Zuma (Neil Young & Crazy Horse album)

697:"Neil would say, 'I think I got a song', and we'd start playing together. We'd play some songs we knew, and then we'd try some new songs. Just recording, just having fun. Then we'd go out to eat. After a little while Neil called us up and said, 'Hey man, I just got a call from Warner Brothers and we gotta turn in a record.' That was Zuma. 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. It was all really honest. We were all finding our way together. And we were relaxed. Nobody was nervous about it. We were just playing. We kept getting better and better. It was the birth of a new band even though it had the same name." 661:"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 3000 seaters. Me and Crazy Horse again. I couldn't be happier. That, combined with the bachelor life... I feel magnificent. Now is the first time I can remember coming out of a relationship, definitely not wanting to get into another one. I'm just not looking. I'm so happy with the space I'm in right now. It's like spring. I'll sell you two bottles of it for $ 1.50." 709:: "There was a power-cut in the recording studio. They missed a whole verse, a whole section! You can hear the splice on the recording where we stop and start again. It's a messy edit. It was a total accident. But that's how I see my best art, as one magical accident after another." Poncho Sampedro remembers: "We went in, put on our guitars and just played the whole thing and that was the take. The power even went off in the control room but not in the room where we were playing. Briggs got the power back on. We listened to where it dropped out and then punched back in right in the right place. We did lose the third verse. Something about 'a rocky grave.' Neil never sang it again. 634:"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." 747:"We just played and played and played and were having a pretty good time just goofing off. Then one day, Neil comes in and goes, 'Hey, man. I just stepped outside. Check this out. There's a van parked in the driveway. This guy is listening to us. Check it out', and it was Dylan. Dylan lived around the corner. He heard the band playing. I guess he found out it was Neil, so he was sitting down listening to us. So that happened a couple of times and then he came in and played with us one day. We screwed up all his songs. You know, we had a good time. He was really a regular guy. I wish we would have got " 763:"One night, Dylan came by and I played him a couple of new songs, "Hitchhiker" and "Cortez the Killer." When he heard "Hitchhiker," a confessional about the progressive history of drugs I had taken through my life, he told me, "That's honest." That moment still crosses my mind. It makes me laugh every time I think of it because Bob's humor is so wry. I think it was his way of saying kindly that the song was not very inventive as far as creating a story goes, just that I was following a history and not making up anything new. It's still funny to me, at any rate, the way he put it." 586:! 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'." "When he's on the boat, on his way over...I don't think he knows what's gonna happen yet - I'm not sure Cortez might've felt like he was doin' the right thing at the end. Killing all those people. Might not have felt as good about it as he did when he was just dancing across the water in his boat. I have to think that changed his life, that experience. That he was not able to sleep well." 712:"Stupid Girl" features double-tracked lead vocals, with one pitched low and the other high. Young explains in a 1988 interview: "I recorded it with Crazy Horse at 4 o’clock in the morning. We were all messed up and did the track, all the vocals and everything, all in one shot. But when I listened to it with just the low vocal, I said, 'That sounds too dark.' So I added the high one. I was probably just zonked out of my mind when I did the whole thing. But at that time, all I wanted to do was keep moving, keep going." 4101: 574:" were first written in high school after eating too many hamburgers, according to a story Young 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. This is before McDonald's. They were just real bad. I was studying history, and in the morning I woke up and I'd written this song." He shares his perspective on the historical figure in 1995 to author 673:"Back at Briggs's, we kept playing day after day and partying at night. We did the original "Powderfinger" and held it back. We did "Sedan Delivery" and held it back. My song "Born to Run" was recorded, left unfinished, and held back. "Ride My Llama" was completely finished and mixed and held back. We recorded a lot of tunes and held them back, but we released "Cortez," "Don't Cry No Tears," "Stupid Girl," and a bunch of other tracks on 1179: 1251: 1246: 1241: 1236: 1231: 1174: 1169: 1164: 1159: 1129: 1124: 1119: 1114: 1109: 22: 685:. 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. 715:

Towards the end of the sessions, Young and the band revisited a pair of acoustic tracks he had recorded in June 1974 during rehearsals for the CSNY tour that year. Electric guitar and backing vocals were added to "Pardon My Heart". It and "Through My Sails" were added to the album's sequencing in

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and various contemporaneous dreams. He talks about his new material in a June 1975 interview: "I don't know what this next tour will be like. I'll be doing a lot of stuff that I'm recording now. A lot of long instrumental guitar things - progressive progresso supremo? It's about the Incas and the

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always wanted to remix it. I like the mix. A combination of two songs. "L.A. Girls and Ocean Boys" I never recorded, but it's part of "Danger Bird." Hey, sometimes that's what happens—one song doesn't come out, I'll be writin' another and say, 'Oh, that fits.' Bang! Drop it right in. Young would

80: 705:". A power surge occurred during the recording of the song, resulting in one verse not being recorded. Young's reaction to hearing of this was that he "never liked that verse anyway" and it has never been performed live. Young explains in a November 1990 interview with 626:: "Our setup in Briggs' Dume garage was tight and comfortable. The Green Board was right down the hall, out of sight of the control room, which was a rec room bar. There was no video monitor. Briggs just listened and talked to us." Briggs further describes the setup in 523:

The melody and lyrics of "Don't Cry No Tears" are partially derived from "I Wonder", a song Young wrote in high school. He explains in a post on his website: "I wrote it in high school under the name "I Wonder", and added the "Don't Cry No Tears" verse around 1974 for

567:: "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." 537:

In "Danger Bird" Young interpolates sections of a previous song called "L.A. Girls and Ocean Boys" that had related to the breakup with Snodgress, specifically the line "'Cause you've been with another man / there you are and here I am." Young explains in

751:" because I was having a blast playing that song. But somebody kept missing one of the changes. Neil was killin' it with the lead guitar. We all had big smiles on our faces. We just weren't that accomplished of a band to pick up a song in three minutes." 593:

on backing vocals. The song dates from June 1974 sessions at Young's ranch during rehearsals for the 1974 'Doom' tour with the group. Like his CSNY bandmates, Young is an avid sailor, and would purchase his own sailboat in the mid-70s.

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sessions that did not make the album include "Pocahontas", "Sedan Delivery", "Hitchhiker", "Ride My Llama", "Powderfinger", "Hawaii", "Kansas" and "Born to Run". Young would explain the atmosphere in an August 1975 interview with

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Aztecs. It takes on another personality. It's like being in another civilization. It's a lost sort of form, sort of a soul-form that switches from history scene to history scene trying to find itself, man, in this maze."

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alongside Talbot and Molina. Aside from a brief period in the late 1980s, this line-up would remain stable until 2014, when Sampedro retired as a professional musician. He was eventually replaced in 2018 by Lofgren.

1664: 2508: 1905: 1138: 556:"Pardon My Heart" (also inspired by the deterioration of Young's relationship with Snodgress) dates from the spring of 1974. At his solo acoustic performance at 4267: 2910: 495: 4694: 3516: 1394: 3188: 560:

that year, he introduces it as "a song I learned recently. I wrote it too. This is a love song. It's one of the saddest love songs I've ever heard."

1804:"On Tripping At Budokan And Why Neil Young And Crazy Horse's New 1990 Live Album Is The Band's Definitive Document, March 17, 2021, Stephen Deusner" 4446: 3023: 2931: 735:

came by in the late morning and played with us, just making up something on the spot, a three-chord blues thing. That's what it was like recording

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The sessions for the album were a prolific time for Young, and a fresh start for him personally. He was newly single, having recently split with

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The band would rehearse and record Young's new material at the house. The band tried out many new songs, some of which would be revisited for

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So Hard To Make Arrangements For Yourself: The Rolling Stone Interview With Neil Young by Cameron Crowe ROLLING STONE, August 14, 1975

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The sessions were notable for its many visitors who dropped by to check in on the band and hear the ongoing work. Young recalls in

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Neil Young – guitar, vocal; Stephen Stills – bass, vocal; David Crosby – vocal; Graham Nash – vocal; Russ Kunkel – congas

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