Cortez the Killer

Young said it was the first song he wrote after moving to Zuma beach. Crazy Horse recorded it at David Briggs's house on Point Dume on 22 May 1975, in double drop D tuning. While it was being recorded, the power went out in the control room and a verse was lost. Young said you can hear the splice, and called his best art a series of magical accidents. His father wrote that Neil said he had never liked that verse anyway. The lyric manuscript with the missing lines survives in his archive, and he first sang them live in San Diego on 24 April 2024.

He told NME in 1975 that the song was about the Incas and the Aztecs, and later described Cortés as an explorer with a benevolent side and a ruthless one. He admitted to his biographer Jimmy McDonough that a lot of the details were made up. His Decade note says it was banned in Spain, where an early pressing called it Cortez, Cortez. Guitar World placed its solo at 39 among the greatest, and Rolling Stone ranked it 329 among the 500 greatest songs.

Live

First played in December 1975 on the Northern California bar tour, it has been performed 562 times by Sugar Mountain's count. During the 1991 tour, with the Gulf War under way, Young and Crazy Horse added it and Powderfinger to the sets, and a Pittsburgh performance went on Weld. Built to Spill stretched it past twenty minutes, and Slint, The Church, Dinosaur Jr. and David Rawlings have all covered it.

The upload in the hypersongs web is a live performance by Neil Young and Crazy Horse from their 1991 tour, not the Zuma studio take.