s word for a record too smart to dismiss. Record World, the same week, praised the construction: “a bass drone provides drama while percussion shakes create tension”, it noted, and the song had a “catchy synthesizer melody line and punchy chorus hook”.
The setup could hardly have been stronger. The band was coming off the No. 4 title track, the album was lodged in the Top 10, the video was in rotation, the reviews were respectful, and the song opened the album every reviewer had already praised. Everything about the release of “Since You’re Gone” was correct except the ending.
The B-Sides Tell the Truth
A single’s flip side is where a band shows its hand, and the two flips of “Since You’re Gone” are a small exhibition. America got “Think It Over”, an album track with its own nervy charm. Britain got “Maybe Baby” — the band’s cover of Buddy Holly, the closing track of Shake It Up and the only cover on the album. It is worth pausing on that choice. The Cars were routinely accused of being a machine with no ancestors, a synth-age novelty with the roots airbrushed out. Their records tell a different story — Easton’s solos are a history of rock guitar in miniature — and here, on the back of their most futuristic ballad, they put a 1957 rock and roll song, played straight and tight, Holly’s hiccup ironed into Boston chrome.
The B-side geography also records the campaign’s expectations. Different flips for different markets was standard practice, but the pairing is eloquent: the Americans, who were being asked to make the song a pop hit, got more of the album’s modern surface; the British, who had sent the band’s early singles up their charts with enthusiasm, got the roots record. As it happened, Britain also gave the single its Top 40 placing. The markets understood the band in proportion to how much of it they were shown.
There is one more quiet fact in the single’s paperwork: the song that would spend decades being called too strange for the Top 40 was released with its strangeness fully intact. No radio edit trimmed the Dylan mannerism, no remix warmed the vocal, no alternative take softened Easton’s solo for the singles market. Elektra and the band sent the album version out exactly as it stood at the front of Shake It Up, chant, ascending bridge, impersonation and all. Whatever the campaign’s hopes, nobody involved tried to disguise the record as something else. The near-miss that followed was an honest one — the song failed, if it failed, as itself.
Forty-One
It entered the Hot 100 on the chart dated March 27, 1982, at No. 78, and climbed — steadily, respectably, fatally. Six weeks later, on the chart dated May 8, it peaked at No. 41. Then it descended, completing nine weeks on the chart and exiting, carrying forever the strangest distinction in chart music: it had missed the Top 40 by a single place, in an era when “Top 40” was not a statistic but the name of the dominant radio format in America. Guarisco’s epitaph for the release is exact: the song “charted just outside the pop chart Top 40.”
The campaign then did what campaigns do: it moved on, and the moving-on is part of the song’s story. The third American single from Shake It Up was “Victim of Love”; Britain took “Think It Over”. The album cycle rolled toward its close with the band’s profile higher than it had been since 1979, and “Since You’re Gone” settled into the role it would play for years — the opener people remembered, the single people argued about, the track that DJs at influential stations like Los Angeles’ KROQ kept in their personal rotations long after the chart office had filed it away. KROQ’s own year-end reckoning for 1982 placed it at No. 14 for the year, a programmer’s verdict that has aged considerably better than Billboard’s.
The rest of the numbers mock the headline. On Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, where album-rock programmers voted with their playlists, the song reached No. 24 — a solid hit. That chart itself was barely a year old: Billboard had introduced its rock tracks tally only in 1981, an admission that the album-rock audience had become a nation within the nation, measurable separately from the singles-buying public. The split verdict of “Since You’re Gone” is that new geography made visible. In the old country’s chart, the song was a near-miss. In the new country’s, it was a fixture. The Cars had always been an album band with singles, rather than a singles band with albums, and 1982 was the year the industry built a chart that could see the difference — just too late, and just partially, to save this song’s official biography. In Britain it made No. 37, an actual Top 40 placing, the band’s home-away-from-home chart being kinder than its own. In France it reached No. 10. On the Cash Box chart it peaked at No. 51, which only sharpens the story: depending on which tally you consult, “Since You’re Gone” was a Top 10 record, a Top 40 record, or a record that missed everything by one square. The discrepancy is a parable about measurement. Songs do not experience charts; audiences experience songs, and the audiences for this one — rock radio’s, MTV’s, France’s, the album-buyers’ — received it as a hit. Only the one chart that conferred the title said otherwise, by the width of a single rung.
It is worth pausing on how small that rung is. No. 41 and No. 40 are separated, in a typical week, by a handful of reporting stations’ playlists, a rounding error with a biography attached. Had the song touched 40, it would appear in every “Top 40 hits” summary of the band, every oldies-format segue, every listicle’s arithmetic. At 41, it became the connoisseur’s choice instead — the song fans cite to prove the charts were wrong, which is its own kind of immortality, purchased at retail price.
A Breakup Song in the Lyric Wars
The strangest battle came three years after the chart fight ended, and the song was not consulted. In July 1985, in a syndicated newspaper column titled “Rock musicians sing suicide”, the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly took aim at a shelf of rock songs she regarded as encouraging suicide, and “Since You’re Gone” was among the exhibits: lines about life being a mess and everything thrown away were read, in her interpretation, as an argument that life is not worth living after a loved one has gone. The column landed in the middle of America’s great mid-eighties panic over rock lyrics — the season of the Parents Music Resource Center, of Senate hearings and warning stickers, when the nation’s op-ed pages treated pop choruses as public-health hazards.
The reading tells you more about 1985 than about the song. “Since You’re Gone” is a document of desolation, certainly — its singer can’t help it, everything’s a mess — but desolation described is not desolation prescribed, and the song’s actual subject is endurance: a man still standing in the wreckage, itemizing it, which is what people do instead of falling. That a Cars single could be conscripted into the lyric wars at all is a measure of how far the band’s frost had traveled into the mainstream: three years after it stalled at No. 41, the song was famous enough to be denounced. The panic passed, the stickers became a marketing device, and the song remained what it had always been — a breakup record, guilty of nothing but sounding like one.
The Verdict Gets Rewritten
Time has been the song’s best advocate. Greg Prato, AllMusic’s Cars chronicler, calls it “one of Ocasek’s best-ever tales of heartbreak” and the melancholic high point of Shake It Up. Ultimate Classic Rock‘s Nick DeRiso hears “a desperately weird tale of romantic nihilism” and locates its peculiar charge in the vocal: when Ocasek “lovingly chirps” the accusation of treachery, DeRiso writes, “it sounds simultaneously hilarious and truly creepy — like maybe the last truly weird thing the Cars ever did.” Classic Rock History has ranked it among the band’s ten greatest songs twice over, its critics praising a record that sounds, as one put it, like something that could have been released on one of the band’s first two albums — the highest compliment in the Cars universe, where the first two albums are scripture.
The song’s institutional standing kept pace. Elektra placed it on the band’s Greatest Hits in 1985, three years after its chart stall, which is the industry’s own way of rewriting a verdict: whatever the Hot 100 had said, the catalogue department knew a standard when it heard one. Shake It Up itself settled at double Platinum. And the debate the song started — detachment or devastation — never resolved, because it was never really a debate. The San Francisco Examiner‘s Michael Goldberg, reviewing the band in February 1982, heard Ocasek’s tone as detached, “almost as if he’s discussing a computer that doesn’t work anymore”. Keith Thomas heard the same performance as “impassioned”. Both men were listening carefully. Both were right. The song is a machine for producing that disagreement, and it still runs.
What the Band Did Next
The years after the single explain why critics keep returning to it as a dividing line. In 1982 Ocasek released Beatitude, his first solo album — the beginning of a parallel career that would increasingly draw his energies away from the band he led. In 1984 the Cars returned with Heartbeat City, made with Mutt Lange, and became MTV-era superstars: “You Might Think”, “Magic”, “Drive”, the hits arriving in a bright, expensive procession. It was everything Shake It Up had promised commercially, delivered at twice the wattage. It was also, in DeRiso’s phrase, the end of the band’s truly weird period — the strangeness sanded down for the stadiums, the irony replaced by scale.
The rest of the arc is familiar: Door to Door in 1987, the breakup announced in 1988, Orr’s solo success with “Stay the Night” in 1986 having already proved that the band’s other voice could carry a hit without the machinery, Orr’s death in 2000, the long estrangement, the one-album reunion, the Hall of Fame. Viewed from the end of that story, “Since You’re Gone” sits at the exact hinge — the last moment when the Cars were simultaneously a hit machine and an oddity, when their opening track could contain a Dylan impersonation, a Fripp homage and a nervous breakdown narrated in grammar jokes, and their label could still send it out as a commercial single with a straight face. Later, the hits got bigger and the songs got smoother. The oddity is what the connoisseurs kept.
Why It Endures
“Since You’re Gone” endures because it is the purest distillation of the thing only the Cars could do: a hit-shaped song about heartbreak, engineered to withhold the very catharsis it is shaped to deliver. Every other power ballad of its era begs. This one itemizes. Its singer stands in the emptied apartment of the video, among the mannequins of his former life, and files his report in perfect tense — and the report is devastating precisely because the voice never rises. The frost was never the absence of feeling. It was the sound of feeling under discipline, which is the sound of most actual grief on most actual days.
Its battles, in the end, were all the same battle in different rooms: against a predecessor album’s shadow and a follow-up slot behind a No. 4 smash; against a hometown critic’s narrative and an activist’s sermon; against the suspicion that control is coldness; against a chart that measured it one place short of the title it deserved. It lost some of those fights. It lost the famous one by a single rung. But the song itself never blinked, and the culture slowly reorganized itself around the song’s position — the critics rewriting their verdicts, the label canonizing it on Greatest Hits, the fans adopting its near-miss as a badge. No. 41 turned out to be a forwarding address.
Play it now and the number sounds absurd, a clerical error in the biography of an obvious classic. The chant of the verses, the ascending pull of the bridge, Easton’s Fripp-haunted solo, the treacher-ess that is half Dylan and half distress signal — it is all exactly where the band left it in a Boston studio they owned, in the last sessions of their first great partnership. The Cars would get bigger, sleeker, more famous. They would never again be quite this strange on a single. One place short was as far as weird could go in the spring of 1982 — and weird, it turns out, lasts longer than forty.
There is a final fitness to it. The Cars’ songs were always about the distance between the report and the feeling, the chart position and the record. “Since You’re Gone” simply got to live its own lyric at the level of biography: everything in perfect tense, everything a mess, the official record insisting one thing while everyone who actually heard it knew another. Since it’s been gone from the charts — four decades gone — the moonlight around it has only gotten better.