Brazil’s merry pranksters return

THERE are bands that hit it big right away, there are others that win an audience gradually, and then there are Os Mutantes. The Brazilian psychedelic rock group formed in the late ‘60s, broke up by the mid-’70s and posthumously found a small but dedicated following in the United States in the late ‘90s. Now reunited (without their original singer), they are performing in this country for the first time this month, on a short tour that includes a show Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl, where they will open for the Flaming Lips.

“There is a thing for every season,” said Os Mutantes guitarist Sergio Dias, quoting, more or less, the lyrics to “Turn! Turn! Turn!”

As Dias’ choice of reference suggests, Os Mutantes (Portuguese for “the mutants”) were influenced by American and English ‘60s rock, especially the elliptical lyrics and experimental recording techniques of the Beatles. But they interpreted that music in their own way. To capture the pffft sound the Beatles made by running tape backward in the studio, Os Mutantes used a bug-spray pump facing the microphone.

Along with the singers Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, whom they sometimes backed, Os Mutantes were identified with Tropicalia, a late-’60s Brazilian counterculture art movement with a collage aesthetic and an ironic sensibility. Intellectually, Tropicalia traced its roots to the Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto,” which urged the country’s artists to devour a variety of influences in order to assert a recombinant national identity. To musicians, that meant drawing on the enormous variety of influences.

“We heard everything from mariachi guys to the Everly Brothers,” Dias said. And they digested it all well enough to make music that sounded entirely new.

Formed in 1966 in Sao Paulo, Os Mutantes consisted of Dias, his brother Arnaldo Baptista (each uses a different part of their family surname, Dias Baptista) and singer Rita Lee, who declined to join the reunion. (The band is touring with another singer, Zelia Duncan, as well as drummer Ronaldo “Dinho” Leme, who joined the band later.) From 1968 to ‘71, the band released four albums full of experimental sounds, sophisticated rhythms and clever lyrics, mostly in Portuguese. (Os Mutantes perform some of their songs in English on “Technicolor,” which was recorded in 1970, shelved at the time and released in 2000 in the U.S.) Although popular in Brazil, they were almost unknown elsewhere.

Perhaps they were simply ahead of their time: Os Mutantes’ knack for assimilating influences with ease and humor made them a favorite among musicians and hipsters in the ‘90s. Kurt Cobain invited them to perform with Nirvana in Brazil (they declined). Beck named his “Mutations” album in tribute to the group (it contains a song called “Tropicalia”). In 1999, David Byrne released a compilation of the band’s music, “The Best of Os Mutantes: Everything Is Possible,” on his label Luaka Bop, which won them a slightly larger audience.

“It was like a wildfire -- it came out of nowhere,” Dias said of the band’s surprising posthumous popularity. “The formers of opinion started to listen, and they realized there was something strong there.”

With Portuguese lyrics and oddball sounds, Os Mutantes offer the appeal of the exotic to music aficionados who delight in the obscure. “There’s that part of the underground that’s digging for a gem from the past,” said Wayne Coyne, lead singer of the Flaming Lips. “I thought they were cool. And the story is stunning -- you can’t help but be intrigued by it.”

But Os Mutantes are more than some musical curio. “They come out of a Brazilian song tradition, but they don’t have anything to do with world music,” said Christopher Dunn, an associate professor of Brazilian literature and culture at Tulane University who wrote “Brutality Garden: Tropicalia and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture.” “They were cosmopolitan.”

Indeed, that was part of the point. Tropicalia represented a challenge to the domination of foreign pop and Brazilian bossa nova. Mixing elements of rock with bossa nova and other genres, the movement offended both the military government (which briefly jailed Veloso and Gil, who then left the country for a few years) and the socialist left, which held more purist notions of what Brazilian music should sound like.

Os Mutantes were not as self-consciously artistic as Veloso, who wrote a song called “´E Prohibido proibir” (Prohibiting is prohibited). “They weren’t thinking it out a lot,” Dunn said. And unlike Veloso and Gil, who came from Bahia, the center of Afro-Brazilian culture, Os Mutantes were very much products of the modern, middle-class culture of Sao Paulo. “Os Mutantes were an apparition from the future,” Veloso wrote in his autobiography, “Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil.” And they dressed like it, in bizarre costumes to drive home their departure from traditional Brazilian music.

After Tropicalia exhausted itself, Veloso and Gil became national icons (the latter is now the country’s minister of culture) and the story of Os Mutantes began to look like a treatment for a Brazilian “Behind the Music.” Rita Lee left in 1972 and became a mainstream pop star; she still appears on television frequently. The band evolved into a prog-rock group that favored long solos and wore headbands. Baptista, who dated and briefly married Lee, developed mental problems from his overindulgence in LSD, and in 1982 fell into a coma when he injured his head after jumping out the window of a psychiatric hospital. “We all did a lot of LSD,” Dias acknowledged.

Although Dias said the band received many offers to tour, their hearts were never in it. But earlier this year, the Barbican, an arts center in London, mounted an exhibit about Tropicalia, and Dias and his brother decided the time was right. Their London performance received positive reviews, and the band added a few dates to its brief U.S. tour.

“The magic was there,” Dias said.

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Os Mutantes

What: Os Mutantes, opening for the Flaming Lips and Thievery Corp.

Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Hollywood

When: 7 p.m. Sunday

Price: $5 to $120

Info: (323) 850-2000