Credit: Dangerous Minds / Album Cover

It’s a nigh-on unmovable fact of life that being a fan of a high-profile musician is an inherently capitalist endeavour.

Now, stow away your pitchforks, put down your tomatos, and stop looking up what the latest version of calling someone a tofu-eating, wokerati libtard is. I don’t say that as an inherently bad thing. It’s more or less a fact of life at this point, whether we like it or not. Our favourite musicians (generally speaking) live in a different world that is pretty much completely inaccessible to us on account of the sheer amount of money involved in what they do.

There’s an argument to be made that this is exactly how it should be. As anyone who’s ever been unfortunate enough to spend a moment on “stan twitter’ will tell you, music fans don’t seem to hate anyone with quite the same ferocity as they hate musicians. A pop star spending a moment longer with these sociopaths than they absolutely have to would probably look like the dinner scene from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before too long. Thus, it would take someone truly off the wall to build a career around directly dealing with your fan base.

To call Damião Experiença (or Damião Ferreira da Cruz to his mother) off the wall is selling it drastically short. This was a guy who lived life defiantly his own way, for better and for worse. What’s more, this was someone who built a respected, influential career in music without ever really engaging with the music industry. The vast majority of people who bought an album of his bought it directly off him in the street, or were just handed it by him with no money changing hands at all.

Look a little closer at the guy, though, and you find someone for whom being in the public eye at all, even as little of it as he was, probably wasn’t a great idea.

So, who was Damião Experiença?

There’s not a lot we know for sure about the upbringing of Damião Experiença.

The information we do have comes directly from the man himself, and as you’re about to find out, that’s not always the most reliable source. Broadly speaking, we know he was born in Bahia, Brazil, around 1935, and spent a desperately unhappy childhood being mistreated by his parents until he was around 13, when he ran away from home.

He then joined the Brazilian Navy, serving as a radio operator until an accident forced his early retirement. This is where things get really messy, he settled back down in Rio, working as a pimp to finance his first forays into music, releasing his first solo album Planeta Lamma in 1974. The next few decades saw him release anywhere between 24 and 38 albums (it really is difficult to tell) of hugely acclaimed, folk and reggae-inflected psychedelic rock. The closer you look, though, the more damaged a mind you can see is at work here. What else explains a man who’s dedicated albums of his to both Bob Marley and Adolf Hitler?

By the end of his life, Damião Experiença was little more than a hermit. Often found wandering the streets of Ipanema when not holed up in his famously litter-strewn apartment. He died on December 10th, 2016, and despite the sheer amount of Brazilian legends who have sung his praises, everyone from Tony Bellotto to Rogerio Skylab, only two people were at his funeral. His neighbour and a fan of his, who happened to be in the area.

That’s the price you pay for doing things your own way, I guess.