Tim Maia's Tim Maia Racional Vols. 1 & 2

Allen Thayer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501321559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

At the height of Tim Maia's soaring fame, he joined a radical, extraterrestrial-obsessed cult and created two plus albums of some of Brazil's-and the globe's-best funk and soul music. This book explores the career of the man often hailed as the James Brown or Barry White of Brazil, and the time of his radical transformation from a musician notorious for hedonistic living to a devoted follower of Manoel Jacinto Coelho's Rational Culture. After suddenly joining Coelho's cult in 1974 (which started first as an offshoot of the mystical Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda), Maia gave up drugs and alcohol, threw away his material possessions, and released Racional Vols. 1 & 2 in the attempt to convert the entirety of Brazil and the world to the revelation of Rational Culture. Thayer explores this strange, brief, yet incredibly prolific period of Maia's life wherein the reigning soul and funk artist of Brazil produced two albums, an EP, and a recently unearthed tape containing almost another full album of funky jams laced with spiritual content and scripture. For just as quickly as Maia became entranced with Coelho did he become disillusioned with the cult, disavowing and destroying everything having to do with that experience and refusing to speak of it for the rest of his life. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-based books and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

1 Tim Maia Irrational, 1942–73

The eighteenth out of nineteen children, of whom only twelve survived birth, Sebastião Rodrigues Maia was born in Tijuca on September 28, 1942. Just over the hills and past São Conrado beach from Rio de Janeiro’s iconic beaches of Leblon, Ipanema, and Copacabana, Tijuca was a young neighborhood, full of immigrants, a bustling multiethnic lower-middle-class neighborhood where Tim’s family made a decent living delivering boxed lunches to retirees and running a boarding house. As soon as Tim was old enough, he began delivering lunches, which is where he picked up his first nickname “Tião Marmiteiro.”¹ Tim was a horrible delivery boy, as he would make regular detours to play with friends, neglecting his rigid delivery schedule. Tim’s first job foreshadowed not only his inability to take direction, but also his insatiable appetite, as his expanding waist size betrayed his regular habit of snacking on the meals he was meant to deliver.

A musical prodigy, Tim was singing by age eight, enrolled in a music academy by twelve, and at the age of fourteen formed his first band, Os Tijucanos do Ritmo (The Rhythmic Tijucans), with his childhood buddy and an unsung hero of the Brazilian soul scene, Edson Trindade. Tim was the first among his friends in the neighborhood to learn to play guitar, so he taught the other members of the Matoso Street gang (named after the street in the neighborhood where they would gather to hang out and play music), including future Brazilian superstars Roberto Carlos and Erasmo Esteves (later known as Erasmo Carlos). Even a young Jorge Ben Jor was known to hang out in the neighborhood devouring American rock n’ roll and the new revolutionary bossa nova sound with equal enthusiasm. Tim and Erasmo even referred to each other as “Tim Jobim” and “Erasmo Gilberto” in reference to the rising bossa nova stars Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim and João Gilberto.

Tim’s second band was far more successful. The Sputniks included Erasmo on guitar and Tim on drums. The band gained the attention of rock n’ roll impresario Carlos Imperial, who put them on his TV shows, Clube Do Rock (Rock Club) on TV Tupi starting in 1958 and Os Brotos Comandam (The Youngsters In Command) on TV Continental, starting in 1959. The show featured live performances by the best of Rio’s musical youth, including many of the Matoso gang and many other soon-to-be stars of the Jovem Guarda (The Young Guard) scene. On Imperial’s next show Clube Do Rock, the Snakes (Erasmo’s next band without Tim) backed Roberto Carlos, doing his best Elvis Presley, and Tim Maia, doing his best Little Richard.²

Eduardo Araújo, who would later be of great of help to Tim, had recently arrived in Rio de Janeiro to perform on one of Clube Do Rock’s final shows. “He was already Tim Maia,” Eduardo remembers, “because Carlos Imperial changed everyone’s name, except for me. He showed up Sebastião Rodrigues Maia and Carlos Imperial said, ‘Sebastião Rodrigues Maia won’t be a success anywhere. Starting today, you’re Tim Maia, nobody will forget Tim Maia.’”³ Sadly, they did, or better said, they never had a real opportunity to know this future star as Imperial’s efforts to sell American-style rock n’ roll fell flat, at least initially.

The death of Tim’s father in 1959, the breakup of the Sputniks, and the canceling of Imperial’s show made it clear to the young Tim that he needed to find a new scene. He had always talked about traveling to the United States, but his father had been vehemently anti-American, so with nothing left to keep him in Tijuca, he planned his escape to the United States. Tim saved money and convinced the naïve neighborhood priest to cover what he lacked, while lying to the immigration officials that he was participating in an exchange program to study television production in New York. He arrived in New York City in 1959 with no one to greet him, unable to speak a word of English, only seventeen years old, and with twelve dollars in his pocket.

Tim’s only plan was to find a family friend who had married an American and was now living in Tarrytown, New York, in Westchester County, a thirty-minute train ride from Grand Central Station. Tim made his way up the Hudson to the home of the O’Meara family, who had no idea Tim was coming, and they reluctantly hosted him until he found a place of his own. However, Tim never really got his own place, preferring to couch-surf with friends and fellow musicians. While Carlos Imperial may have already dubbed him “Tim,” while in the United States he traded the difficult-to-pronounce Tião [pronounced: “chee-ow”] for Jimmy. Over the next four years, Tim worked as a pizza delivery boy, a short-order cook, a janitor at an insane asylum, and a snow shoveler. As he would recall later in life, “I took my course in malandragem ⁴ and drugs in the U.S. I learned everything fast there because everyone snorts, smokes pot, screws, drinks booze and pops pills.”⁵

One wonders why Tim stayed in the sleepy town up the river from Harlem, Brooklyn, The Bronx, and countless opportunities for a young and ambitious musicians to take root. I think the answer was that he was able to find just what he needed right in town and within reach. A sixteen-year-old Roger Bruno met Tim not long after the Brazilian arrived in Tarrytown and invited him to join his fledgling R&B group built around four singers, the Ideals. Roger recalls that the five-member vocal group came together effortlessly: “There was something about Tim where he and I musically related, so we got to be really good friends, and then we started writing, and then we wrote ‘New Love,’ which was, like, the second song I ever wrote.” The song, which was later recorded for Tim’s fourth solo album more than ten years later in 1973, was a mix of R&B and bossa nova. “He turned me on to João Gilberto,” Roger remembers. “He was a real João freak, and it was about the time when bossa nova was hitting in the States, and we wanted to do something with bossa and pop music. So, we wrote that song and decided to do a demo on it.”⁶ The song only exists as an acetate in Bruno’ s possession, but beyond it being Tim’s very first “professional” recording session, it’s notable for featuring Brazil’s most famous drummer at that time, Milton Banana, who happened to be in town for the legendary bossa nova concert at Carnegie Hall.⁷ Notable session player, Don Payne, played bass. Tim played acoustic guitar and sang backup vocals to Roger’s lead vocal.

Figure 2 Left to right: Roger Bruno, Frank Delmerico, Tim Maia, and Felix DeMasi. Photo courtesy of Roger Bruno.

Who knows what might have happened if the Ideals had actually stuck together long enough to shop around their demo. Roger reminisced about their teenage daydreams of headlining the Apollo and all the adoring female fans, but he also remembers that Tim’s talents weren’t just limited to making music: “Let’s just say he always had a way to make money. Believe me, Tim was an outlaw.” In 1963, Tim was arrested in Daytona Beach, Florida, with some black American friends. The cops pulled over their stolen car and found the deviants in possession of marijuana. Tim was sent to jail for six months before being deported back to Brazil. Roger Bruno remembers receiving a phone call from Tim in jail, which wasn’t the first time, but this time he was in Florida and enough was enough. “He was very unhappy that we didn’t bail him out,” Roger recalls. “For him, that was it. His hopes for a career in the U.S. were gone.”

Figure 3 Left to right: Roger Bruno, Felix DeMasi, Tim Maia, Paul Mitranga, and Bill Adair. Photo courtesy of Roger Bruno.

Having spent most of the North American winter in jail, Tim arrived back in Brazil in April 1964. He landed in Rio de Janeiro during a period of tremendous political turmoil, just days following the right-wing military coup that toppled the progressive, democratically elected President Goulart.⁸ Not entirely unlike the bleeding heartbreak following JFK’s assassination in 1963, Brazil’s doe-eyed liberals and bossa nova romantics experienced a similar existential loss as they watched their country being taken over by a US-backed military dictatorship. For the next twenty-one years, Brazil was ruled by a succession of military leaders with extralegal kidnappings, detentions, assassinations, and—what every musician had to worry about—censorship. During those decades Brazilians saw the degree of oppression wax and wane according to the various military leaders’ levels of morality, but the early to mid-1970s were known as some of the worst years. But unlike some repressive dictatorships, Brazil’s military leaders avoided interfering too much with the fundamentals of Brazilian life: Catholicism and samba.

What better to distract the populace from the extralegal activities of its government than with ephemeral pop culture. Just as Tim arrived home, Tim’s old friends from Tijuca made a splash in the wake of Beatlemania that swept through Brazil (and the world) in 1963–4. “Even soft water hitting a hard rock can make a hole,” Eduardo Araújo says, calling upon an old Brazilian adage to describe the Jovem Guarda’s eventual triumph over the media blockade that shut down Clube Do Rock and kept the nascent Brazilian rock n’ roll scene momentarily at bay. “But then all of a sudden, the radio stations started to play it . . . .” Eduardo’s career took off and so too did those of Tim’s old friends, Roberto Carlos and Erasmo Esteves, now going by Erasmo Carlos.

Tim returned to Brazil with only the clothes on his back. He called his mother from the airport to pick him up, telling his family and friends that he came back to Brazil in order to avoid being drafted to fight in Vietnam. Before he could even get a plan together, he was already in trouble again. Hanging out with an old friend, they decided to steal some nice furniture they noticed left unattended in front of a house. Moments later, the neighbor came outside and started screaming, “thieves, they’re stealing the furniture.” While his buddy escaped, Tim was caught trying to run away with a chair on his head. Within weeks of getting out of a US jail he was back in jail, now in Rio de Janeiro. “You can’t imagine what you pick up in jail in Brazil,” Tim said about this time in jail in Rio. “I got picked up and did a year in there and I am still traumatized by [those prison] uniforms until today.”⁹ Tim rarely shied away from talking about his life, the good, the bad, and the hilarious, but he rarely (and never in public, aside from the above quote) spoke about this year he spent in jail in Rio de Janeiro. Certainly, more brutal and twice as long as his stint in the Florida jail, sitting in his jail cell Tim couldn’t be further from his dream of headlining the Apollo Theater back in New York. But rather than let his demoralizing surroundings and string of bad luck kill his spirit, Tim emerged from the experience tougher and even more determined. Though it didn’t help that his cellmates and guards were as incredulous when Tim claimed that he’d taught the fresh pop stars Roberto and Erasmo Carlos how to play guitar.

With his old buddies from the Matoso gang dominating the pop airwaves as the leading lights of the Jovem Guarda scene, it was clear to Tim that Rio de Janeiro was not the place to stage his assault on the Brazilian recording industry. The Jovem Guarda’s ground zero was São Paulo. “I lived in the United States from 1959 to 1964,” Tim told journalist Ruy Castro in Brazil’s Playboy in 1991.

When I returned, the Jovem Guarda was already armed. I got myself into trouble; I was arrested and put in jail for a year. When I got out of the can, them—my old gang—didn’t even want to look at me—“Look it’s Tião here! Look it’s Tião Maconheiro [Tim pothead]” I stayed for three years in São Paulo trying to do the Jovem Guarda [thing], but they wouldn’t let me in. . . . I was sabotaged by Roberto Carlos and his gang all that time. They were afraid of soul music—later I came to conclude. At that time, I never imagined that I, chubby, mulatto, would compete with them, they were the kings of Jovem Guarda [laughs].¹⁰

Tim’s determination to bring the sound and spirit of soul music to Brazil was initially a liability because no one was singing this music. Eventually, Erasmo got him a single on his label, Fermata, Tim’s debut release from 1968, “What You Want To Bet” backed with “These Are The Songs.” Laercio de Freitas, a revered Afro-Brazilian pianist, composer, and arranger was hired by the label for the session. “Tim was a crazy man,” Laercio recalls during an interview in San Diego, California, in 2017. “I knew him since I was working in São Paulo,” Laercio digs back into his memories of Tim’s first professional session. “The band was playing the song [in the studio] and he enters, ‘you guys didn’t think I was coming did you?’ A good person, Tim had a good soul, a good spirit.”¹¹

The single tanked, as did another on Roberto’s label (CBS) from 1969, “Meu Pais” backed with “Sentimento.” That same year, Roberto recorded Tim’s song “Não Vou Ficar,” an upbeat and defiant funk vamp, which became a huge hit. Tim’s old friend from the Clube Do Rock days, Eduardo Araújo, was the one who passed the song to Roberto. A part of the São Paulo–based Jovem Guarda scene, but with a grittier rock image, Eduardo’s career was going like gangbusters and he generously pulled the homeless and struggling Tim under his wing. “When he lived with me in the Hotel Danube for a long time, he was a guy rejected by everybody, all of the musicians, the producers, everyone judged him because he had been in jail,” Eduardo said. “When he showed up, I received him with open arms. He didn’t need for the basic things in life living in the Presidential Suite of the Hotel Danube with me.”

When Tim re-entered Eduardo’s life, and now his apartment as well, the original rocker from the Jovem Guarda scene was looking to try something new. Tim suggested this new style from the United States that he was trying to sing: soul music. “Nobody was listening to it,” Eduardo insists. “They were all imported records, they didn’t sell here or play on the radio.” Eduardo’s record label was understandably nervous about this idea, but ultimately Odeon relented. The assistant producer would be a certain Tim Maia. Soul music could only be heard at select nightclubs in Brazil’s biggest cities. The Cave club in São Paulo was the only place in town to dig the primordial funk wafting down from the United States. “The nightclubs were first, they played: Arthur Conley, Aretha Franklin, James Brown,” Eduardo remembers. “Tim knew this spot on Rua Augusta and all the records were imported, and we bought everything to listen to. It took us six months to put together the material [for the album],” Eduardo remembers. Eduardo’s album, A Onda É Boo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Tim Maia Irrational, 1942–73
• 2 The Band, the Shed, and Fatherhood (Late 1973–Early 1974)
• 3 50 Mescaline + Universe in Disenchantment = Tim Maia Racional? (1974)
• 4 Tim Maia Racional Vol. 1 (Late 1974)
• 5 Rational Friends and Family (Early 1975)
• 6 Tim Maia Racional Vol. 2 (Early–Mid 1975)
• 7 Tim Maia Racional Vol. 3 and the End of Rationality
• 8 The Disenchantment
• 9 Irrational and Loving It
• 10 Rational Legacy
• 11 The Rescue and Reconstruction of Tim Maia Racional Vol. 3
• Notes
• List of Interviews
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright