Neil Young To Perform Lost 'Cortez The Killer' Lyrics On Summer Tour With Crazy Horse

When Neil Young hits the road this summer with Crazy Horse, he plans to perform “Cortez The Killer” with lyrics that have been missing from the song for 50 years. “Just a couple of days ago, I found the other lyrics,” Young told fans Monday afternoon during a Zoom with paid subscribers on Neil Young Archives. “Just the lyrics… We might have those lost lyrics in the show, which will be fun for me.”

When the band originally cut the song at a California home near Zuma Beach, the power to the recording console died mid-take, although the band was completely unaware. They felt it was a prefect show. “Don't shoot yourself,” producer David Briggs told them as they left the studio. “But the power went out and we lost a verse.” Briggs told them which verse they had missed. “Never liked that anyway,” Yang replied.

“It was a good shot,” Young told fans on Zoom. “So what we did was take the main film and find ways to cut it together to make it work, but we lost some lyrics. They had gone. Now that I've found the lyrics, I'm trying to find exactly where they are in the song. I have to look at the tape and see where the cut is, where we missed some. I'll put them there.”

In a 2012 interview with Rolling rock, Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro recalled cutting “Cortez The Killer” shortly after joining the band. “It was a sunny day at Zuma Beach, and this guy walked by and I smoked angel dust with him,” he said. “And then Neil came along and said, 'Let's try this song,' we never played it and I was like, 'Oh, shit.' If you listen to the first recording, I thought the second chord was the first chord. Neil emphasized the former, I emphasized the latter. [Laughs]. But you know, it goes in a circle, so it doesn't really matter.”

Young has played the song in concert over 540 times, but this will be the first time anyone has heard the lost lyrics. At a May 29, 2003 performance in Hamburg, Germany, Young added this additional verse: “The ship is breaking up on the rocks/With a beach so close/The ship is breaking up on the rocks/With a beach so close/Dancing beyond the water/Dancing across the water/Lost on the rocks/Sandy beach so close.” It is unclear whether these were spur-of-the-moment hype or memories of lost words from 1975.

After Covid hit in 2019, Young took a break from the road for three years. When he appeared last summer for a solo tour, he played only outdoors. He's playing 24 shows with Crazy Horse over the next few months, and they're all outdoors as well. “We have to be careful,” Young told fan Zoom. “I don't know the stats of it, but I imagine if you look at a normal group of 15,000 or 20,000 people, just randomly from all over the world, and then you look at 15,000 or 20,000 people who all went to a show, and how many of them got Covid, I think you've found that people who went to a show inside are much more likely to get sick. I don't really need to do that. Willie Nelson told me he only plays outside now. I felt like it was a good idea, so that's what I'm doing.”

Hearing that Graham Nash recently came down with Covid for the fourth time only reinforced his views on the matter. “I just sent him the acetate for it new CSNY Fillmore East on double vinyl 1969, all in mixed proportion,” Young said. “He was going to hear it yesterday but he came down with Covid and is out for a while.”

This live album is a holy grail for CSNY fans as it was recorded during their heyday as a live band and captured in superb sound quality. “I've been hanging out [Stephen Stills],” Young said on Zoom. “We just finished the CSNY Fillmore East 1969 live album. We did it with John Hanlon engineering and mixing. Rhino had almost completed a digital thing made from digital copies of all the original tapes. It was so depressing I couldn't even listen to it. You could hear that we were playing great, but I just didn't want to hear it anymore, where you know you have a lot more sound than what you hear. We found the original analog tapes and mixed them. Sounds like God. It's amazing. There's an 18-minute “Down The By The River” on there that's probably the best “Down By The River” ever. Stills is just smoking. I think I might have already smoked when we started, so it was a lot of fun.”

Young largely dodged questions about what songs he plans to play this summer with Crazy Horse, though he noted that he enjoyed playing tonight the night Everyone knows this is nowhereand Ragged Glory in private club gigs late last year. “The songs that Horse plays are so simple that you can go almost anywhere with them,” he said. “A lot of them only have two or three chords in them and they just repeat. There is another song that has four chords. We will try it. The horse has [rarely] played “I'm The Ocean” before. I think we will do that. But we should be able to block for a long time on all these things. I'm looking forward to it.”

He's also looking forward to playing with Micah Nelson, who will take over for Nils Lofgren for the summer. (The guitarist has previous engagements with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.) “Micah is fantastic,” Young said. “He's really the right guy for the job. He plays great guitar. He sings very well. Music is in his blood. And it keeps things simple. Horse is and still is a simple four piece rock and roll band. The fourth member has changed a few times due to various life events, but I think we're in great shape.”

Young also gave an update on the upcoming Archives III box set. “It's different from the other two,” he said. “He has a different approach. There's more sonic certainty to it. Things are happening in real time that people haven't heard of. There's a scene it's myself and Nicolette [Larson]Linda [Ronstadt]and [David] Briggs. We sit around a table and I sing them all the songs on the next record for the first time. And then they start singing together. It's just a live thing of people sitting around a table. I think it's really interesting to listen to them… There's actually a really cool movie there called Opposite the Water this is a great Crazy Horse movie. It's really big. It is longer than the other volumes.'

According to current plans, Volume III will cover a period of 30 years. Volume IV will do the same. “Instead of continuing to produce volumes that are smaller,” he said. “We'll get an IV out and that'll be it. We start with the last one. It is a monumental work.”