The Go-Betweens recorded their version in 1982, but the one playing in my head is a composite of the half-dozen times I saw Grant McLennan and Robert Forster play out in the summer of 1999. They weren't yet calling themselves "The Go-Betweens" again, but they weren't fooling anyone: The band started out as a duo, two best friends from Brisbane playing together, and so they were again. The reserved craftsman of the group, McLennan stood off to the side, even though he sang almost all of the group's latter-day singles. But as "Cattle and Cane," his bittersweet ode to growing up in Australia's farm country, started up, McLennan's hips started to shake, occasioning a rare lyrical alteration: instead of "waiting for a chance," the song's narrator was now "learning how to dance." In the midst of the song's melancholy memories, the alteration seemed almost frivolous, but it eventually occurred to me it might be McLennan's way of signaling that he'd made peace with his past. Grant McLennan died in his sleep on Saturday. He was 48.