The Mutants

So it’s Friday night and my last night in town before jettin out to the East side to face the final stretch of my academic stint at the illustrious, reputable and seriously scrapey Wellesley College. The moon’s full and shiny and the stars are not only aligned but a-leaned: I’m kickin it at my homegirl’s, with a fresh homemade mojito in one hand, a cupful of magic in the other, and in my pocket, freeee tickets to see an apparently bangin Brazilian psychedeli-rock band known as Os Mutantes---The Mutants. PREPARE yoself.

With the bevies in our bellies, we wander our way down to The Night Light, a cozy Bellingham nightlife hot spot notable for its rustic all-wood motif and its universal appeal to the young and the not so young. The crowd ranged from various twenty-somethings—the awkwardly swaying hipster, the double-jointed raver kid Gumby-bot-ing all over the place, and the 6’5” gangly guy hastily supporting his totally plastered 5 foot-tall girlfriend as they shift side-to-side only kind of with the beat—to various forty-, fifty-, even sixty-somethings behaving no less and probably more indecently than us kids, bumping and grinding with pot-bellies very much involved, and every so often thrusting a violent “ROCK ON!” hand gesture into the air.

And I haven’t even talked about the band yet. Os Mutantes at first appeared to me to be a family affair, both in form and in purpose—like an aging Brazilian counterpart to The Partridge Family, now past their prime and so relegated to down-home performances at family restaurants or bars in big small towns like Bellingham. Ohh no sir. Their late ‘60s/early ‘70s peace-love-WAY too much LSD driven lyrics, combined with a later ‘70s funky disco sound, some oh-so ‘80s power ballad harmonic moments, and random-ass insertions of catastrophic avant-garde mayhem (a la Animal Collective meets Amazon warrior)…all somehow taking root in Brazilian traditional rhythms—go seriously, SERIOUSLY, dumb.

With no point of reference in this sea of thizz, I leaned myself back and let the waves take me. After 2 encores all parties dispersed and I took a second to unlean and process what I’d witnessed. I said to my friend: “All that’s left to do is add a club beat and dress em up like mutant space cadets.”

I later found out, with a little research, that they’d already done close to that, minus the club beat part. In the ‘60s when the band was young and vital, they rebelled against the oppressive Brazilian military government with rampant psychadelic behavior, appearing, for example, on a weekly TV program disguised as aliens, witches, or conquistadors performing surreal hymns to such bizarre figures as Don Quixote, Genghis Khan, and Lucifer, while tossing massive nets and giant rubber caterpillars across their audience.

Need I say more? Just a bit and then I’ll leave it. Lead guitarist, Sergio Dias Baptista, is the only continuing member of the original trio, which also included his brother Arnaldo, who left the band in 1973 for thizzing too hard on liquid love (he was subsequently institutionalized and jumped from the building's window, causing a six-week coma), and Rita Lee, who peaced out in 1972 to pursue a solo career (yawn). On hiatus until 2006, Os Mutantes inspired the likes of Kurt Cobain, Beck, David Byrne, and Of Montreal. Now a 7-member crew, the band will release their first album in 35 years this Tuesday. Search Haih Or Amortecedor for the deets.

Hard to find a good vid, but this one gives a good taste of the original sound and the pic seems to capture some of their essence.