Schedules are meant to be changed!

After the cacophonous smörgåsbord of Oranges and Lemons, I needed a palate cleanser in the form of a back-to-the-basics, cut-the-bullshit, get-to-the-point, no-doubt-about-it rock album. Two guitars, drums and a bass capable of rattling the springs on the garage door. Maybe an acoustic tune here or a piano part there, but no fucking synthesizers or studio-generated nonsense.

I had two candidates for the job. One was Zuma, scheduled for the end of March. The other was a late addition I needed to fill the gap between XTC reviews after I realized that my Joan Armatrading review wasn’t going to work (I’ll explain later).

All it took was the first five seconds of “Don’t Cry No Tears” to declare Zuma the winner. My instincts were confirmed by long-time pal and frequent producer David Briggs, who described the unique recording process in Shakey:

Nothing was more insane than the way they cut Zuma. For eight hundred bucks a month, Briggs was renting a huge house directly across the street from Goldie Hawn’s. It had six bedrooms, but for some perverse reason Young decided to record the band in one of the tiniest rooms in the house. The confined quarters, combined with the tenuous ability of the Horse, created some challenges for Briggs.

“Poncho didn’t know how to play, nobody had a tone, nothin’. The band was at an enormous volume in a terrible little room with a low ceiling and flagstone floors and picture windows all around—[ace mixer/producer] Bob Clearmountain couldn’t a made the drums sound good. We brought down the green board, set it up in the kitchen, I cut big pieces of foam for the windows, said to my neighbors, ‘Lissen, I’m gonna be makin’ records all night long’ and started rollin’ tape.

“Wasn’t a lot of work on those records, man—we just set up, recorded, and I mixed ’em on the spot. That’s why those records sound so crude and elementary. We did a lot of editing, ’cause they’d free-form and I’d edit out the flat parts. Some takes would be ten minutes long. That whole album is a lesson in making Neil Young records. If he’s great, I don’t give a shit about anything . . . Neil’s a lot better in houses than he is in studios.”

McDonough, Jimmy. Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (p. 485). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

I’ll take crude and elementary over seriously overproduced any time.

I’ve given some thought to popping into Mr. Peabody’s Wayback Machine and planting myself in that tiny room so I could absorb the vibes at maximum intensity, but according to McDonough, the boys were humping every broad in sight and as one “inclined to acts refined,” gang bangs aren’t really my thing.

*****

At this point in his life, Neil had decided it was time to climb out of the ditch, end his relationship with Carrie Snodgress and reactivate Crazy Horse. The original rhythm section of Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums was rarin’ to go, so all they needed was a second guitarist to complement Neil. Billy had been jamming with a former juvenile delinquent, head shop owner and beyond-recreational-drug-user by the name of Frank “Poncho” Sampedro and urged Neil to give him a shot.

Yeah, that Poncho. The guy who didn’t know how to play.

Poncho wasn’t a total novice. He’d played in rough-and-tumble bands in Detroit during his teens, learned a few basic chords from listening to Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, and came up with a unique, un-PC hypothesis regarding the music he was playing: “Rock and roll—I thought that meant Loot the Village and Rape the Women.” (McDonough, p. 477). Though his over-the-top machismo turns me off, his hypothesis is spot-on despite the disgusting metaphors—the best rock ‘n’ roll comes from guys bursting with testosterone or gals dripping with estrogen. And though Poncho’s rhythm guitar contributions were limited to the basics, his feel for the music is exceptional, closely following Neil’s cues and knowing instinctively when to play straight chords and when to shift to arpeggios. Recognizing that he had a rhythm guitarist able to provide a solid baseline for his solos, Neil graciously accommodated Poncho’s technical limitations by keeping the chords as simple as possible.

Poncho brought more to the table than his intuitive gift for rhythm guitar. He embraced a life philosophy of carpe diem and was on a mission to convert Neil to that mode of thinking:

While Poncho might’ve been insecure as a musician, he wasn’t lacking in attitude. “I dedicated my trip into makin’ Neil have fun. He had On the Beach out, and I teased him—‘Look at the titles. It’s “This Blues,” “That Blues.” Here we are in L.A., there’s beautiful chicks everywhere, we’re high out of our brains havin’ a great time—isn’t there something else to write about?’”

Maybe so. With Poncho and Briggs as role models, Young seemed to cut loose and have a little fun for a change. The joyous abandon on Zuma is palpable. If his last few records were so low they were subterranean, this one was daybreak hitting the water.

McDonough, Jimmy. Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (p. 486). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

His mission turned out a success: “Of all the records Briggs made with Neil, he seemed fondest of making this one. ‘Neil was the happiest I’ve ever known him during Zuma. He was a great guy to be around. A happy, happy guy . . . we were just out cruisin’, havin’ a good time . . . the recording was just an extension of our everyday life.'” (McDonough, p. 485)

I’m glad Neil had fun and even more pleased that a happy Neil Young didn’t even consider doing covers of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” or “The 59th Street Bridge Song.” The bulk of the material on Zuma deals with shedding relationships and reflecting on what went right or wrong. If that isn’t enough to relieve you of the fear that a Happy Neil might have gone soft, he also includes one song about dumb-ass chicks in Malibu and another about a genocidal maniac. 

Artists are happiest when they can express themselves in their medium of choice and that often means dealing with the complex emotions they experience as they navigate their way through life in an unartistic world.

*****

I should note that not all of the tracks on Zuma were recorded in that claustrophobic space near Zuma Beach. Three songs were recorded at Neil’s Broken Arrow Ranch, none of which display the “hard and hittin’ you kind of a sound” of the Zuma Beach sessions. Though I would have been happy with a full slate of hard and hittin’, the insertion of the gentler Broken Arrow Ranch songs makes for a more balanced album.

Side One

“Don’t Cry No Tears”: Yes, yes, I know that the story involves a breakup where Neil essentially tells his ex to shove those crocodile tears up her ass, but this song makes me incredibly happy! Part of my glee comes from something I hear in Neil’s voice, probably best described in the parlance of the era—he’s “telling it like it is.” His tone strikes the perfect balance between impatience with her whining and his valid need to move on and out of it. For some reason she feels she has to apologize for banging another guy, but in his mind, it’s over, he doesn’t need her pity and her insincere tears aren’t going to change a goddamn thing (“When all the water’s gone/The feeling lingers on”).

But what really moves my happiness needle to the upper reaches of the dial are those two guitars backed by a sturdy rhythm section. The rough-and-raw sound of Neil’s Old Black (“might be a Gretsch pickup”) coming out of a Fender Deluxe and mingling with Ponchos’s slightly fatter tones (also on a Gibson) is positively mesmerizing. Working from his belief that “less is more,” the music consists of six chords in the key of A major with a two-note riff involving a straight A major chord with an Aadd9 serving as the dominant motif. The guitarists enrich the piece to the nth degree by occasionally sweetening the music with cleaner tones, providing contrast to the rougher textures and thereby enhancing their power. And I love the way Ralph Molina varies the punctuation in his attenuated cymbal crashes to avoid dreary predictability. Nothin’ fancy here folks, just a great mid-tempo rock song played by guys in perfect sync with one another.

“Danger Bird”: I assume that the Danger Bird is the fowl depicted on the cover with his talons digging into the back of the female swimmer with the sweet potato tits. Ouch!

McDonough exposes himself as a true fanatic by pronouncing the album cover a “stroke of genius” and labeling the song “a masterpiece.” I would describe the cover as “infantile” (especially the fuck-you cactus), the lyrics as “a bloody mess,” Neil’s vocals as “shaky” and the call-and-response vocals as “muddled.” Given that Briggs had to patch the song together from two different takes, “Danger Bird” obviously presented the musicians with some challenges.

Monk’s “Brilliant Corners” and Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” are patch jobs, so Briggs was following a time-honored tradition and had every right to splice to his heart’s content. My beef is I don’t think he went far enough. Briggs could have turned the song into a masterpiece had he wiped out all the vocals and transformed the song into an instrumental. The guitar interplay is beyond awesome and I find it amazing how quickly Neil and Poncho clicked. Neil’s solos rank among his best and Poncho’s crashing thrusts supply far more cohesive emotional power than the meandering lyrics.

However, I do think the song was a cathartic experience for Neil, written in a language only he could fully understand.

“Pardon My Heart”: Three songs in a row dealing with relationship troubles may seem like overkill, but the music and the lyrical perspectives are varied enough to make it work. Recorded at Broken Arrow Ranch during a break from the Zuma Beach sessions, “Pardon My Heart” features a restrained arrangement of acoustic guitar and bass lightly spiced with electric guitar and tinkling piano in deep background. Molina and Talbot provide the call-and-response vocals, Tim Drummond takes care of the bass and Poncho . . . well, I guess Poncho wasn’t invited.

Without getting too deeply into Neil’s private life, the inspiration for the song came from a conversation Neil had with Sandy Mazzeo, the friend and colleague who would sketch the cover art for Zuma. Neil had just returned from Hawaii, where he thought he found evidence that his gal had been cheating on him: “When Young returned from Hawaii, he spilled his guts to Sandy Mazzeo, who recalls telling him, ‘Sometimes you just have to pardon your heart.’ Young did a double take, asking his friend to repeat what he’d said. The phrase would inspire a classic ballad released the following year on Zuma.” (McDonough, p. 447)

When McDonough asked Neil if he had ever experienced betrayal, Neil admitted that he had been doing exactly what he believed his lover was doing. “I thought I did. But it turned out I was just as bad as the other person, so it wasn’t really betrayal—I discovered what happens when you do something to yourself. When you do it to someone else, you do it to yourself. It’s not like being betrayed. You look back and go, ‘Well, fuck—that person didn’t do anything I didn’t do to them’ . . . 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.”

Looking at the song from a broader perspective, “Pardon My Heart” describes what happens in many relationships where the people involved lack self-and-other awareness. In our desperate search for “the one” we often attach excessive importance to the initial connection (emotional or sexual) and blithely ignore evidence of a potential mismatch because we want to believe we have found the perfect mate. When the disconnection becomes too obvious to ignore, we enter a period of contradiction where we deny the disconnection while keeping our eyes open for a suitable replacement. Neil’s lyrics capture the contradiction and denial while also introducing the all-too-common emergence of self-blame, expressed in the Molina-Talbot response line:

It’s a fallen situation
When all eyes are turned in
And the love isn’t flowing
The way it could have been

You brought it all on
Oh, but it feels so wrong
You brought it all on
No, no, no, I don’t believe this song
You brought it all on

It’s a sad communication
With little reason to believe
When one isn’t giving
And one pretends to receive

In the closing verse, Neil seems to try to wish the disconnection away, recalling moments when the love flowed both ways:

Pardon my heart
If I showed that I cared
But I love you more than moments
We have or have not shared

You brought it all on
Oh, and it feels so good
You brought it all on
When love flows the way that it should

I was surprised to learn that there is comparatively little buzz about this song on the internet, as I consider “Pardon My Heart” one of Neil’s most agonizingly beautiful works.

“Lookin’ for a Love”: This late addition to the album was recorded at Broken Arrow Ranch well after the Zuma Beach sessions when Warner called Neil and asked him what the fuck happened to the new album he promised them. I assume that the track shortage involved Neil’s decision to hold back several songs that would appear on Rust Never Sleeps and later albums.

During the interlude, Neil underwent throat surgery and was unable to speak much less sing, but he wrote this song on an Etch-a-Sketch provided by Poncho, taught the boys the chords and melody and added his vocal later. He kept the chords simple for Poncho and wisely crafted a melody that wouldn’t push his capabilities to the edge. The result is a pleasant little number with a slight country feel and a basic E-A-B progression in the verses. The most interesting part is the chorus, where Neil avoids the expected resolution to the E chord and ends the passage with an ambiguous F# minor that syncs beautifully with the doubt-filled closing line:

Looking’ for a love that’s right for me
I don’t know how long it’s gonna 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

Even in his simpler compositions, you can always find a nugget of brilliance in a Neil Young song.

“Barstool Blues”: I mentioned in my review of Rust Never Sleeps that McDonough was a terrible music critic, more of a fan-atic than an objective observer, and he outdoes himself with his outlandish commentary on “Barstool Blues”: “If God asked for a definition of beauty, I’d play him Barstool Blues’.”

Incredibly, McDonough allowed that ridiculous assertion to stand after asking Neil about the song’s origins: “‘Barstool Blues’—we came home from the bar and I wrote that song. I woke up and I went, ‘FUCK!’ I couldn’t remember writing it. I couldn’t remember any of it. I started playin’ the chords and it was so fuckin’ high—I mean, it was three steps higher than the fuckin’ record.” (McDonough, p. 491) In that context, his commentary almost comes across as insulting, as in “Neil wrote his best song when unconscious.”

The melody (such as it is) is pretty much lifted from Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” so you can’t classify “Barstool Blues” as a pure Neil Young original. I agree with McDonough that the guitars are the highlight, with Neil’s latent instincts overcoming the effects of whatever drug was swimming through his body at the time, but the rather limp ending sounds like the drugs were beginning to peter out and the band had no idea how to wrap up the song. The illegal substance certainly destroyed any inhibitions Neil may have had about expressing his bitterness regarding his now-dead relationship, life as a rock star and his years in the ditch:

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.

It’s pretty obvious that the “friend” is Neil himself, and the lyrics are pretty much an emotional dump as opposed to thoughtfully crafted poetry. Good song? Yep, for the most part. Definition of beauty? Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Side Two

“Stupid Girl”: No, I am not offended by this song. I lived in the L.A. area during my college years and the place was loaded with stupid broads who would fuck anyone to get into movies, TV or the Playboy Mansion and dumb trophy wives who enhanced their tits to attract dumb guys with large bank accounts and small brains.

Before the Angelenos in the audience cry “FOUL!” I should mention that I became quite fond of L.A. after I figured out where to go and where not to go.

There isn’t the slightest bit of evidence in the lyrics to conclude that Neil Young thinks all girls are stupid. What I hear is frustration that some women choose to waste their potential by focusing on appearance rather than substance, whether they’re showing off their bods on the beach or driving a luxury car wearing designer shades. I translate “Looking for the wave you missed” as the failure to hook a celebrity and “When another one is close at hand” as the possibility of finding true love with an unpretentious human being. My take on “I saw you in your Mercedes Benz/Practicing self-defense/You got it pretty good/I couldn’t see your eyes” is that the truly stupid girl hides her insecurity through a shield of arrogance.

The music is ab-fab with cleverly executed tempo changes between musical interludes and the verses. The Neil-Poncho connection is exceptionally strong, with Poncho providing just enough crunch while avoiding interference with Neil’s outstanding solos. After listening to the playback, Neil felt the song was too dark and decided to add the high-octave vocal, but I wish he’d left things alone. The waste of potential deserves a dark approach.

“Drive Back”: I didn’t need to read Shakey to learn that “‘Drive Back’ is just the Deluxe all the way up” as that’s pretty fucking obvious from the initial guitar attack. It could be argued that Briggs might have turned down the volume on the twinned guitars in a few spots where they nearly bury the vocals, but fuck it—this is just a great guitar song that’s as sexy as fuck so LET THE BOYS RIP!

After about the tenth time through I finally allowed myself to pay attention to the lyrics and I heartily endorse the plea in the chorus: “Drive back to your old town/I want to wake up with no one around.” Actually, I didn’t care if they drove to town or off a cliff but during my heavy fucking years in my twenties I would occasionally wake up and find my one-night stand next to me in bed, gazing into my face. “Aargh! What are you doing here? Shoo, shoo!” “I’m just enjoying how beautiful you are,” one replied. “Thanks. Now get the fuck out of here!” Eventually I learned to include a warning when negotiating the parameters of a fuck. “Look. In the morning, I am Greta Garbo. I want to be alone! So after you’ve shot your wad, wash up, put your pants on and get the hell out.”

I want to personally thank Neil Young for validating my right not to be a morning person.

“Cortez the Killer”: One flaw common to many histories is the tendency to build the narrative around the good-guy-bad-guy paradigm. Sometimes that orientation holds up, but even when it does there is an equally problematic tendency to make the good guys perfect angels and the bad guys hopeless devils.

What’s important to remember when considering “Cortez the Killer” is that Neil had no interest in presenting a historically accurate account of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. His claim that “Hate was just a legend/And war was never known” completely ignores the fact that the Aztecs built their empire by conquering other city-states. When he told Mojo Magazine that the lyrics were “a combination of imagination and knowledge,”  he was defending his right to apply artistic license to the subject matter and present the Aztec Empire as a cooperative utopia with a vibrant culture destroyed by Spanish greed and genocidal ruthlessness.

While I approve of Neil’s use of artistic license, I have to disagree with his representation of the conqueror: “What Cortez represented to me is the explorer with two sides, one benevolent, the other utterly ruthless.” Cortez was an asshole as far back as his teens when the family secretary described him as “ruthless, haughty, mischievous, and quarrelsome.” He ignored orders, lied to his superiors and repeatedly broke Spanish law to achieve his evil ends. Neil could have gone whole hog with the good guy/bad guy paradigm but chose to imbue Cortez with a shred of humanity, a choice that I will reluctantly admit results in a more interesting narrative.

The song opens with an exceptionally long introduction taking up three minutes and twenty-two seconds of recording space set to a fixed chord pattern of Em/D/Am7. On paper that sounds pretty fucking boring but the Pink-Floyd-like intro is thoroughly engaging through the headphones. Neil dominates the proceeding with a reflective guitar solo that explores the full range of possibilities presented by the chord pattern, combining arpeggios and partial chords in an acutely sensitive performance. Poncho’s supporting guitar is unusually restrained thanks in part to the angel dust he smoked before the session. The PCP also caused him to lose touch with the chord pattern, but the fuck-up worked to the song’s advantage, as he explained to Uncut (via Songfacts): “The whole song I thought the second chord, D, was the first chord. So I emphasized that every time round, while Neil was leaning on the first chord, E minor. I think that helped keep a really slow tune moving along.” It also gave the passage a palpable drone effect that served to ground Neil’s flights on the fretboard. Billy Talbot tosses in a few nice bass runs during the build and Ralph Molina continues to display his mastery of the cymbals with another shimmering performance. The intro is so compelling that I experience a bit of shock when Neil begins his vocals, but I get over it pretty quickly.

Curiously enough, Neil devotes very little space to the lead character, opening the song with a single verse describing Cortez “dancing across the water with his galleons and his guns” before shifting his attention to the Aztecs. Neil devotes five verses to the unwary victims, describing their cultural norms and religious beliefs without judgment while celebrating their collective achievements:

On the shore lay Montezuma
With his coca leaves and pearls
In his halls, he often wandered
With the secrets of the world

And his subjects gathered ’round him
Like the leaves around a tree
In their clothes of many colors
For the angry gods to see

And the women all were beautiful
And the men stood straight and strong
They offered life in sacrifice
So that others could go on

Hate was just a legend
And war was never known
The people worked together
And they lifted many stones

And they carried them to the flat lands
But they died along the way
And they build up with their bare hands
What we still can’t do today

Neil claimed he wrote the song when he was sixteen during a period when he was taking a high school history class and I have no reason to doubt him. All I can say is that those verses contain some remarkably strong imagery that you wouldn’t expect from a teenager, but we often underrate those who haven’t reached adulthood despite scientific evidence that indicates creative thinking is more common in children than adults.

Neil wisely inserted an instrumental passage between the third and fourth verses to allow the poetry to sink in, lowering the collective volume at the end of the passage to properly cue the return to the narrative. Once he completes his tribute to Aztec culture, Neil suddenly shifts to first-person while taking a leap into the future where we find Cortez in a reflective mood:

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

The woman who fills his memories is likely Malinche, one of twenty native women presented to Cortez by the tribe’s elders as a gift of friendship. Malinche (aka Marina) “became his mistress and interpreter and bore him a son, Martín,” enabling Cortez to build an alliance that included many of the native tribes. I doubt that the real Cortez had any regrets regarding his actions in Mexico or leaving his mistress and child behind, but this is Neil’s story, not mine.

A third instrumental passage follows, where Neil finds even more possibilities in the chord progression in the form of a descending two-note arpeggio featuring some very impressive picking. The song closes with a brief epitaph where Neil abandons his attempt to humanize the mass murderer:

He came dancing across the water
Cortez, Cortez
What a killer

And what a masterpiece.

“Through My Sails”: This odd choice for the closer came out of CSNY sessions recorded at Broken Arrow Ranch way back in June 1974 while the quartet was preparing for the “Doom Tour.” It’s a pretty song and the harmonies are quite lovely but the pristine production is completely out of sync with the Zuma sound and mood. I suppose this song was added to make up for the track shortage caused by all the holdbacks but as most of those holdbacks would appear on Rust Never Sleeps, I can’t complain all that much about the song’s inclusion.

*****

In Waging Heavy Peace, Neil wrote about the personal breakthrough that coincided with the Zuma sessions. “Those were some of the finest, most alive days of my life. I was getting past the lost relationship with Carrie, living the life with my best friends, making some good music, and starting to get a grip on something: an open future in my personal life and a new future with Crazy Horse after Danny.” Leave it to Poncho, still living the charmed life in his seventies, to capture the nature of the experience that facilitated that breakthrough: “We didn’t have a concept in mind. It wasn’t going to be this or that. It was all just wide open. We were just playing and recording, and we didn’t know what people did with the recordings. We just kept making new ones. We never thought about putting together a record or running order or any of that shit. We were just having a good time.”

And I had a great time listening to Zuma. Thanks, guys!