PHOTO by MALLORY DITCHEY

Fri | July 13
Os Mutantes @ The El Rey

Os Mutantes started as little kids doing covers on national TV under state dictatorship and became the most majestic band—what if Brian Wilson came out of the Mickey Mouse Club and Homeland Security wanted to stick him in Guantanamo Bay? That was Mutantes in Brazil in 1967. They never played an English-speaking country besides one innocent subway busk in London in 1968, but they were the best; they could play any kind of music that had been invented by the time they broke up in about 1978, and when they were the best at being the best, they made rock & roll songs with no evident awareness of limitation or doubt, the kind of pocket symphonies allotted only to one band on one continent on one planet at one time. I love Mutantes—you don’t often get me that simply. Mutantes never had an American radio hit (or an American anything until the Everything Is Possible anthology) but they knew they had classics and last half went “Ave Lucifer” (with the famous Flit guns onstage—true reunion!) into “Balada Do Louco” with a re-arranged (and better!) chorus like Billy Preston/Iron Butterfly (?!) and “Ando Meio Desligado” inflated with a solo (“Epic,” said a solemn man with glasses and beard) that would have turned indulgent at measure 44 except for Sergio’s guitar tone—fuzz from above! Famous singer Rita Lee had refused to reunite and instead they had Lia Duncan, a wiry wild girl unrestrained unlike coy Rita; she held songs with pure muscle and was happily exhausted all night long. They played everything necessary except “Oh! Muhler Infiel!”—even “A Hora e a Vez Do Cabelo Nascer” with the censored lines restored. One guy jumped on stage to hug the band and when he got face to face with Mutantes, he looked suddenly so humble. And then during encore—Arnaldo, the wounded Mutante, with a gutting divorce from Rita and a suicide attempt by defenestration somewhere behind him, had been hidden seated behind a wedge of keyboards and screens all night, and as “Panis Et Circenses” cracked into its last crescendo, he jumped up! And he ran around to the front of the stage, his spangle-sequin suit making trails in the sloppy house light, and Lia and Sergio were sharing a mic and singing and he slid in beside them and threw his arms around them and hugged them, and then he hopped up to the lip of the stage and did this ridiculous floppy dance—joints loose, flapping like a flag, and he froze for just a second. The way he looked then, with the room and the band singing around him (“The music lighted with the heat of the sun!”) and a ridiculous smile pinching at the edges of his eyes—I never saw something like that before and I won’t again. I love Mutantes and it really is that simple.