Neil Young with Crazy Horse – Zuma, 50 Years Later

Fifty years ago today, Neil Young celebrated the end of his trial-by-fire years and the return of Crazy Horse with his blistering-hot, heart-lacerating Zuma.

Neil Young: lead vocals, guitar, piano, principle songwriter

Crazy Horse:

Billy Talbot: bass, backing vocals

Ralph Molina: drums, backing vocals

Frank “Poncho” Sampedro: rhythm guitar

Special guests: Tim Drummond, bass on “Pardon My Heart;” Russ Kunkel, congas on “Through My Sails;” Crosby, Stills & Nash, harmony vocals on “Through My Sails”

produced by David Briggs with Neil Young and Tim Mulligan

art by Sandy Mazzeo

“Just twenty-nine years old, Young had already realized that dreams can cost you everything – and that even the great ones can morph into nightmares.”

quoted from: Jimmy McDonough, Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (2002.)

If you were to combine Spinal Tap with The Hangover, you’d get the production of Zuma; a blistering-hot, heart-lacerating LP shaped first by the long, messy breakdown of its writer's relationship.

While Neil Young was recording what would become On The Beach, Carrie Snodgress sailed off to Hawaii with another guy. “I was too late for one thing and just in time for another,” Neil curtly recounted in his memoir. Carrie insisted nothing happened, but seeing as this guy was writing her love letters and showing up unannounced to Broken Arrow, Neil didn’t buy it for a second. He was no saint either; it’s worth noting around this time, he met his second wife Pegi. (I love the guy, but he is a serial relationship overlapper.) But he was aware. Neil admitted this Carrie thing dealt him a taste of his own medicine. “I discovered what happens when you do something to yourself. When you do it to someone else, you do it to yourself...You look back and go, ‘Well, fuck – that person didn’t do anything I didn’t do to them.’”

Neil was writing up a storm about his old lady’s indiscretions. On The Beach and entirety of Homegrowncame from this period; the latter so raw, Neil didn’t feel comfortable releasing it for another 45 years. “Ambulance Blues,” “Love Is A Rose,” which he gave to Linda Ronstadt, and others directly reference Carrie.

Separations always get weird and messy when children are involved – I can attest to that. Neil and Carrie’s son was just two years old at the time. In especially unfortunate cases, breakups are prolonged by family emergency. All of one day after Carrie moved out of Broken Arrow, her mother took her own life. Thissudden, tragic loss made a clean break all but impossible for both parties.

Things are further complicated when one party is a rock star on a multi-million-dollar tour and doing the one thing he swore he’d never do: reuniting with Crosby, Stills, & Nash.

The Doom Tour

C, N, and Y were all open about the fact that they only did this for the money. But still, Neil had such a bad experience the last time. Why the hell did he agree to this? Elliot Roberts, probably. His client had just released three of his most naked, abrasive, unpalatable, unfiltered, and drunken albums in a row. While those albums were great, the sales were no Harvest!

Called “the Doom Tour” by David Crosby, exactly no one had a good time.

Endeavors were horrifically disorganized. According to Stephen Stills, “The first ten shows were like, ‘What song do you wanna do?’ ‘I don’t know, what do you want to do?’ ‘Who’s got the list?’ ‘What list? We don’t use a list.’” It was mostly outdoors and during the summer, so the heat would push the instruments out of tune. The guys’ wedge monitors were placed on side stage for some reason? And egos involved meant that everyone’s amps had to be turned up, which meant no one was singing in tune.

By the mid-seventies, rock-and-roll excess was standard practice. All the hippies and scrappy kids got rich. The Rolling Stones built their legacy off Keith Richards’s nine lives, Rod Stewart is schmoozing around Malibu, and Led Zeppelin just...is. The “Doom Tour” was just bleeding money. Croz insisted it was to be a stadium tour, but neither Crosby, Stills, Nash, nor Young were at a commercial peak in mid-1974. Thus, the grievous error meant merely a quarter of tickets were sold. All the guys traveled separately with their entourages; Neil drove a brand-new mobile home with his son (still a toddler,) his dog Art, Neil’s sidekick Ranger Dave, and Sandy Mazzeo.

Rented limos went unused. Management took gobs of money for themselves every night. There were CSNY-branded sheets and towels and 50,000 CSNY frisbees, a mariachi band for some fucking reason, and so many drugs, Steve Stills believed he fought in Vietnam. Not to mention they spent $250,000 on Astroturf to protect the fields of the stadiums they played.

Pictured, L-R: David Crosby, Graham Nash, Neil Young, and Stephen Stills performing as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at the Oakland Coliseum on the "Doom Tour" (photographed by David Zimmer, 7/14/1974)

During all of this, Neil released the second installment of his “ditch trilogy,” On The Beach, to trash reviews. This would be career-ending for any of CSN, but not for Y somehow! Seeing dollar signs from this reckless and endangered tour, Atlantic Records released greatest hits compilation So Far without C, S, N, or Y’s consent. The only “new” features were Neil’s “Ohio” and its B-side “Find The Cost of Freedom” – and even those were pushing five years old.

Tour incidents included a kid setting off a rocket that lit said quarter of a million dollar Astroturf on fire (talk about “Requiem for the Rockets...”) and Neil’s mobile home running out of gas in the middle of the Queensboro Bridge. Traffic backed up for miles behind him. The thing died for good in Chicago, where he bought a black Cadillac for $400 – another ticking time bomb. Joel Bernstein joined the fray somewhere along the way, and this Cadillac inevitably died.

The tour was also stained by tragedy. At the same gig as the rocket fire incident, another attendee jumped off a ledge, fell twenty-five feet, and broke his back. On the morning of the Houston show, Cass Elliot – the one who’d facilitated Crosby, Stills & Nash getting together in the first place – passed away in London.

Pictured: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performing at Wembley Stadium on the "Doom Tour" (photographed by Vin Miles, 7/14/1974)

The grand fucked-up finale of the “Doom Tour” was Wembley Stadium. “Listening back to the tapes of Wembley, it is pretty obvious that we were either too high or just no good.”

The weirdness continues as Neil and a ragtag group of accomplices take a ferry to the Netherlands. Here, our ringleader bought a Rolls-Royce named Wembley. Graham Nash stuck around for the chapter of the story with thrift-store disguises and paper leis, but jets home after having to bribe a customs officer with a literal bag of cash so Neil could collect Wembley. Neil’s certifiably out of his mind over Carrie and thinking up some pretty weird stuff, like a road trip across the Sahara Desert in this Rolls-Royce. He also had this dream that when the tour was over, him and his buddies would be stuck in a foreign country working as hotel valets to make the money to get home.

In what I can only describe as a turn of events that if I wrote it, I’d be thrown out of the fucking writers’ room, Wembley died right in front of the Brussels Hilton Hotel. Son of a bitch, Neil’s dream came true! (Well, half-true. Neil asked the horrified concierge if he could park cars for them, but he didn’t have work papers.)

By the grace of God – and despite Neil’s best efforts – the trio made it back to California in one piece.

The Human Highway

CSNY booked time at the Record Plant for a project with the working title “Human Highway.” Here, CSN dubbed harmonies onto “Through My Sails” and test-ran “Pardon My Heart.” But everyone was so drugged-up and exhausted that not much else came of it. This wasn’t the first time this happened, and it wouldn’t be the last.

Why did CSNY entertain this stupid run-around for like twenty years? As put by Peter Doggett, there was a “gulf in understanding between the original trio and their maverick partner.”

“Once CSN started working with Young, they assumed CSNY was now the ultimate – the creative – priority. Young, meanwhile, took CSN as their original word: that they could work in whatever combination suited them at the time. In his mind, there was no reason CSN couldn’t have made an album without him (and he was right.) To which they would have conjectured: why make a CSN record when it could have been CSNY?”

quoted from: Peter Doggett, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (2024 ed.)

Pulling the plug on “Human Highway” was for the best. Neil was still obviously unwell and having dreams about Carrie’s mother. He became convinced she was haunting Broken Arrow. Though Carrie was gone, Neil found he couldn’t bear the ranch. There were too many memories there.

He buys this place on Sea Level Drive, a few miles north of Zuma Beach, and calls up his old friends Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina. What remained of Crazy Horse had a messy few years themselves: both Nils Lofgren and Jack Nitszche left after the Tonight’s The Night tour. Here, the third major player of Zuma makes his first appearance in this debauched film: Poncho.

Pictured, L-R: Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot, Poncho, and Neil Young "on the beach" in Northern Malibu (photographed by Henry Diltz, 1975)

Poncho is that guy who shows up in your driveway in a hot rod with two chicks in the back and your wife says “Oh, no!” because three days later, you’ll wake up sunburnt and lying on a beach in Mexico with no recollection of how you got there.

Aside from some minor details, that’s what happened to Neil! He wound up in Mexico with Poncho guzzling tequila like it was water!

Poncho has a place on the PCH. David rented a six-bedroom mansion nearby for Crazy Horse to record at; under the rationale that “Neil’s better in houses” (or barns) “than in studios.” It was well and truly a miracle they got anything done in this house. The soundproofing in the “studio” (the smallest bedroom in the house) wasn’t much more than foam stapled over the windows. The mixing board was stuck all the way out in the kitchen. Poncho’s stuffing ungodly amounts of cocaine up his nose, everyone’s smoking pastures’ worth of green stuff. David’s enabling it all, especially the womanizing. “Half the women in Malibu had Neil’s phone number because of David.”

In one of the funniest fucking accounts in the whole of Shakey, one that so perfectly describes the circumstances from which Zuma was born, Sandy recalls someone or other buying a wedding dress and stuffing it in the coat closet of this frat house with a can of chocolate-covered cherries. “If we meet the right girl, we’ll open up that door – otherwise that’s where all that shit belongs.” The move completely changed Neil’s outlook and lifestyle.

Neil revealed to Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone, “It’s weird, I’ve got all these songs about Peru, the Aztecs and the Incas. Time travel stuff. We’ve got one song called ‘Marlon Brando, John Ehrlichman, Pocahontas and Me.’ I’m playing a lot of electric guitar and that’s what I like best. Two guitars, bass and drums. And it’s really flying off the ground too. Fucking unbelievable. I’ve got a bet with Elliot that it’ll be out before the end of September. After that we’ll probably go out on a fall tour of 3,000 seaters. Me and Crazy Horse again. I couldn’t be happier.”

The 3,000-seater tour didn’t happen, and neither did that September release date.

Danger Bird Is On The Rise

About CSNY rehearsing for the “Doom Tour,” Peter Doggett wrote,

“...Crosby would famously try to persuade Young not to play ‘your dark stuff;’ little realizing that darkness was where Young shone most brightly.”

quoted from: Peter Doggett, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (2024 ed.)

Released just five months before, Tonight’s The Night is drunk and dark. You don’t know whether you should keep it on its feet or let it go down. It’s thick, coagulated, brown blood. Then you have Zuma. It lacks the commercial appeal of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After The Gold Rush, and Harvest, and hasn’t garnered the cult following of Time Fades Away, On The Beach, and Tonight’s The Night. What does the Horse sound like years outside the context of Laurel Canyon, long gone after Manson popped their bubble, Mama Cass Elliot’s passing dissolved the friend group, and all the hippies got rich and bought mansions? Zuma sounds bone-dry, for one. There's very little reverb and no gloss. Yet somehow, it’s less combative than its predecessor! This is more concise than the last time we saw the Horse, due to the addition of Poncho. There are less exploratory jams of “Down By The River” and “Cowgirl In The Sand” in favor of three-chords-and-the-truth. Of course this iteration of the Horse clicks with me. Poncho is from Detroit! “...he digs the old cats like Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, but he also has a taste for the greasy depravity of Leslie West’s Mountain.” Poncho is a standout player on Zuma for sure.

Zuma opens with Don’t Cry No Tears; a rewrite of “I Wonder” which Neil played with the Squires.

Above: "I Wonder," as performed by the Squires (c. 1963)

"Don't Cry No Tears" has that early sixties feel: simple chords and a predictable turnaround, with that Roy Orbison “My girl’s caught between two guys and I don’t know who she’ll choose!” plot. The original lyrics from “I Wonder,” “I wonder who’s with her tonight/And I wonder who’s holding her tight,” take on a new context. The narrator’s heart still with his girl, but he’s pretty matter-of-fact about his circumstances. “There’s nothing I can say to make him go away.” He knows he’s lost her. No amount of her crying is will change how he feels, and nothing he can do would change how she feels. “Don’t Cry No Tears” has a slight country flavor that Crazy Horse did so well, but this song is plugged in. There’s none of the ambiguity ofEverybody Knows-Crazy Horse. Old Black is plugged in and cranked up, and Poncho’s guitar matches that energy. I hear noticeable improvement from the rhythm section! This is not a Billy Talbot that would flub a change seventeen times in a row. Zuma-Crazy Horse has a brightness that makes even a “Well, ain’t that some shit!” song like “Don’t Cry No Tears” feel sunny, even optimistic. If Zuma were the arc of a breakup, I see this opening tune as the end of the narrative. The scorned partner has found closure.

Thin, piercing guitar feedback over sparse, ascending bass confronts the listener with Zuma’s first tonal shift. The music of Danger Bird feels like a funeral procession in the Mojave, marching towards a thunderstorm. The ground is barren, pale, and cracked. The air is thick and hot, the sky turning blue-black. I’m impressed with Ralph’s drumming; intuitive and full of dimension. Poncho’s thick stasis holds drama of the core riff. Neil’s voice is bloody and bruised from the alcohol and coke. He struggles to hit the notes and cracks like a motherfucker. His most ugly-beautiful delivery is of, “But the training that he learned will get him nowhere fast!” The peak of the strain comes on “training,” and he just sort of tumbles out of that line. Most haunting of all is Neil’s conscious manifesting itself through the backing vocals. If you can make out what they say, they fill in the gaps of the scene. Neil mumbles and rants under this Greek chorus. It makes “Danger Bird” one of the most doomed songs in Neil’s whole catalog.

Born from a song called “LA Girls and Ocean Boys,” the original lyric was about him, Carrie, and friend she ran off with. It was so specific Neil had to rewrite it, but there are still hints to what went down. Buried in the backing vocals, you can hear, “Cause you’ve been with another man/Here you are and here I am/That’s the moment that he cracked…” I love drawing parallels to past Neil songs. “Round and Round” off Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is about the fear of leaving a relationship that’s long since run its course; presumably Neil’s marriage to his first wife Susan. Once again, Neil has fallen into the trap on “Danger Bird;” complacency as a toxic corrosive force. “I know I should be free/But freedom’s just a burden to me.” Hear how he spirals out of, “And though these wings have turned to stone/I can fly! Fly away!”

Born from Homegrown sessions, the lyric of Pardon My Heart was inspired by a turn of phrase Sandy Mazzeo used in conversation with Neil. The narrator is well aware things are expiring. “It’s a sad situation when all eyes are turned in/And love isn’t flowing the way it could have been.” But he’s in denial. He goes from acknowledging the soft, repeated chorus calls of “You brought it all on” with “Oh, and it feels so wrong” to ignoring them. Neil croons, “Ooh, and it feels so good/No, no, no, I don’t believe this song.”

I see “Pardon My Heart” as a sister to “Tell Me Why” off After The Gold Rush. They have a gentle rock on acoustic guitar and the same tenderness. Where one swoons, “I am lonely but you can free me/All in the way that you smile,” now we say, “Pardon my heart if I showed that I cared/But I love you more than moments we have or have not shared.” There’s history now. And it’s just not that easy, is it? The piano twinkles in the background, and Neil plays a wonderful distant solo. The mood is intimate and reconciliatory.

The bright, sunny instrumentation of Lookin’ For a Love is disconnected from the bitter, dark, conflicted, and subdued we’ve heard from Zuma so far. This is likely because it was written and recorded back at Broken Arrow; long after Zuma Beach sessions had concluded! Thus, there’s a change in perspective from the doom-and-gloom. Remember that lyric from “Old Man,” “Live alone in a paradise that makes me think of two”? Our narrator still thinks of two, but with a few more years behind him.

“I’ve been looking for a lover but I haven’t met her yet,

She’ll be nothing like I pictured her to be,

In her eyes I will discover another reason why I want to live

And make the best of what I see.”

Okay, the former is a great outlook to have! Betrayal doesn’t seem to have stamped all over Neil’s heart, and I love going in with no expectations.

But you’re already pinning your will to live on someone you’ve never met? Jesus, Neil, that explains a lot!!

“Looking for a love that’s right for me,

I don’t know how long it’s going to be,

But I hope I treat her kind and don’t mess with her mind

When she starts to see the darker side of me.”

He’s being completely frank, even doubting himself. The melodrama of the lyrics isn’t matched by Neil’s lethargic vocal delivery. This wasn’t intentional; Neil had just undergone throat surgery and his already-limited range was now reduced to about six notes. I wish this song didn’t fade out through Neil’s little falsetto bit.

Parasites and Countless Idle Threats

Have you ever seen someone who looks like your ex while you were out? You went out with work friends, school friends, whoever. It had been months or even years since you split up with this person, so you think you’re fine. You let loose, have a few too many. What’s the harm? Then you see someone who looks like your ex, and before you know it, you’re being wrangled into the back of your own car as you rant and rave about god-knows-what.

In the First Decade documentary, biographer Johnny Rogan says Zuma is “dominated” by “Cortez the Killer.” I think he’s wrong.

The origins of Barstool Blues are totally emblematic of this period. Neil was so shitfaced, he doesn’t remember writing it! And the melody is literally “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” But like any great Neil song – and against all inebriated odds – “Barstool Blues” is simple, but cuts.

I’m about to do something I never do on Vinyl Monday. I didn’t do it with my favorite set of lyrics ever written: “Expecting To Fly.” I don’t even do this with Bob Freaking Dylan. I’m going line-by-line through “Barstool Blues.”

“If I could hold onto just one thought for long enough to know

Why my mind is moving so fast and the conversation is slow,

Burn off all the fog and let the sun through to the snow,

Let me see your face again before I have to go.”

Alcohol makes you truthful and stupid, and our narrator is drunk as hell. I can imagine him picking his head up from the bartop and squinting at no-one in particular while delivering this line. He holds on for dear life to his train of thought with one hand and pulls the reins of honesty with the other. His grip is slipping; he’s desperate for sudden, blinding clarity, like sun on bright white snow. And he misses his ex. “Let me see your face again before I have to go.” Neil pushing the very top of his vocal range throughout “Barstool” conveys this desperation.

“I have seen you in the movies and in those magazines at night.” Carrie was an actress; Neil saw her face in a magazine and it was love at first sight. But “magazines at night” paints the “you” in a less savory light. Our narrator is trying his best to justify disposing of this woman; by drinking her memory away or throwing dirt on her good name. “I saw you on the barstool when you held that glass so tight.” This girl is just as down-and-out as him as she sits across this same bar. Is she even the girl that broke our narrator’s heart, or does she just bear a vague resemblance to her? The next line makes me think it’s the latter. “And I saw you in my nightmares, but I’ll see you in my dreams.” Realizing his honesty, our narrator undercuts himself with a joke. “And I might live a thousand years before I know what that means.” What do I know? I’m drunk!

In the final verse, Neil drops the curtain and turns the pen to himself.

“Once there was a friend of mine who died a thousand deaths,

His life was filled with parasites and countless idle threats.

He trusted in a woman and on her he made his bets,

Once there was a friend of mine who died a thousand deaths.”

In hindsight, Neil said Carrie was one of those people in constant crisis. You probably have one or two of them in your life. That’s appealing to a man at first; it tickles that “knight in shining armor” thing society drills into our heads from birth. Girl: be the “damsel in distress.” Guy: save the girl. But after five years, someone who needs constant saving wears on one’s patience and material resources; especially if they collect “strays.” Neil said Carrie brought a lot of hangers-on around.

Neil was also intimately familiar with death in this time in his life. Carrie’s mother, his old friend Cass. “Once there was a friend of mine who died a thousand deaths” invokes the spirits of Neil’s departed friends, Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry. Their lives as addicts were surely filled with “parasites andcountless idle threats.” It’s safe to say Neil was forced to confront his own mortality and limitations as a man at this time in his life. “He trusted in a woman and on her he made his bets,” clearly Neil is kicking himself for putting all his eggs in the wrong basket.

This final verse of “Barstool” is the only one that repeats its first line: “Once there was a friend of mine who died a thousand deaths.” Neil has turned the pen to himself; confirming his obsession with changing. The Hollywood Indian is dead. The down-home country boy is dead. The loverboy is dead. The smarmy beachcomber in the seersucker suit is dead. They’re all dead.

Zuma was released on the eve of Neil’s thirtieth birthday; making him twenty-nine when he wrote “Barstool Blues.” His twenty-sixth, -seventh, -eighth, and -ninth ears were trial by fucking fire. My best friend said, “I hope to god I never have a decade like Neil Young’s 1970s.” I’m with him on that. I don’t blame Neil for being a completely different man on the other side of those years. “Once there was a friend of mine who died a thousand deaths” grabs onto my heartstrings like a heartbroken woman grasps the stem of her wine glass. The part of Neil’s writing and public presence that speaks to me most is his constant, violent, iconoclastic pursuit of reinvention; that which surrounds and deflects from a tender heart. “Expecting To Fly” is my favorite lyric anyone’s written ever because it’s the story of my life. “Barstool” is one of my favorite songs ever because Neil’s once-openly tender heart is screaming out on it. It took some liquid hubris to do it, but even after all this, it still screams out.

Around here is when I realized, “Fuck! I completely forgot the music!” The brightness of the chords is sick, ironic, and perfect. Neil’s solos articulate the desperation further. “Barstool Blues” is engaged in constant battle with “Out on the Weekend” and “Words” for my favorite solo Neil song.

Remember “the darker side of me” Neil sang about on “Lookin’ For a Love?” Stupid Girl is it.

The women of Zuma are ghouls from our narrators’ pasts, split-tongued deceivers, or used-up, down-and-out bar room tramps. It’s that old-school blues “woman done me wrong” trope amplified. How did we go from “Hello, woman of my dreams” to this?

I mean, you can’t exactly blame Neil for having an extreme reaction. The mother of his child quite literally sailed off with some other guy! A violation of trust like that is gonna screw with your views of the opposite sex for a while. But Neil admitted he was fucking around too.

“Someone else betrays you, you feel it a lot more if you’ve betrayed them. It brings out all of the shit you thought you could hide. Where it all comes out in your face.”

quoted from: Jimmy McDonough, Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (2002.)

Neil exacts his hypocrisy on several archetypes of women, and he takes glee in it. He takes down the woman who gets hung up on shit that doesn’t matter. “You’re such a beautiful fish flopping on the summer sand/Lookin’ for the wave you missed when another one is close at hand.” Then there’s the girl who drives a fancy car and has a self-defense instructor. “You got it pretty good I guess, I couldn’t see your eyes. You’re really stupid, girl.” These are the kind of girls who hang around rock stars in hopes of being their next young wife. Very different from “groupie.” Some might call them “starfuckers.” It’s ironic that Neil was surrounding himself with these very same girls at time! He might be calling himself a stupid boy for wasting his time on all these stupid girls.

Drive Back is an almost frat-rock soundtrack to the sheer chaos of that Neil’s bachelor pad. The cowbell recalls one of Poncho’s favorites, Mountain, and their “Mississippi Queen.” It’s a rocker, but otherwise, “Drive Back” is pretty inconsequential.

About Cortez the Killer, Neil said to Mojo,

“What ‘Cortez’ represented to me is the explorer with two sides, one benevolent, the other utterly ruthless. I mean, look at Columbus! Everyone now knows he was less than great and he wasn't even there first...It always makes me question all these other so-called ‘icons.’”

quoted from: Nick Kent, “‘I Build Something Up, I Tear It Right Down’: Neil Young at 50” Mojo, 12/1995.

I have to give credit where credit is due, “Cortez” was the song that got me hooked on Zuma.

Neil wrote quite a few epics in the first decade of his career: “Broken Arrow,” “Down By The River” and “Cowgirl, in the Sand,” “Words,” and “Ambulance Blues.” “Cortez” plays an interesting role in this canon. Where “Broken Arrow” is a commentary on American culture in the sixties, “Words” was Neil’s stab at an “All Along The Watchtower,” and “Cowgirl” and “Ambulance” were personal accounts, and “Down By The River” was a straight-up fever dream, “Cortez” is about a historical event: the Spaniards conquering the Aztec empire.

After that “He came dancing across the water with his galleons and guns” line, Neil doesn’t focus on the titular character. Instead, he paints his picture of the Aztecs. Their achievements, their culture, the life lost building their massive pyramids, their religion. “They offered life in sacrifice so that others could go on.” The music applies sense of doom. Hundreds of years in the future, we know what’s going to happen to the Aztecs, but they don’t. “Cortez” is all about feel. Moody, stormy; with perfectly-paced and phrased guitar solos. Poncho is the anchor with those dark, heavy strums. Naturally, Neil goes on a brief tangent about lost love: “I know she’s living there/And she loves me to this day/I still can’t remember when/Or how I lost my way.” This love is doomed the way the empire was. I love the ambiguity of the last lines. “He came dancing across the water, Cortez, Cortez, What a killer...”

Above: Neil Young with Crazy Horse performing "Cortez the Killer," 1979

You’d think Zuma would close with an epic. Instead, Neil went with a more subdued, down-to-earth finale. Salvaged from “Human Highway” sessions, Through My Sails is one of – if not the first – Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion on record since Deja Vu five years before. As Joel Bernstein described, “When you hear how beautiful that track is, you just feel so frustrated that they couldn’t do that more often.” A track like “Through My Sails” refocuses us on how much playing with CSN changed Neil as a musician. After The Gold Rush, Harvest, and his contributions to Deja Vu have these beautiful, complex chords and stacked harmonies. Neil abandoned that in the ditch, and didn’t really revisit it again. It’s diminished, but “Through My Sails”’s glossy production and breezy feel take us back to that again; if only for a moment.

Ahead of Zuma’s release, Neil said to Creem:

“It’s about the Incas and the Aztecs. It takes on another personality. It’s like being in another civilization. It’s a lost sort of a form, sort of a soul-form that switches from history scene to history scene trying to find itself, man, in this maze.”

quoted from: Bud Scoppa, “Neil Young: The Unwitting Superstar” Creem, 11/1975.

This album coincided with a turning point; the rock-and-roll cell in mitosis. Rock-and-roll as the mainstream knew it was blowing up like a balloon, about to pop. The excess was insane. Zuma clearly came from that excess – it’s Neil’s cocaine album! But it shuns the glitz and glamour. Unvarnished, seldom edited. Even the art reflects this; it’s little more than a sketch on white board. This sensibility is more in line with something else going on; a mass rejection of the glitz that will take rock-and-roll by storm over the next two years. (Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.)

Pictured, L-R: Ralph Molina, Billy Talbot, Poncho, and Neil Young on the beach in Northern Malibu (photographed by Henry Diltz, 1975)

I love our birthday boy's unpredictability. But he doesn’t see himself that way at all. “My career is built around a pattern that just keeps repeating itself over and over again. There’s nothing surprising about it at all. My changes are as easy to predict as the sun coming up and down.” Zuma is a killer conclusion to Neil Young’s golden run. For nine whole years – his contributions to the first Buffalo Springfield album to Zuma and Deja Vu in between, this motherfucker did not miss. This album is able to speak from so many different points of view; of living, love, and heartbreak. The blistering manic-depressive guitar attack is everything you’d hope for from this guy, and the Horse is firmly back in their saddle.

50 years later, Zuma still doesn’t motherfucking miss.

Personal favorites: “Don’t Cry No Tears,” “Danger Bird,” “Pardon My Heart,” “Barstool Blues,” “Cortez the Killer”

– AD ☆

Watch the full episode above!

Crowe, Cameron. “Neil Young: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, 8/14/1975. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/neil-young-the-rolling-stone-interview-123513/

Doggett, Peter. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. New York: Atria, 2024 ed.

Downing, David. A Dreamer of Pictures: Neil Young, The Man and His Music. New York: Da Capo, 1994.

Kent, Nick. “‘I Build Something Up, I Tear It Right Down’: Neil Young at 50.” Mojo, 12/1995. https://thrasherswheat.org/tfa/mojointerview1295pt2.htm

McDonough, Jimmy. Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography. New York: Random House, 2002.

Scoppa, Bud. “Neil Young: The Unwitting Superstar.” Creem, 11/1975. https://www.creem.com/archive/issue/19751101

Young, Neil. Waging Heavy Peace. New York: Penguin, 2012.

Neil Young Under Review: 1966-1975. Smokin’, 2007. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVXCA-a6_Kk

“About Mazz - Jim Mazzeo.” Mazzeo Studios West. https://mazzeostudioswest.org/about-mazz/