Nearly 20 years after reuniting, Os Mutantes are still on the move

Boston Globe

2 days ago

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'So we played, and of course it sucked,' said Dias on a recent video call. 'But the energy was there.'
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Some of Dias's bandmates figured they'd play a few songs. Four, maybe?
'I said, 'My ass, man. We're gonna do 23.''
As it turned out, Dias assembled a 10-person band with a full horn section, and the band played a long set to an enraptured audience. When they finished, the musicians boarded an elevator to the green room underground. They had no idea the crowd was cheering and clapping, sustaining a standing ovation that lasted several minutes.
The revamped band, with Dias at the helm, continues to tour almost two decades later. The band
will play club shows in Portsmouth, N.H., (at the Press Room on
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To facilitate their US touring schedule, Dias lived for more than a decade in Las Vegas.
'I fell in love with the place,' said Dias, who recently moved back to his native São Paulo. 'The mountains keep changing colors. That blew my mind, because I'm used to green.'
He was just 14 when he and one of his brothers, Arnaldo Baptista (Sérgio's full name is Sérgio Dias Baptista), formed a band called the Wooden Faces. Another brother, Cláudio César Dias Baptista, built instruments for the group, including Sérgio's guitar and various electronic effects.
The two performing brothers soon teamed with young singer Rita Lee to form a new band. Dubbed Os Mutantes — 'the mutants' in Portuguese — by a popular Brazilian TV host just before an on-air appearance, the group bonded over the instrumental surf-rock of the Ventures, the Beatles's increasingly hallucinogenic music, and Dias's obsession with guitar innovators such as Les Paul and the largely unknown gypsy jazz player Elek Bacsik (a cousin of Django Reinhardt).
The result was a singular brand of cosmic MPB (música popular brasileira) that combined bossa nova, go-go, acid rock, and a fractured take on show-tune melodies. Dias often practiced without using the index finger on his fretting hand — to strengthen the other three fingers, 'to attack my weakest points,' he said.
The brothers took cues from their artistic parents. Their father, César, was a poet and singer, and their mother, Clarisse Leite, was a concert pianist.
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'They gave some input,' Dias remembered, 'but we were very much self-sufficient.'
At one point, the Baptistas' father was arrested as an 'enemy of the state' by Brazil's secret police, the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS). Soon, the younger generation of artists would be labeled 'dissidents' for their radical revision of the country's popular culture.
Throughout Os Mutantes's early years, the group played a 'cat and mouse' game with the secret police, according to Dias, changing the lyrics to their songs to avoid censorship. Sometimes, however, they went the other way, changing the words to be more subversive than the originals.
In 1969 the DOPS arrested two of the leaders of the Tropicália movement, the singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. Exiled, they lived for a few years in London. Os Mutantes visited often, but their tight-knit scene in Brazil began to fall apart.
'The music in Brazil started to go down after Caetano and Gil were arrested,' Dias said. 'They cut the head off the movement.' His band managed to hang on until 1978. By then, Arnaldo was struggling with heavy LSD use, and Lee had branched out on her own.
During Os Mutantes's long hiatus, their reputation grew among certain connoisseurs. Kurt Cobain wrote the band a letter in 1993, imploring them to reunite.
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Dias is the only remaining long-standing member of Os Mutantes in the band's current version. Arnaldo left the reunited band in 2007. Lee, who had a long career post-Mutantes — she would be nicknamed the 'Queen of Brazilian Rock' — died in 2023.
Yet Dias keeps recruiting new members from the group's international pool of enthusiasts.
'It's a beautiful thing,' he said.
Though Os Mutantes 'never had a golden album, were never played too much on the radio,' he's proud of the legacy they've built.
'We were damn good, you know,' he said.
'All my life I survived by playing guitar. I never did anything else,' Dias added. 'Now I'm 74, and I'm still doing it, and preparing to go on another tour.'
While in Europe recently, he came down with pneumonia. It was 'an old-guy thing,' he said with a smile.
'I lost my voice, and I thought I was never going to be able to sing again. But I'm singing like a bird now.'
OS MUTANTES
At the Press Room, 77 Daniel St., Portsmouth, N.H., Monday, July 14, 7 p.m. Tickets $32.85 and up,
At the Drake, 44 N. Pleasant St., Amherst, Wednesday, July 16, 8 p.m. Tickets $30-35,
James Sullivan can be reached at [e-mail].