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Welcome to Crack.band, the official website of Crack, the Spanish progressive rock band.
If you’d already heard of Crack and would have liked to get to know us better, this is the place to do it. Here you’ll learn about the history of the band and the recording of “Si todo hiciera Crack”, our first and only album, as well as listen to the tracks.
You can also get to know the members of the band and browse a great collection of photos, richly captioned and packed with “juicy” comments about the band’s life; read the album lyrics and their English translations; and finally consult an interesting timeline of Spanish progressive rock in the 70s and 80s.
We hope you find all of this interesting—and before we begin with all the content, one wish: long live progressive rock! And now we’ll tell you how Crack happened:
More than 42 years ago, the story of Crack began. A story that now feels like it belongs to another time—and a short-lived story at that. Isn’t there that saying, “If it’s good, it’s brief…”? Well, that’s it: a brief story—and if it still interests us today, it must be a good one ;-)
It must have been around the autumn of ’77 when I first heard about Crack. A former university classmate, Mento Hevia, had gotten in touch with me to tell me about a musical project that was bound to be something big, and he wanted me to join him.
We were desperately short on money, and we didn’t know anyone important in the music business. On top of that, the gear we had wasn’t up to the level we needed to give free rein to our “brilliant” ;-) ideas. But we never lacked ideas—nor did we lack the determination to let them carry us toward carving out a little place for ourselves in the music scene of those years.
And so, with that more-than-reduced capital, we set out—like so many other bands like ours at the time—determined to “make it” on the rock scene, which back then everyone called “symphonic” and which today we call “progressive”.
Those were years of serious financial hardship, like those faced by so many other groups determined to carry their ideas forward—or “die trying”.
We believed in our music in spite of everything: the problems caused by a sound system that was insufficient for the ideas we wanted to develop; the tastes of the mainstream audience, more inclined toward the usual rhythms, toward “catchy” songs with a clear chorus; the latest “movida” trend, promoted without nuance by every media outlet; and promoters and record labels always ready to sign on only to whatever was easiest to sell at that moment.
And of course, we also kept going in spite of our own shortcomings and weaknesses: personal squabbles over any silly thing, everyone’s quirks and particularities. You know how it is: “a mangy dog gets all the fleas”.
But in the end that record was made, and from the very first moment—and right up to today—we have all felt proud of that youthful birth, which made every difficulty worthwhile.
Behind us lay hundreds—surely thousands—of hours of work, in which, besides the music (which absorbed almost all our efforts), we also had to deal with the countless tasks that were simply part of being a rock band of the era like Crack: absolutely self-managed.
Now, once again, from the far shore of time, Crack sticks its head up again and invites you all to share with us that symphonic rock project—or progressive rock, as that style now seems to be called.
And we’re sure that, back then, we did feel our music as progressive—or even “progressive-minded”—and in that sense the newer label fits our ideas perfectly.
So, without further preambles, and recalling a line from one of the greats in rock history, Emerson, Lake & Palmer:
"Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends We're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside…"
For Spanish readers, there is a separate page about Crack as a Spanish progressive rock band: read it here (Spanish) .
