The Neil Young song that Link Wray called “pure, honest music”
The debate concerning the finest album by Neil Young will likely rage on until the end of time. A fiercely fought battle with Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Harvest and Rust Never Sleeps constantly cropping up, as the Canadian songwriter’s oeuvre is split into separate chapters, the discussion takes many turns. My shout would be 1975’s Zuma, a cerebral bridge between what came before and what was to come. In my mind, this was the moment Neil Young became ‘The Godfather of Grunge’.
One of the darkest records in his oeuvre, with melancholy coursing throughout, Zuma is a strange case in that it is musically luminous despite being emotionally bleak. Famously, it was fuelled by Young discovering that his partner, actor Carrie Snodgress – the mother of his child Zeke – had been cheating on him, and their ensuing split. This makes the regret, sadness and bitterness incredibly palpable.
Zuma was also the first record that saw the musician reunite with old backing band Crazy Horse, after ‘The Ditch Trilogy’ of albums without them, Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and Tonight’s the Night. Adding to this sea change, following the tragic death of guitarist Danny Whitten in 1972, this new-look Crazy Horse featured Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro on guitar, and it was to kick off an excellent period in Young’s career. Despite the tremendous hardships Young and the band were experiencing at the time, on a musical level, they were reinvigorated and faced the darkness together. This created a record that has dodged the passing of time.
There are numerous moments of note on Zuma, including the opener ‘Don’t Cry No Tears’ and the eminent ‘Cortez the Killer’. However, many fans believe the extended and profoundly depressing ‘Danger Bird’ is the finest. Something of a stylistic sister piece to ‘Cortez the Killer’, as it is also lengthy and written in a minor key; I’d even go as far as to label this one of Young’s best ever.
Written about what went down between the former Buffalo Springfield man and Snodgress, the brooding music is augmented by heartbreaking lyrical flourishes such as: “Cause you’ve been with another man / There you are and here I am”.
Another guitar-playing masterclass, ‘Danger Bird’ is so emotionally piercing thanks to Young’s wailing six-string that even a man most people thought incapable of emotions, Lou Reed, admitted in 1994: “It makes me cry, it is the best I have heard in my life. The guy is a spectacular guitarist, those melodies are so marvellous, so calculated, constructed note to note… he must have killed to get those notes. It puts my hairs on end.”
It wasn’t just Lou Reed who bestowed high praise upon ‘Danger Bird’. Rock and roll pioneer Link Wray also felt it was one of the best guitar performances he’d ever heard. Per Songfacts, when Wray was in his 70s, writer Jimmy McDonough played him the song for the first time. The ‘Rumble’ songwriter simply responded: “It’s pure, honest music. No bullshit”.
Revisit the song below.
