Considered a major icon of the Brazilian countercultural scene and one of the country's most famous and prolific outsider musicians,[3] he was praised by figures such as Tony Bellotto, George Israel and Rogério Skylab,[4] and also regularly compared to the likes of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, Frank Zappa, Moondog, Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, Jandek and Father Yod.

[5][6] His albums, usually sold in the streets or handed out for free,[7] became much-sought collector's items, and his reclusive, eccentric, and unpretentious personality attained him a passionate cult following.

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 in the vicinity of the bairro of Estácio, became a pimp and was able to produce his records thanks to money obtained via procuring.

[4] Soon after he began a long hiatus, 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.

Until the final days of his life, he lived alone in a run-down and rubbish-filled apartment next to the Cantagalo–Pavão–Pavãozinho favela complex, receiving a monthly disability pension from the Navy.

[11] His discography is vast, with numbers varying between 24 and over 38 albums depending on the source, all of them in vinyl format[8] (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), the apartheid and the Rastafari movement, opposition to abortion, feminism, wage labor and any forms of organized religion, drugs, sex, homosexuality, semiotics and planets created by him,[7] while alluding to personalities such as João Cândido, Isabel and Eva Perón, Bob Marley, Pieter Willem Botha, Adolf Hitler, Fidel Castro, Manuel du Bocage and Getúlio Vargas.

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.