Just a guess, but this song came out in 1972, the year LR turned 30...time to grow up, right? By that time he'd probably lost quite a few friends to drugs (e.g., Edie Sedgwick OD'd in 1971). The song is probably meant to be ambiguous: you can take it simply and literally, as a complaint about living people from his past, or more sadly, as a sort of mock complaint about the ghosts of those people who won't leave him alone; maybe he found those people silly and annoying when they were alive, and yet he still finds himself thinking about them from time to time and even missing them. It's that little bit of complexity that makes his lyrics so good.
Just a guess, but this song came out in 1972, the year LR turned 30...time to grow up, right? By that time he'd probably lost quite a few friends to drugs (e.g., Edie Sedgwick OD'd in 1971). The song is probably meant to be ambiguous: you can take it simply and literally, as a complaint about living people from his past, or more sadly, as a sort of mock complaint about the ghosts of those people who won't leave him alone; maybe he found those people silly and annoying when they were alive, and yet he still finds himself thinking about them from time to time and even missing them. It's that little bit of complexity that makes his lyrics so good.