This is the story of Os Mutantes, perhaps one of the strangest in the entire history of rock music, which has served as heady inspiration for artists as varied as Beck, Devendra Banhart, Sean Lennon, Nirvana, and the Flaming Lips. Imagine a 1960s Brazilian rock group comprised of three teenagers who liked to dress up in strange costumes and play psychedelic music with their own handmade guitars. Now imagine this band playing music so strange and so beautiful that the right-wing military government of Brazil declared them a national threat, arresting many of their friends and band mates. They had the courage to perform a fusion of traditional Brazilian rhythms with psychedelia at a time when the “MPB” (the Brazilian music establishment) were openly hostile to the wild sounds of American rock ‘n roll, provoking even further outrage by fashioning their own handmade musical instruments, constructed out of such common household objects as rubber hoses, cans of hot chocolate, or bottles of bug spray. Os Mutantes was regularly censored by the government while performing alongside such musical revolutionaries as Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso (who, like many artists in Brazil at the time, were imprisoned and exiled for their political stance). Amidst such oppression, it’s a miracle their records survived the decades and are considered such a great inspiration to many of today’s best artists.