Hollywood, the band pressured Young to dismiss him. Although Young let Whitten live on his ranch near Woodside, California and worked with him one-on-one during off-hours in an unsuccessful effort to keep him in the group, Young fired him and Whitten died several hours after returning to Los Angeles, his death attributed to a fatal overdose of alcohol and Valium. After Whitten's death and the tepid reception of their most recent albums, Talbot and Molina were left as the only members of the band. They let the Crazy Horse name go unused while resolving not to retire it altogether. In mid-1973, Young brought together a band comprising Talbot, Molina, Lofgren, and pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith to record a new album, the majority of which became the basis of 1975's Tonight's the Night. In the autumn of 1973, that ensemble (initially billed as Crazy Horse for the inaugural concerts at the Roxy in September 1973) toured Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States as the Santa Monica Flyers. Molina and Whitsell would subsequently contribute to Young's On the Beach in 1974. Shortly after aborted Young sessions involving Talbot, Molina and Keith at Chicago's Chess Studios in late 1974, the band spontaneously reconvened without Keith at Talbot's Echo Park home in 1975. These jam sessions cemented the role of rhythm guitarist Frank "Poncho" Sampedro, a friend of Talbot who began to play with the group during the Chicago sessions and proved to be a long-time member of Crazy Horse. "It was great," Talbot would say of the gathering and the chemistry it evoked. "We were all soaring. Neil loved it. We all loved it. It was the first time we heard the Horse since Danny Whitten died." After the five-year hiatus since 1970, Neil Young, Crazy Horse, and producer David Briggs, quickly recorded Zuma in the summer of 1975, in the basement of Briggs' rented house in Malibu. Sampedro's lack of technical proficiency at the time ("Neil kept writin' simpler songs so I could play them") and desire to see Young "rockin' and having fun" would greatly inform the sound of the record. Following a warmup tour of unannounced appearances at various San Francisco Bay Area bars (dubbed by the media as the Rolling Zuma Revue in contrast to Bob Dylan's contemporaneous Rolling Thunder Revue) in December 1975, Young and the band toured Japan and Europe from March to April