Brazil’s ‘Queen of Rock’ who attracted fans ranging from Kurt Cobain to King Charles
Known as Brazil’s ‘‘Queen of Rock’’, Rita Lee, who has died of cancer aged 75, once claimed that her band Os Mutantes had ‘‘come from another planet to take over the world’’. Certainly there was something otherworldly about the cosmic fantasies and acid-inspired psychedelic visions of the group, who were called ‘‘the Brazilian Beatles’’.
One of Os Mutantes’ biggest hits was tellingly titled Ando Meio Desligado (I’m Feeling a Little Spaced Out).
Formed in Sao Paulo in 1966 by Lee, her then boyfriend Arnaldo Baptista, and his brother, Sergio Dias Baptista, the group took its name from a science fiction book called O Planeta dos Mutantes (The Planet of the Mutants) and swiftly became the most inventive and irreverent rock’n’roll group in Brazil.
They found natural allies in the movement known locally as Tropicalia. Based on the aesthetic of antropofagia, a kind of musical cannibalism that chewed up influences from diverse genres, the result was a unique melange of samba and bossa nova rhythms and imported Anglo-American popular and avant-garde styles, fired by socially and politically conscious lyrics that took aim at Brazil’s military rulers.
Lee and Os Mutantes became Tropicalia’s house band, backing the movement’s leading lights such as Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, and between 1968 and 1972 recording five albums in their own right with titles such as E Seus Cometas No Pais Do Baurets (Mutants and their Comets in the Country of Weed).
Their records still sound original to this day and almost half a century after the release of Os Mutantes’ self-titled debut release, Rolling Stone included it on a list of ‘‘the greatest stoner albums of all time’’, calling it one of the ‘‘most mischievous head trips’’ of its era.
Isolated from the mainstream of Anglo-American pop, the group found inventive ways of creating the sound effects they heard on imported rock records. Not knowing how to replicate the backwards tape sounds on the Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows, they found an approximation of the effect by aiming a canister of fly killer at the microphone. A similarly improvised Heath Robinson contraption was used to create the sound of a guitar wah-wah pedal.
It was all done not merely with ingenuity but with a subversive sense of surreal humour and an eccentric stage presence, with Lee taking charge of their extravagant costumes. For one gig they would appear as conquistadors, for the next they might be dressed as witches or aliens. Early in her career Lee suffered from chronic stage fright and she was not the first or last performer to seek to overcome it by dressing up.
However, by the mid-1970s the band had fallen apart, collapsing under the weight of their philosophy of free love and liberal drug use and the oppression of living under a military dictatorship, although they were never jailed and forced into exile as were Gil and Veloso.
Lee went on to a commercially successful solo career and Os Mutantes, whose music at that stage had been little heard outside Brazil, faded into rock history, if not quite into obscurity.
As a solo artist she scored eight No 1 hit singles in Brazil and a dozen gold or platinum albums, among them a bossa nova-styled collection of Beatles songs titled Aqui, Ali, Em Qualquer Lugar (Here, There and Everywhere).
Her voice attracted some unlikely fans beyond Brazilian shores too. In 1988 the Daily Mirror reported that Charles, then the Prince of Wales, had requested a Rita Lee record during a British embassy banquet in Paris and when it was played ‘‘knew the words by heart’’.
The world was slower to discover the Os Mutantes back catalogue but in the 1990s a younger generation of British and American rock stars started citing the band as unsung heroes.
Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain begged them to reform, Beck named his 1998 Grammy-winning album after them and David Byrne of Talking Heads brought their music to a new audience by releasing an influential compilation of their best work on his New York-based label Luaka Bop.
Two decades after they had broken up, Lee and Os Mutantes found they had turned into a hipster cult.
‘‘The bottom line is that we were light years ahead of everyone else,’’ Lee said in a 2001 interview with The New York Times.
The Baptista brothers re-formed the group in 2006 to play their first ever show outside Brazil at the Barbican Centre in London, although Lee did not join them, calling it an attempt to ‘‘earn some cash to pay for geriatric care’’.
She is survived by her second husband, Roberto de Carvalho, a guitarist she married in 1976, and their children Beto Lee, a Brazilian rock musician, Joao Lee, and Antonio Lee. Her first marriage to Os Mutantes’ Arnaldo Baptista, from 1968 to 1972, ended in divorce.
She fought a long battle with lung cancer and named her tumour ‘‘Jair’’, a sardonic reference to Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president from 2019-22, which outraged his supporters.
On her death his successor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, paid tribute. Lee was ‘‘one of the greatest and most brilliant names in Brazilian music’’, he wrote.
Rita Lee Jones was born in Sao Paulo, the youngest of three daughters of Romilda Padula, a Brazilian-Italian pianist, and Charles Jones, an American-born dentist descended from Confederate fighters who fled to Brazil after the American Civil War – he gave his daughter her middle name in honour of General Robert E Lee.
She studied classical piano from an early age and recounted in a 2016 autobiography that she had been sexually abused as a child by a man who visited the family home to repair her mother’s sewing machine. The traumatic experience fuelled her rebellious spirit.
In her teens she abandoned the piano for a drum set and a guitar and was 18 when she formed Os Mutantes.
Lee composed her own epitaph, expressing the wish that her headstone should read: ‘‘She was never a good example. But she was a good person.’’ – The Times
‘‘She was never a good example. But she was a good person.’’
Rita Lee’s self-composed epitaph