Cortez The Killer

by poputonian

This summer I saw the Dave Matthews Band, along with Warren Haynes (of Gov't Mule) perform a sensational, twenty-minute cover of Neil Young's, Cortez The Killer. Cortez is that guy who slipped into Mexico and conquered the indigenous people. I wonder what the place was like when he got there?

The book 1491 lists the following inside the cover:

-In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe.

-Certain cities --- such as Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital -- were far greater in population than any contemporary European city. Furthermore, Tenochtitlan, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets.

-The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids.

-Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process so sophisticated that the journal Science recently described it as "man's first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering."

-Amazonian Indians learned how to farm the rain forest without destroying it -- a process scientists are studying today in the hope of regaining this lost knowledge.

-Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively "landscaped" by human beings.

DMB and Warren Haynes also played Cortez the Killer (a shorter, ten minute version) before 100,000 people in 2003 in New York's Central Park. The video of that performance [link below] juxtaposes beautiful shots of the fruits of one civilization, the NYC sky-scrape, while the band plays on about the conqueror of another. Several other songs on the DVD had similar images, so I don't think any message was intended. But it is paradoxical, methinks, that you have this going on, and all the while everyone in the crowd and in the band is smiling.

Maybe Kurt Vonnegut knows a reason why. He had a comment or two about music in his book, A Man Without a Country:

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.
...
It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even Military bands, although I am a pacifist, cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today -- jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on -- is derived from the blues.

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful songwriter Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country -- an atrocity from which we can never fully recover -- the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.

Murray thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can't drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it's played. So please remember that.

Here's the link to Cortez the Killer. Enjoy the incredible guitar riffs by Haynes, and watch after the second one when Dave turns to Carter, shakes his head in amazement, and says smiling: "That's bad!"

A nice slice of Americana.

You can get the Central Park DVD at any music retailer.