Streets full of people, all alone
Roads full of houses, never home
Church full of singing, out of tune
Everyone’s gone to the moon
- Jonathan King, 1965
One of my favorite all-time songs of the ’60’s was Jonathan King’s Everyone’s Gone to the Moon. It peaked at #17 in 1965. In fact I liked it so much I recorded it in 1985. However, I never released it. It was actually a big hit Noel Harrison, Rex’s kid.
King has had a different career. He was, and is, a songwriter and producer who won awards in the early 1970’s as a producer beating out luminaries such as Mickey Most. But his life is overshadowed with charges of stalking and having relationships with, basically, children.
That aside, Everyone’s Gone to the Moon came out during the magical 1965, the same year as Mr. Tambourine Man and Satisfaction. The production was really heavy on the strings and Harrison’s voice gets lost in them at times. I guess they were trying to get spacey before synthesizers.
Listening to this song at night with a 2 -transistor radio made it even more eventful. Y’see I was picking it up on the skip because we couldn’t get our weak radio station at night. So I would hear The Byrds, Beatles and Stones, but just snippets of 10-20 seconds. Yet in that small isolated town, in 20 feet of snow, it was like being connected. . . like there were people out there who knew I was around.