Dinho (singer)

Alecsander Alves Leite (5 March 1971 – 2 March 1996), better known as Dinho, was a Brazilian singer, songwriter and comedian who was the lead singer of the satirical rock band Mamonas Assassinas.

Born in Bahia and raised in Guarulhos, Dinho started singing and receiving singing lessons at age five. He was considered a mischievous student and eventually dropped out high school. In July 1990, he joined the rock band Utopia in Guarulhos, while still working at other professions, including as office boy and comedian. Dinho and the other Utopia members were unsuccessful in promoting the group and leading it to fame, but upon realizing that satirical songs were more popular than serious ones, they were convinced to rebrand the group as a comedy band, Mamonas Assassinas, in 1995.

Within weeks, the band achieved great popularity, performing in concerts across Brazil and appearing frequently on media. On 2 March 1996, Dinho and all other band members were killed in a plane crash.

Early life
Dinho was born in Irecê, Bahia, but when he was just two months old he moved with his parents, Hildebrando Alves Leite and Celia Ramos Alves, to Guarulhos, São Paulo, where the family would seek a better living. His nickname was given to him by his maternal grandmother, Carmen Ramos, of Spaniard origin, who couldn't pronounce Alecsander and so nicknamed him Dinho.

He started singing as a child, and by the age of five was the main performer in the children's choir at his local church. While growing up, he had his first singing lessons by Donizete Severo, after the teacher died in 1993 in an accident at the factory she worked, Dinho stopped attending the worship service altogether.

1989 – 1995: Utopia and commercial failure
In July 1990, Dinho was attending a gig by the band Utopia, consisting of Sergio Reoli, Samuel Reoli and Bento Hinoto at Parque Cecap in Guarulhos, when he joined them on stage to sing "Sweet Child o' Mine" by Guns N' Roses. Although he couldn't properly sing in English, his charisma and stage presence earned him the position of new lead singer of the group, which would later have Marcio Araujo (keyboardist) and Julio Rasec (then percussionist, later keyboardist) as members.

The band did a few shows in Guarulhos, especially in Parque Cecap, but Utopia's serious songs never reached the success the musicians hoped for. The failure seemed to become clearer in 1992, when the band's LP sold less than a hundred copies. Despite the adversity, Dinho didn't gave up and even went as far as Guarulhos City Hall to ask Utopia to perform at the inauguration of the Paschoal Thomeu Gymnasium; the fact that he was a complete stranger meant that Dinho was mistreated and humiliated by those in charge of the event, who hostilely refused to allow the band to play at the inauguration of the hall.

He worked as an office boy and an entertainer at political rallies, especially for councilor Geraldo Celestino, doing comic imitations of celebrities such as Maguila, Silvio Santos and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In mid-1992, he began to work as a presenter of a musical program on Record's now-defunct Saturday Show, which was led by his former father-in-law Saverio Zacanini, who was responsible for giving Dinho and Utopia their first opportunities to perform on TV.

1995 – 1996: Mamonas Assassinas and success
As time progressed, Dinho realized that his comical side and a few joke songs were more popular than Utopia's more mature tracks. After an unpretentious recording of Mina (which would later be rewritten and renamed Pelados em Santos) and Robocop Gay, the group was convinced by producer Rick Bonadio to switch from serious rock to satirical music, and so, in 1995, the band Mamonas Assassinas was created.

With the instant, unexpected and overwhelming success of the Mamonas Assassinas in 1995, Dinho went from a complete unknown to the front-man of Brazil's most popular band, becoming one of the country's most sought-after celebrities in a matter of weeks. With his fame, he met some of his idols, such as Humberto Gessinger, Chitãozinho & Xororó, Roberto Leal and Morten Harket, lead singer of A-ha, with whom Dinho and the rest of the group shared the stage at a concert in the Toco Dance Club, playing Take on Me.

On January 6, 1996, the Mamonas Assassinas returned to Guarulhos to perform an unforgettable concert at the Paschoal Thomeu Gymnasium, where they had been humiliated years before. Before playing as the Mamonas Assassinas, the five members of the band walked on stage without their famous costumes and performed as if they were Utopia, playing the songs Será by Legião Urbana, Bichos Escrotos by Titãs and Horizonte Infinito, a song from the unsuccessful Utopia album. In an ironic vein, Dinho thanked the Mamonas Assassinas for the opportunity to make Utopia's dream of playing in the hall come true. They then went to the dressing room to put on their prisoner costumes and return to the stage as Mamonas Assassinas. At the end of the show, Dinho sat down on stage and, in a rare moment of seriousness, spoke to the crowd:"'Five years ago I was there, among you, wanting to be here. And people looked at me and said: ‘It's impossible to get here' (...) We're the band Mamonas Assassinas, from Guarulhos, and we've taken the name of this city all over the country. And we're going to take the name of this city abroad too! Because we're still from here. Success doesn't get into people's heads. It only goes to the heads of those who are weak. And we're not weak people. If we were weak, we would have given up five years ago, when people said we would never get this far. But here we are! (...)'"

Personal life
Dinho dated Mirella Zacanini, who wrote the book "Pitchulinha, My Life with Dinho – Until Mamonas Do Us Apart", from 1992 to July 1995, when he started achieving mainstream recognition. Zacanini would later write the song "Mil Momentos" (A Thousand Moments), dedicated to the singer.

He later had a relationship with Valeria Zoppello until his death in 1996. She is popularly remembered after Dinho called her on the stage of Domingo Legal, a popular Sunday TV show, to publicly introduce her to Brazil as his girlfriend, kissing her so passionately they fell to the ground, but the singer, with his trademark humor, didn't stop; the public display happened after an argument between the couple backstage because the TV show traditionally had segments featuring women sitting on the guest's lap or just wearing a bikini in a bathtub with them, much to the singer's discomfort. According to Zoppello, regarded as the band's fans' favorite girlfriend, the couple would marry at the end of the same year and intended to have children, after the fatal plane crash that killed Dinho, she never married or had children.

Death
On March 2, 1996, at 9:58 p.m., Dinho and the other four musicians from Mamonas Assassinas, after a concert in Brasília, left in a Learjet 25D prefix PT-LSD heading to Guarulhos, São Paulo. The aircraft, already close to its destination, made contact with the control tower after the pilot informed them that there were visual conditions to do so. It then made a left turn, but the correct direction to reach the airport was to the right. At around 11.16pm, the plane the group was on crashed into the Cantareira mountain range, in the north of the city of São Paulo.

The difficult access to the crash site resulted in delays in the rescue effort, which could only be carried out effectively on the morning of the following day. On arriving at the scene, all the occupants of the aircraft were pronounced dead, and Dinho's body was found decapitated. This tragic event generated intense popular commotion, leading approximately 100,000 people to take part in the funeral procession in honor of the band members.

Honors
On January 10, 1996, while still alive, he was honored with the title of "Emeritus Citizen of Dracena" because it was his mother's hometown.

Posthumous
In 2008, he was played by Fabrizio Teixeira in the special "Por Toda Minha Vida – Mamonas Assassinas" (For All My Life – Mamonas Assassinas), which competed for the Emmy of Best Arts Programming.

In 2016, he was played by Ruy Brissac in the play "O Musical Mamonas" (The Mamonas Musical). Ruy played him again in "Mamonas Assassinas – A Série" (Mamonas Assassinas – The TV Show), made in partnership with RecordTV, with a script by Carlos Lombardi and directed by Léo Miranda. He returned for the role in 2023 for the movie "Mamonas Assassinas – O Filme" (Mamonas Assassinas – The Movie).

Two streets named Alecsander Alves, his baptismal name, were created, one in Juiz de Fora and another in the Villa Barros neighborhood in Guarulhos. In 2019, a square was inaugurated in his hometown of Irecê, where the singer was immortalized with the installation of a full-body sculpture, in an act attended by his parents, Hildebrando and Celia, who witnessed performances by the Irecê Symphony Orchestra and the Mamonas cover band made up of local artists.