Neil Young unveils plans to put twist on classic track during his upcoming tour
For many fans of Neil Young, 1975’s Zuma is a cherished effort. With the record, the Canadian songwriter had just moved out of the profoundly melancholic ‘Ditch Trilogy’ and continued to reflect the immense personal morass he was in at the time and create a musically and emotionally piercing opus.
Although most argue that it was 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere that laid the blueprint for him becoming ‘The Godfather of Grunge’, on Zuma, he continued to perfect the formula he had first formed with Crazy Horse six years prior. It’s a collection of searing guitar lines, stirring chord progressions and heartbreaking lyrical palettes that drew on both his complicated personal life and more intangible matters with artistic aptitude, blurring the line between fiction and reality.
Several notable moments stand out on the LP but ‘Cortez the Killer’ purely distils the essence of the album and its creative triumphs. Thematically, it does this by conflating his recent breakup with Carrie Snodgress with the story of conquistador Hernan Cortez and the Aztecs.
Written in drop D and featuring a simple but stirring chord progression that slowly builds to an emphatic solo, it is famed for the following lyrics, seemingly pointing to Young’s romantic woes: “And 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.” Notably, Snodgress was the mother of Young’s child and had been unfaithful.
In a Zoom conversation with paid subscribers to the Neil Young Archives on April 15th, Young revealed that when he heads out on tour with Crazy Horse this summer, he is planning on playing ‘Cortez the Killer’. He even suggested that he might include the verses that have been missing from the song for five decades.
“Just a couple of days ago, I found the other verses,” Young told fans. “Just the lyrics…We may have those lost lyrics in the show, which will be fun for me.”
Famously, when Young and the band first recorded the song with producer David Briggs at his home near California’s Zuma Beach, a power surge occurred during the take, causing the recording console to die. The group were totally unaware, thinking they had captured what they deemed a perfect performance until the anxious producer broke the news to them. They had lost one verse, but Young replied that he never liked that section anyway.
“It was a good take,” Young told fans about the lost verses on Zoom. “So what we did was take the master tape and find ways to cut it together so that it would work, but we lost a couple of verses. They were gone. Now that I’ve found the lyrics, I’m trying to find exactly where they come in the song. I need to look at the tape and see where the cut is, where we lost some. I’ll insert them there.”
In other Young news, he and Crazy Horse will release the nine-track FU##IN’ UP for Record Store Day on April 20th, before it arrives in a wider manner on the 26th. Young also recently announced that he was returning to Spotify after a two-year boycott.
Listen to ‘Cortez the Killer’ below.
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