Hooray for Tim Maia! was a live broadcast that was part of a worldwide celebration on what would have been the Brazilian musician’s 70th birthday. The good folks at Luaka Bop have organized the international events to celebrate his legacy and unveil their album release World Psychedelic Classics 4: Nobody Can Live Forever; The Existential Soul of Tim Maia which is out now. The dublab broadcast featured DJ sets and insight from T-Kay, Andres Renteria & Tropicaza with super special guest Arto Lindsay. Following is some more info on this far out legend.

Tim Maia was the man. A soul superstar with outsize talents and appetites, he revolutionized popular music in his native Brazil in the 1970s. He also married five times, served multiple prison sentences, and at the height of his fame, joined a UFO-obsessed religious cult.

Tim Maia’s story is the stuff of legend, and indeed he is the subject of a best-selling biography, TV movie, and hit musical in Brazil. Growing up in Rio, he formed his first band at age 14 and taught local gang members to play guitar. In 1959, aged 17, he illegally emigrated to Tarrytown, NY where he studied communications, worked as a janitor, and formed a new band, The Ideals. Four years later he was jailed and deported for smoking marijuana in a stolen car. He returned to Brazil deeply inspired by American soul music and the civil rights movement and began writing songs in earnest.

Maia’s 1970 debut LP has been called “a massive cannonball into the pool” of Brazilian culture, the ripples of which are still visible today. The album linked Brazilian pop music and American soul in a way that was genuinely new, and it spent 24 weeks on the charts. Other landmark recordings would follow, but in 1976, Maia joined the Racional Energy cult, at which point he shed his vices, dressed in white robes, and performed and recorded only for cult members. Maia would later distance himself from Racional Energy, but the mythos surrounding him only grew. He died, 55 years old and obese, after an onstage heart attack in 1998.

A great video intro to Tim Maia:

“In 1975, acting as a missionary for the Racional Energy cult, Tim sends his new ‘Racional’ albums and the cult’s “bible” to Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield and John Lennon, convinced he could turn them onto his new religion. One month later he gets an answer from John Lennon, including a photo of Lennon, fully naked: “- Dear freak, I don’t speak Portuguese. You can LISTEN to this photo. Love and peace, John””