In 1968, Os Mutantes emerged onto the international music scene in a cloud of marijuana smoke. They were the hippest, most far out cats ever to come out of swinging Sao Paolo, and their music was naturally groovy. But on Jan. 1, 1970, tragedy struck: the '60s died. To this day, there are hippies across the country who never got the memo. The sad fact is, the squares have won, no matter how many hippies there are to wave the flag.
Os Mutantes' newest album sounds, in short, like a dream dying. Live at the Barbican Theatre 2006 is a live recording of a band that clearly spent too long in a cloud of Studio 54 nose candy to remember the sound that made them famous. The album shows their edgy and tropical psychedelia has been replaced with the sound of an elevator-worthy Girl from Ipanema"" cover.
The opening track, ""Don Quixote,"" is indicative of everything wrong with the album. It opens with trumpet fanfare that sounds like it was stolen from the beginning of a David Lean movie, and what follows could accurately be described as sonic torture. It sounds like a Portuguese translation of a failed Pete Townshend operetta with a Folgers commercial inexplicably thrown in the middle. Since this is a live recording, the track begins and ends with the sounds of a cheering crowd which is, of course, immensely perplexing. But with the amount of money Broadway musicals rake in every year, none of this is too surprising.
On other tracks, like ""Top Top,"" Os Mutantes sound like they have adopted the Bee Gee's testicular deficiency. The high-pitched whining, along with what sounds like one of the background singers speaking in tongues and a repetitive harmonic drone, make the track truly painful to listen to.
But the most depressing track on the album is ""Ave Lucifer"" which, in the original studio recording, brilliantly and perversely mixed the sounds of a church hymn with an acid-fueled trip to the circus. But on their live album, with all of the band members sounding spiritually dead, the song sounds like the theme song from a Timothy Dalton James Bond movie.
The trajectory of the music of the '60s runs parallel to that of the greater population of hippies: They matured in an environment of rampant idealism and even more rampant drug use. Then the Vietnam War ended and without a uniting cause, they hung up their beads and decided to become bankers, lawyers and insurance salesmen. They still fork over half of their social security check to see the occasional Rolling Stones concert but, like the Rolling Stones, they are just corpses being dragged around the room like marionettes. The hippies took their fingers off the trigger, and thanks to that we now have global warming and global war.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Os Mutantes rolled up to this gig in a Hummer. Stranger things have happened.
