Damião Experiença

Biography

Damião was born in Santo Amaro de Ipitanga, a former district of Salvador, Bahia which is now the city of Lauro de Freitas – even though many sources state that his birth date was September 27, 1935, this was never confirmed by him. He experienced an unhappy childhood and was constantly beaten up by his parents, what led him to run away from home to Rio de Janeiro in the late 1940s/early 1950s. As a youth he served as a radar operator for the Brazilian Navy; while in the Navy he allegedly fell on his head off a ship's crow's nest, what could have provoked his erratic mental state. It is also said (in his autobiography which comes as a bonus booklet on many of his albums) that once he was condemned to solitary confinement for many years due to desertion. After his precocious retirement from the Navy in 1963 (probably because of his accident), he went on to live with a prostitute in a stilt house, became a pimp and was able to produce his records thanks to money obtained via procuring. Damião's first known recording was a guest appearance on Luiz Melodia's 1973 debut Pérola Negra – he provided backing vocals for the track "Forró de Janeiro" –, and subsequently came to adopt the stage name "Experiença" (a corruption of the Portuguese-language word for "experience", "experiência") as an homage to his favorite band and major influence, The Jimi Hendrix Experience. In 1974 he self-released his first album, Planeta Lamma, and many others followed throughout the 1970s to the early 1990s.

Well known for his unsociable personality, since the beginning of his musical career he avoided interviews and attention from the media, even refusing to give autographs or sign any documents. (Rogério Skylab, one of Damião's most enthusiastic fans, has dedicated his 2002 album Skylab III to him; in 2012 he tried to interview him for his talk show Matador de Passarinho, but he vehemently declined the invitation.) In 1994 he was invited for a guest appearance on the debut album by experimental rock band Professor Antena, to which he agreed; however, he refused to sign the record label's contract, and never received any money or credit on the album for his part. Soon after he entered a long hiatus period, in which he only appeared throughout sporadic shows (one of them famously alongside Lulu Santos) and did not release any further albums, and at a certain point of the early 2000s was even presumed dead.

He resurfaced in 2007, releasing two albums: Sarafina 1937 and Amorzinho 1914, the names of his mother and father, respectively. In 2009 he toured around São Paulo in a series of shows, alongside avant-garde bands Zumbi do Mato and Supersimetria, and musicians Walter Franco and Rogério Skylab. After these performances he entered yet another hiatus period, alleging that he could no longer perform because of his declining health and advanced age, and that he was running short of money to put up with more albums. His final known release was the 2013 compilation Cemitério Nazista II; it was his only album not to come out through his usual label, Gravadora Planeta Lamma, founded by himself.

Until the final days of his life, Damião, who never got married and never had any children, lived in a small, dilapidated and junk-filled apartment near the Cantagalo–Pavão–Pavãozinho favela complex in Rio de Janeiro, receiving a monthly disability pension from the Navy. He was frequently seen roaming the streets of Ipanema and the General Osório Square, mistaken by a beggar by passersby unaware of his musical career. He died from undisclosed causes on December 10, 2016, aged 81, and was buried two days later at the Saint John the Baptist Cemetery. Only two people (a fan of his who happened to be around and a neighbor) attended his funeral.

Musical style

Damião's musical style is impossible to categorize accurately, since he experiments with numerous genres, more prominently freak folk, psychedelic rock, reggae and experimental rock. His songs have no logical sense at first sight, and mostly of them are sung in a dialect created by him, the "Lamma Planet dialect" (spoken in his eponymous "home planet"), with improvised lyrics.

His discography is vast, with numbers oscilating between 24 to over 38 albums according to different sources, all of them in vinyl format (Damião has stated that he never planned to re-release his catalogue in CD) and recorded at a small studio inside his apartment. Among his lyrical themes are support for authoritarian and dictatorial régimes (particularly Nazism and communism) and the Rastafari movement, opposition to abortion, feminism and any forms of organized religion, drugs, sex, homosexuality, semiotics and planets created by him, while alluding to personalities such as João Cândido, Isabel Perón, Bob Marley, Adolf Hitler, Fidel Castro, Manuel du Bocage and Getúlio Vargas. His albums' covers are collages made with newspaper and magazine scraps and photographs of himself, in a style similar to the albums by Nigerian musician Fela Kuti.

He usually plays different instruments and sings at the same time. In his earlier releases, Damião used exclusively guitars with different numbers of strings (e.g., his debut Planeta Lamma was played with an one-string guitar), harmonicas, shakers and occasionally marimbas, mixing Portuguese with his own dialect in his lyrics. This style is proeminent in his 1974 debut, Planeta Lamma, continuing in its follow-ups 69 (also from 1974) and Damião Experiença no Planeta Lavoura (1978). His later releases from the 1980s/early 1990s were more elaborate, counting with the presence of a full band; in the vocals, he abandons his characteristic dialect to sing in a broken Portuguese with heavily sexual and political lyrics, often mixing incompatible ideologies. These characteristics are more predominant in the albums Planeta Guerrilha and Ezabelitaperonsim.

Film

A short documentary film about Damião, entitled Daminhão Experiença: O Filme and directed by Ricardo Movits and Jimi Figueiredo, premiered online on December 15, 2016; five days after his death. It is one of the very few interviews to which Damião agreed to partake in. Work on the film originally began in 2007, and a trailer was uploaded to the duo's YouTube channel in 2008. Figueiredo and Movits stated that they plan to rework the film's footage into a full-length at some point in the future.

Dated albums

Albums with unknown release date

As a session member