Cortez the Killer

Not counting greatest hits compilations, live records and archival projects, Neil Young has recorded 45 albums since 1968. Zuma – released 50 years ago this week – is still his best.

The songs on Zuma are essentially about a busted relationship (his marriage to Carrie Snodgress had ended) and unconsciously – because Young’s work often doesn’t seem premeditated – move from denial to anger to depression to acceptance.

The one song that doesn’t explicitly fit this cycle is Cortez the Killer. Young typically downplayed its lyrics when he told an audience in 1996, "One night I stayed up too late when I was goin' to high school. I ate like six hamburgers or something. I felt terrible, very bad... and in the morning I woke up and I'd written this song."

Okay, so the best thing you’ve ever written was the product of indigestion.

The song isn’t so much about Cortez and his geographic and spiritual conquest of Montezuma’s Aztec empire in the 16^th century as it is an idyllic vision of the Aztecs as a primitive society making love not war, laying around the beach chewing coca leaves and wearing colorful clothes, almost an idealized view of the hippie culture.  And with the coming of Cortez – Madison Avenue, Time magazine – it becomes an allegory about the death of sixties innocence.

Aztec washing day

(David Crosby’s Renaissance Fair, released by the Byrds in 1967, treads similar ground, using a medieval marketplace as a metaphor for hippiedom).

What lifts Cortez into the stratosphere are the final lyrics and the unexpected shift from the drone-eye view of the Aztec civilization to the first person, from tourist to participant: “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.”

Now it’s Young as flannel-shirted time traveler committing one of those conundrums of time-travel fiction, falling for someone of a past era and then before the butterfly effect takes hold, returning to his own era alone.

With the closing notes of the song, the time machine swoops away and splashes into a cosmic liquid light show.

Ironically, or maybe not, Cortez the Killer, and much of Zuma, was recorded in a studio near Zuma Beach, Malibu and Point Dume, the same location where the Statue of Liberty scene in Planet of the Apes (1968) – a film about time traveling astronauts displaced into the future – was shot.

Young’s guitar took on a new tone in Zuma, a sound that has since become his electric trademark, crackling at times with controlled feedback. The finished version of Cortez is a first take, a rehearsal jam with a dreamlike, psychedelic, at times ominous vibe, Young not letting on to Crazy Horse that the tape was rolling. It was a keeper, a rare example of first thought, best thought.

Wild and crazy, 1975

Last year, Young released another version of Zuma, called it Dume, replaced the last track on the original, Through My Sails (the acceptance song), added a few other songs that had nothing to do with the break-up theme, then rearranged the track order, placing Cortez first.

Of course, it’s his work and he can do whatever he wants with it, but I’ll stick with the original. First version, best version.