John Simon produced the Band's first solo album, 1968's Music from Big Pink,[2] which had charted at No.
AllMusic wrote that the song "could be a lost Band track in its playing and texture", and complimented Merry Clayton's "soaring backing vocal" for adding "a special wrinkle" and for evoking Leonard Cohen's Songs of Leonard Cohen.
[5] Manfred Mann's Earth Band covered the song in 1977 during a concert at Roxy Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles; Billboard wrote that their "fresh and tender approach to the drastically overused theme of life as a rock musician injected a few moments of alluring sentiment" into the set.
6 on the UK Singles Chart, becoming the biggest of the band's three top ten hits in that country.
[8] The single version of the song was used in early pressings of the soundtrack of The Stud, a softcore pornography film featuring Joan Collins as a nymphomaniac; in 2020, the journalist Carl Meyer wrote in Pattaya Mail that his 1978 interview with Manfred Mann had soured due to him mentioning its appearance in the film and that Mann lost his temper after receiving confirmation of its presence from his press secretary.