Ian Malin
On January 21 1971 Neil Young introduced a new song to his audience at Boston Music Hall. He may have anticipated that its lyrics were open to misinterpretation. ‘This is another new song. It’s called A Man Needs A Maid. It’s kind of, well, it doesn’t really mean what it says. It’s just the idea that anyone would think enough to say something like that would show that something else was happening. So don’t take it personally when I say it. I don’t really want a maid.’
Bewildering yet beguiling, A Man Needs A Maid would not find its way on to an LP until the following year. It was the third track on Harvest, a No1 record on both sides of the Atlantic and an album that heralded an explosion in West Coast country rock in the Seventies.
A rich Harvest gave Young his first UK hit, Heart Of Gold, in which James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt provided some brief vocal harmonies. Young, constantly restless, was not altogether delighted with the catchy song’s success. He eventually refused to perform it live. ‘This song put me in the middle of the road,’ he later wrote. ‘Travelling there soon became a bore and I headed for the ditch.’
Three years after Harvest, Young had turned left on that road and with a hand-brake turn given us another much-heralded record, Tonight’s The Night. It’s not in the ditch. In fact, it’s great but any optimism on Harvest had now given way to something much darker. A despondent Young had seen two friends, Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, die after heroin overdoses and the gentle folk melodies of Harvest were replaced by raw musings on death and the trappings of fame. Young’s warning on Harvest about the dangers of drugs in The Needle And The Damage Done (‘Every junkie’s like the setting sun’) had become horribly prescient.
Neither Needle nor A Man Needs A Maid were anywhere near the middle of the road. A Man Needs A Maid is one of two tracks on Harvest where Young is joined by the London Symphony Orchestra and recorded, not on the West Coast, but in North London at Barking Town Hall. Harvest was produced by Elliot Mazer but Jack Nitzsche stepped in to work the dials on Maid. Young plays piano and the strings of the LSO help give the track an epic, haunting quality.
Nitzsche, who died after a cardiac arrest in 2000 at the age of 63, was a composer, arranger and producer and one of the main architects of Phil Spector’s so-called Wall of Sound. Like Spector he was a controversial figure who had what could be kindly termed a turbulent private life. Nitzsche’s stellar reputation nosedived in 1979 when he was arrested for hitting his then-girlfriend, Carrie Snodgress, with a gun and threatening to kill her’s and Young’s son. This violent man was fined and sentenced to three years’ probation for assault with a deadly weapon.
So oblique are the lyrics to A Man Needs A Maid that nothing is certain but in 1971 Snodgress was Young’s girlfriend and believed to be the inspiration for one of the song’s most memorable lines.
A while ago, somewhere I don’t know when,
I was watchin’ a movie with a friend
I fell in love with the actress
She was playing a part I could understand
Snodgress died of liver failure 20 years ago. She was only 58. She gave up acting to live with Young and to care for their son Zeke who was born with cerebral palsy. Young could have been watching Snodgress’s best-known movie role in 1970’s Diary Of A Mad Housewife which earned her an Oscar nomination. If she was a muse for Maid she did a damn fine job.
But it is the last four lines of the song’s first verse that are so odd and that Young, quite rightly, sensed was going to be problematic:
I was thinkin’ that maybe I’d get a maid
Find a place nearby for her to stay
Just someone to keep my house clean
Fix my meals and go away
Well, if you write a lyric that sounds like an advert for a new cleaner it is bound to lead to some head-scratching even if the strings are as a lush as a rain forest. The song, though, is more complex than it seems. Many critics see it as a heartbroken narrator trying to convince himself that something simple and emotionless could be better than a real relationship.
A Man Needs A Maid is strange but it is wonderful. Like all great art it makes you look at the world differently and, over more than half a century since it was written, it still makes you sit up when you hear it.
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