Cro-Magnon: the band who predicted the future of music in 1969
When working in a steel mill, Tony Iommi, the guitarist of Black Sabbath, was involved in an accident that saw the tips of his fingers sliced clean off. He needed to make new tips out of plastic to still play guitar and tune down the strings so that he could still bend them when he played. Many people see this incident as the inception of heavy metal, but there was a band making metal music long before Iommi lost the tips of his fingers.
In the 1960s, a group called The Boss Blues made blues-sounding pop music and got the attention of a record label. As The Beatles were climbing the charts and pop music was becoming more commercialised in general, this label wanted The Boss Blues to do the same; however, the band were resistant, especially their producer Brian Elliot, who wanted to make more experimental music.
Seeing he could be a problem, the label fired Elliot, but rather than continue making music without him, they opted out of their recording contract and gave themselves wholeheartedly to Elliot’s vision. What was his vision? Simple: create an album that transcends all aspects of time and space. Elliot, Austin Grasmere and Salvador Salgado committed to the project, and with that, Cro-Magnon was born.
Defying time in music didn’t mean just trying to make something that sounded futuristic; it meant actually analysing the patterns in pop music and seeing how they might influence sound moving forward. For instance, the band noted in the ‘50s that rock and roll was established, and Elvis was famed for on-stage flamboyancy. Then, in the ‘60s, acts like Jimi Hendrix and The Who were artistically destroying their instruments.
Throughout both periods, advancements were made in musical production, so machines were much more heavily involved in how we recorded music. The result was that pop music became less human, and all soul that might have otherwise been present in a song no longer was.
How did these observations manifest themselves in the future? Well, they believed there would be a musical revolution. People would resort to natural sounds rather than the sounds that come from instruments and, in the process, would step away from the technological advancements that were enveloping music. The band also believed the human race would become more primitive as they predicted a cataclysmic event that would take them back to the stone age.
The result was an album called Orgasm, which is one of the most bizarre listening experiences you will ever encounter. It’s more of an ambient noise album than anything else, as random people brought in from the street are asked to speak over tape; there is the sound of a radio and TV flicking from station to station, persistent laughing, screams and deranged rhythmic chanting throughout. The album has a beat and melody, but it comes haphazardly and is difficult to hold on to.
One track that stands out, though, and has proper musical properties is the album’s opener, ‘Caledonia’. The song uses the primitive sounds the band was dreaming of, paired with futuristic television noises, instruments, and heavy rhythm to make something comparable to metal years before Black Sabbath released their debut.
In that sense, the outfit predicted the future of music, given how much of a musical giant metal has become, but their reasons for arriving at that sound were slightly off. Still, it’s pretty extraordinary. ‘Caledonia’, sounds like something you would get from a band at Download Festival today, and even then, it would sound slightly ahead of its time. It may well be the case that Cro-Magnon, in trying to predict the future of music, shot too far ahead, and we are still catching up.
Regardless, Orgasm, or as it is now known on streaming platforms, Cave Rock, is one of the most experimental, exciting and atmospheric albums out there. It’s hard to say whether it’s good or not, given it is so far removed from our usual listening experiences, but it has an effect that no album has managed to achieve before or since, truly defying all of time in its existence.
