Weekly Neil: A Man Needs A Maid

My life is changing in so many ways

I’m really loathe to do this so soon into the life of Weekly Neil, but I’ve gotta make this a short one. Wikipedia would call this entry a stub, and they’d be right. I’m on deadline for another piece and feeling the crunch of preparing for some upcoming travel. As such, this entry won’t offer the in-depth examination of gender roles that “A Man Needs A Maid” deserves.

But some quick biographical details are important: Neil was 25 when he recorded 1972’s Harvest, the album that assured the rest of his career. He laid most of it down in a barn with a band called The Stray Gators. It features his only No. 1 single, “Heart Of Gold,” a song you know and that most everyone you know also knows. It’s got “Old Man,” which may be my gun-to-head favorite Neil song. It’s also got “A Man Needs A Maid,” a song about a young guy frightened by the responsibilities and changing landscapes of adulthood and who yearns to retreat into the arms of a mother figure. Spelled out like that, it’s a Judd Apatow film. The song itself is beautiful and moving, if syrupy, full of unexpected strings courtesy of the London Symphony Orchestra.

It’s also hard to separate the larger meaning, which I first glommed onto as a 21-year-old afraid to graduate college, with the likely unintentional selfish sexism at play in the very request of the title. He wants someone to keep his house clean, fix his meals, and go away. That’s what he says anyway. Real life is way more complicated than that.

Listening on a crackly old vinyl copy, I used to picture the piano introduction of this song as Neil alone in the dark barn, melancholy and brimming with meaning. The strings arrive and whisk him (and us) away like Wendy en route to Neverland, a technicolor marvel seen from above. And then he ends up back where he was, asking, “When will I see you again?” It’s sad, really. It also hits just the right notes.

What’s notable is the final verse, where Neil sings about falling in love with an actress on screen while watching a movie (decades before Adam Duritz did the same). This was Carrie Snodgress, whom he eventually fell in love and had a song with. Their breakup helped inspire “Motion Pictures (For Carrie)” from On The Beach, and this song joins the ranks of other great Neil songs about seeing movies (“Speakin’ Out” is a great one).

But back to me for a moment, on my college campus, 21, myopic, dangerously on Tumblr but obsessed with the classic rock canon. I listened to Harvest and After The Gold Rush intently, almost singularly, and thought the later, harsher stuff like Tonight’s The Night was too far-out for me. I was, to use a term, a Neil basic. But I was learning.

The rest of this entry today comes from a Tumblr post I wrote in spring 2012 on the cusp of college graduation. Including it here is surely a form of self-flagellation (and likely narcissistic). It is also true that self-reflection is healthy as long as you don’t dwell on what you can’t change. I wish I could tell myself then that writing is not all about adjectives; I learned it on my own. I like this young version of me’s reflections on “A Man Needs A Maid” and can still feel how he felt then. I feel differently now, sure, and that’s the way it should be.

The campus library closes at 1 a.m. now. I have two English oral comprehensive examinations on Thursday.

I’ve discovered outdoor midnight walks have become my new way to cleanse myself of all the chaos and stress of this scholastic burden. Tonight, I treated myself to The White Album and some Neil Young on the walk home.

“Old Man” just crushed me. That introductory rambling about living on a ranch while he nervously tunes and false-starts the new song. He’s naked up there, vulnerable. Afraid of what his fellow Canucks will think of his new material. What if they don’t like it!? Just Neil and the wooden hum of his Martin. There’s no accentuated slide to complement the chorus, no frisky banjo plucks to prime the palate, no James Taylor-Linda Ronstadt backing howls. Just Neil and his worn-but-still-boyishly-warm voice.

Perfect to drink in and look at the moon through a twisted web of black branches. The moon glowed like a hot bulb tonight, sending a bluish radiance throughout its pillowing sky. It was amazing. The artificial floodlight wash of campus seemed an insult to the real majestic nightlight.

Then, the seven-minute “A Man Needs A Maid” piano rendition, featuring an early version of “Heart Of Gold” laced within its confines. Neil’s whiny chorus of “A may-ay-ay-aid, a man needs a maid!” is switched the first time to “Afray-ay-ay-aid, a man feels afraid!” It’s the heart of the tune. Fear.

I’m 21, each day carrying me closer to that tassled walk in May. My future is a game of Kerplunk. Pull out the wrong stick and the marbles come plunking down like fat chunks of hail. A man feels afraid.

But I wanna live; I wanna give. I have so much to give. I wanna be a miner for a heart of gold. Twenty-one and it’s so much fun… for another three months. Twenty-four and there’s so much more… after I stride across that stage.

A man feels afraid, but at least he’s in good company with a friend.

“A Man Needs A Maid,” written by Neil Young, from Harvest (1972)

Neil Young: piano, vocals
London Symphony Orchestra: arrangement by Jack Nitzsche
Conducted by David Meecham