What all those bands shared was an affinity for digging up old recordings. That career shift, along with touring opportunities, enabled Dias to let Mutantes lie dormant at about the time punk and American independent rock began solidifying. He said, ‘This is Sergio Dias, producer.’” “I didn’t even know what production was,” Dias says. He traveled to New York to meet bandleader Deodato, he says, after someone gave him the Brazilian expat’s number - and was invited to produce four songs on his album. This jazz-world entrance afforded a wealth of unforeseen opportunities.
Eventually, the guitarist decamped to New York and began performing with John McLaughlin compatriot, L. Os Mutantes’ lineups persisted through the late-’70s with Dias’ guidance, as his brother and Lee, who married briefly, left the fold. They tried to label us, but we were kids then. “We were totally different from what they could stand. “We were under a military government and that was not very healthy for art or culture,” Dias explains. They cascaded color down onto a difficult time. Such garage psych as “Bat Macumba,” from the group’s opening salvo, and the besotted beatnik folk of “Desculpe, Baby,” off 1970’s “A Divina Comédia Ou Ando Meio Desligado,” didn’t distill the moment. Renowned at home for ecstatic concert engagements, Dias, his brother, Arnaldo Baptista, and Rita Lee pushed through politically contentious moments even as some of their musical compatriots left home or were forced out. “There was no interest in bands that spoke other languages. Europe was like another world - the USA also,” says Sergio Dias, one of the ensemble’s founders and its lone original member.
And while the clutch of albums from 1968 through 1970 now garner a fair bit of international fawning, the troupe initially had a difficult time reaching beyond Brazilian borders. The members of Os Mutantes attained more than a modicum of home-turf notoriety, donning capes or dressed as aliens on the backs of their album covers and channeling the Beatles run through boogie, folk and psych filters.
It rankled the military government of the era while helping to define a youth counterculture in the South American nation. The group was part of the Tropicália movement, which included Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso and Tom Zé. The myth and magic surrounding the Brazilian ensemble Os Mutantes is just about as potent as the band’s early period recordings.
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