IN THE NEW: The band have been name-checked by everyone from Kurt Cobain and David Byrne to Beck — and now they’re back. |
Last winter, word got out that the original members of the notorious and influential Brazilian psych-pop group Os Mutantes were preparing to perform together for the first time in more than 30 years. The rumors surprised many, including Os Mutantes guitarist Sérgio Dias. He heard the news from a curious journalist. “I was just kind of amazed, because I didn’t know anything about it,” he tells me when I reach him in Paris, where he’s vacationing with his wife.Os Mutantes (“The Mutants”) formed as a trio in 1966, with Dias’s older brother Arnaldo Baptista on bass (and later keyboards) and Arnaldo’s girlfriend, Rita Lee, singing lead. The teens sped to the front lines of Brazil’s countercultural tropicália movement, putting their own far-out sambafied spin on the sounds they’d absorbed from bands like the Beatles. But by the mid ’70s, Os Mutantes’ founders had gone their separate ways. They refused to reconsider the split as their reputation grew over the years; in 1993, they shrugged off Kurt Cobain’s invitation to join Nirvana on tour.
And wishful thinking aside, they had no plans to reunite in 2006. But the gossip inspired Dias, now 55, to get back in touch with his former mates. Baptista agreed to come by his brother’s São Paulo studio, along with drummer Dinho Leme, who had joined the group in 1971. “We started to play, and the magic was there,” Dias says.
They arranged to appear at a retrospective tropicália festival being held last spring at London’s Barbican Centre. Popular Brazilian singer Zélia Duncan was chosen to replace Lee, who declined to come along; Dias enlisted back-up players to help re-create the most twisted parts of Os Mutantes’ twisted songbook. Within a month, the band had booked an ambitious tour of the US, their first ever, and all before this new line-up had played a note in public.
The re-formed band found themselves performing to full houses in cities where their albums hadn’t been widely available before David Byrne released Everything Is Possible: The Best of Os Mutantes on his Luaka Bop label in 1999, and they discovered that, thanks to championing by Cobain, Beck, Byrne, and others, they’d amassed quite a following. “This happened because of the people,” Dias says. “The band didn’t even exist. So the music survived us. And the kids listen to the music, and we’re back basically because they want it. And it’s a beautiful thing to see.”
Picking up where Byrne left off, Universal Music Latino has made the entire Os Mutantes catalogue available in the States. CD reissues of the classic early albums (1968’s Os Mutantes, 1969’s Mutantes, and 1970’s A Divina Comédia) hit stores this past August, with all their exhilarating melodies and improvised studio effects intact. Listening to these playfully disoriented sounds, you can see why the likes of Beck, Belle and Sebastian, and Of Montreal have made a habit of name-checking the once-obscure trio.
