by Paul Sussman
Neither before nor since have I ever made love as often, as vigorously and with such wild abandon as I did during my brief sojourn with The Executioners. Those were crazy, carefree days. Anything went, nothing was taboo. I tried positions that made the Karma Sutra look like a Catholic training manual, and combinations that I wouldn’t have dreamed possible had I not experienced them myself at first hand. Up to that point I’d been a strictly one-on-one type of lover. Now, however, I had three-in-a-bed sex, four-in-a-bed, five, six, so many I lost count and we had to spill out of the bed and on to the floor as well. I fucked Angie, and Carrie, and Anita, and Hermione, and Betty, and Mary, and Running Wolf (whose real name was Amanda but who was going through a Red Indian period at the time) and Sadie and Jan – and that was just in a single day. I had sex in parks, sex on trains, sex in swimming pools and, once, sex in Westminster Abbey. I even had a go at kissing with another man, although I didn’t do it for long because he’d been drinking sweet sherry and I found the taste objectionable.
And I wasn’t the only one to so indulge himself. Our King’s Road flat seemed to be in the throes of a near-permanent orgy. Parties invariably culminated with everybody having sex with everybody else, and usually started that way too, whilst Otis and Libby seemed to do little else besides playing their instruments and bonking, often both at the same time. Even Baz got his end away, which, considering his elephantine girth and the multiple sweaty chins that spilled down over the neck of his soiled T-shirt, was a testament to the overwhelming sexual allure of playing in a band.
The one exception to this near-universal promiscuousness was poor old Keith. Although he talked about them at inordinate length, and never ceased to dole out advice as to what turned them on, Keith wasn’t very good with women. He was, in fact, disastrous with them. At a time when everyone else was having sex, everywhere, all the time, Keith achieved the near impossible and remained celibate.
This wasn’t, admittedly, for want of trying. Whenever we had a party or played a gig Keith went to enormous trouble to dress himself up and engage any attendant females in pithy conversation. Considering the number of parties we had, indeed, and the number of gigs we played, the law of averages alone should have assured him at least some small measure of success.
It was, however, not to be. Women rejected Keith in the same way as human bodies sometimes reject foreign organs (i.e. swiftly and violently). His dark sunglasses, blossoming sideburns, appalling fashion sense and dandelion Afro inspired a sort of instinctive vomit reflex in members of the opposite sex.
‘Check out that bird over there, man,’ he’d say, nodding towards some pouting lovely on the far side of the room. ‘She’s been giving me the eye all night. Probably recognizes me.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Oh yeh. It’s like that in music. Your face gets around. Stay here, man. I’ve got business in the love dimension.’
And off he’d trot, returning five minutes later with his sunglasses all skew-whiff, having been the recipient of a short, sharp slap around the face.
‘Obviously looking for someone a little less successful,’ he’d mutter. ‘There’s no accounting for taste.’
To his credit, Keith never let on that he was in the slightest bit perturbed by these setbacks. The way he talked, indeed, one would have thought he was the most highly sexed man in Britain. Not a day went by without him regaling us with tales of the previous night’s frolics, this despite the fact we all knew the previous night he’d gone up to his Lilo early with a cup of Horlicks and a copy of Record Mirror.
Only once did the façade drop. We were lying, just the two of us, flat on our backs in the middle of Hyde Park, smoking dope, when he suddenly burst into tears.
‘I’m a fucking failure, man,’ he wailed. ‘A big-time loser.’
‘No, you’re not,’ I consoled.
‘I fucking am, man. Compared to me, the worst loser in the world is like a fucking glowing success.’
‘Come on, Keith. It’s not that bad. Have another toke.’
‘Everything I touch turns to shit. I’ve got failure written all over me.’
‘No, you haven’t, Keith.’
‘Yes, I have!’ he screamed, scrabbling to his feet. ‘Look at me. Look at me and tell me I haven’t got failure written all over me, from head to fucking foot.’
I looked, and was forced to concede there was some truth in what he said. I kept it to myself, however, and instead did my best to ring a more positive note.
‘You look cool, Keith. Everyone thinks you look cool. You’re our role model.’
‘Yeh?’ he sniffed.
‘You’re just ahead of your time, that’s all. One day people will see you for the innovator you really are.’
‘I guess you’re right,’ he said, wiping his eyes and puffing up his Afro. ‘I guess pain’s like the price you pay for being at the cutting edge. It’s like that Hendrix song . . .’
Whereupon he launched into an extended homily on why The Jimi Hendrix Experience could never be the same now that bassist Noel Redding had quit to form Fat Mattress, by the end of which his earlier outburst had been quite forgotten.
‘I tell you, man,’ he droned. ‘There’s this bird who waits every day at the bus stop outside the shop, and I just know she’s eyeing me up. It’s the music connection. They can’t resist it. I might just do her a favour and ask her out.’
The only thing I enjoyed doing more during that period than having sex, although only just, was making music. Surprising, perhaps, given that I’d never before displayed a particularly melodious bent. (Emily always used to tease me about my woeful inability to sing in tune.) During my two years with The Executioners, however, I discovered, to no one’s surprise more than my own, that I actually wasn’t that bad a musician. In fact, all things considered, I was rather a good one. It naturally took a few weeks to become fully conversant with the group’s playlist; but once I’d found my feet, or rather my fingers, I got on splendidly.
None of our tunes was, admittedly, especially taxing – although the chorus of ‘Vermicelli Minefield’, all minor 7ths and sustained major 4ths, was a bit of a bugger – and once you’d got to grips with the basic melody there was plenty of room for improvisation and embellishment. Long instrumental solos were a hallmark of the band and, depending on where we were playing and how many drugs we’d done at the time, we could generally be relied upon to string out a reasonably simple tune into something resembling a Beethoven symphony. Our efforts were remarkably well-received, although things did sometimes get out of hand, such as the time at a club in Deptford when I unleashed an hour-long Hammond organ solo, by the end of which the entire audience had either left, fallen asleep or, in one unfortunate case, taken an overdose.
As well as playing keyboards I also supplied backing vocals on a number of tracks, proving particularly adept at the Shoo-be-doo-be-doo-wahs on ‘Peace Explosion’ and the Tra-na-na-na-nooos on ‘Woman, Oh Woman’. I did the scream on ‘Psychedelic Psychopath’, read the Shakespeare soliloquy on ‘Quintessence of Dust’ and, most innovative of all, played the three-minute cowbell solo on ‘Phantasmagoria Elixus No. 3’. There was some argument as to whether it should be me or Big Baz who did the latter, but seeing as it was I who had suggested the cowbell in the first place the honours eventually fell my way. When the song was subsequently released as a single in the mid-Seventies, long after I’d done for Keith and disappeared into another world, the cowbell was removed, in my opinion much to the detriment of the number as a whole.
We worked hard at our music, and days when we didn’t rehearse (in my bedroom, naturally) for at least three hours were rare. Then, of course, we had gigs most nights, which involved loading all our equipment into the back of Otis’s transit van, unloading it again at the other end, playing two or three sets, reloading the van, re-unloading it back at the King’s Road, lugging everything upstairs into the flat (where it was stored in my bedroom), and then sitting down for a lengthy debrief on the night’s
performance (‘You screwed up the fucking arpeggio on “Love Typhoon”, Raph!’ Linus would storm. ‘It fucked the whole song!’) If my hippy life was one of unabashed indulgence, it was also surprisingly hard work.
Not that we minded, however, for in the final analysis the hard work worked. The more we rehearsed and gigged the better we got, and the better we got the more fun we had. All bands, of course, have a high opinion of themselves, but in our case the confidence was not misplaced. We were good. Very good. And people eventually began to notice.
It didn’t happen overnight. The band had been on the circuit for three years before I joined them, with little evident success, and my arrival heralded no immediate upturn in their fortunes. As the months went by, however, and 1969 slipped into 1970, and then 1970 into 1971, we gradually found ourselves getting offered bigger gigs, at better venues, for more money. We started doing tours around the country (and, once, to Luxembourg); began to get reviews in the music press; headlined on one of the side-stages at the Isle of Wight Festival (albeit the smallest one); and even supported Captain Beefheart when he played the Finsbury Astoria.
Shady-looking men in suits began approaching us and asking if we were looking for a manager (we turned them down). Linus got to do some session work for Marianne Faithfull, and I very nearly played on a Donovan album, although in the end he settled for someone else, which was a relief because I didn’t much like his music. There was even talk that we might play at Woodstock, although it all came to nothing.
The band’s reputation grew steadily throughout 1971 until, eventually, in the December of that year, to a great fanfare in the music papers, The Executioners were signed, for a record-breaking sum, to Decca, going on to release their first platinum-selling album, Hymns to the Cosmic Walrus, the following spring.
By that point, however, I was no longer with them, my place at piano being taken by one Dave Gittens, he being the very Dave whose original departure from the group had been the reason I joined them in the first place.
It was, you see, in the October of 1971, two months before the band’s triumphal signing, that I murdered Keith, an event precipitating my departure into an altogether less glamorous life. Not, I should add, that I harbour any regrets. At 71 I was far too old for all that rock-stardom stuff.
Keith’s murder was, I freely admit, a tragedy. Not so much because it happened, but rather because it did so at a time when, after years of relentless underachievement, things were finally beginning to look up for him.
The improvement in Keith’s fortunes happened at much the same time as, and in large part because of, the improvement in the fortunes of The Executioners. He never actually acknowledged the connection, and we never made a thing of it, but the fact was that our success rubbed off on him, and the better things got for us, the better they did for Keith too.
It started with the bootlegs. Keith had, over the years, built up a sizeable collection of recordings of the band and, as our reputation grew, he began flogging copies of these to anyone who was interested. Word soon got around that if you wanted anything by The Executioners – and these, remember, were the days before the band had actually cut its first record – Keith Cream was the man to go to, and before long he was doing, if not a roaring trade, at least a steady one from behind his plywood counter in the Record Roundabout, paying the rest of us a nominal, and rather paltry, commission on each sale.
‘What’s important here, guys,’ he’d explain, ‘is not the financial angle, but what I’m doing for your image. I’m spreading the word. If you think of yourselves as Jesus, then I’m, like, your ten disciples.’
With more and more people coming into the Record Roundabout to buy bootlegs, Keith’s other records began to sell too. Albums that had lain untouched for years, their sleeves yellowed with age, now, at last, started to find buyers. Richie Havens went, as did The Turtles, and Big Brother and The Holding Company, pre-Joplin, live in Seattle. He flogged all his Pete Seegers, and most of his Ramblin’ Jack Elliotts, and had to order in more Grateful Dead. He even found a buyer for his entire Tiny Tim collection, which, as Keith himself admitted, ‘was something I expected to do when, like, pigs began to fly’.
Girls stopped being quite so dismissive of Keith when he tried to chat them up at gigs, aware that he was a friend of the band. Music-industry executives no longer told him to fuck off when he sidled up at parties. He even got his photo in Music Echo, albeit with a caption announcing he was Aretha Franklin.
Most dramatic and life-changing of all, Keith found a girlfriend.
Marcie was, admittedly, not the most prepossessing of women. She wore thick bubble spectacles, sported even more chins than Baz, and was the only person I’ve ever met with legs hairier than Keith’s. She was also extremely aggressive, tending to lash out violently with her fists and feet at anybody with whom she disagreed, which, so far as I could ascertain, was everybody.
None of that, however, seemed to matter to Keith, who was utterly devoted to Marcie. And she, in turn, was utterly devoted to him. So devoted were they, indeed, the one to the other, that they had little time for anyone else, so that from the moment they met – at one of our gigs in the Crawdaddy Club – communication between Keith and the rest of us dwindled to next to nothing. Which was just as well, because Marcie didn’t like him talking to other people.
Such, pretty much, was the state of affairs that chilly October night of 1971.
Keith was out with Marcie for the evening, as he was most evenings now, and since for the first time in months we didn’t have a gig, the rest of us were all crashed out in my room, listening to records and smoking dope. As well as the band, there were ten or eleven other people present, including a bald American poet who kept standing up and reciting his work, which was mostly about dying children and, probably on account of the dope, made us all laugh uproariously.
We’d been thinking of going out to a club, to which end I was wearing my hippest red sequinned trousers and cheesecloth shirt. As the evening wore on, however, and we got more and more stoned, the idea of moving became ever less appealing and was eventually abandoned altogether. Instead we just sprawled around the room, working our way through a large wedge of Moroccan hash and holding a long and at times heated discussion about whether the universe was simply a minute particle in the body of some superior being, which personally I didn’t think it was.
Around midnight, by which point The American Poet had, thank God, passed out in the living room, everyone decided to drop some acid. I, however, wasn’t in the mood, and so whilst the others popped their tabs, I went upstairs to get some fresh air.
There was a large skylight in Keith’s bedroom through which one could climb out on to the roof, and after downing a glass of water I duly clambered through this, ripping my lovely cheesecloth shirt on the way out. I was extremely stoned by this point, and when I saw the pumpkin at first thought I was having some sort of hallucination. It was only when I’d crawled over to it, and slapped it with my hand, and laid my cheek against its rindy orange skin, that I realized it was for real.
‘A pumpkin,’ I thought to myself. ‘A pumpkin on the roof. Very strange.’
It was wedged in the angle between the slope of the roof and the brick parapet running along its foot. I presumed Keith had put it there, although for what purpose I had no idea. Probably something to do with Halloween, which was only a couple of weeks away. I staggered to my feet, swaying dangerously against the parapet, and, leaning down, tried to pick the giant vegetable up. It was extremely heavy, and it took all my strength to heave it up on to the top of the wall. So huge was its girth I could barely circle my arms around it.
‘That is one motherfucker of a pumpkin,’ I gasped to myself. ‘Jesus.’
I rested for a moment to get my breath back, peering down at the cars passing along the King’s Road 40 feet below, and then grasped the pumpkin once again, thinking it might be quite good fun to get it inside the flat and roll it down the stairs. As I was tensing to lift it,
however, I was distracted by the sound of voices down below. It was Keith and Marcie, and they appeared to be arguing. Intrigued, I released my grip on the pumpkin and looked down.
‘I’m not,’ whined Keith. ‘I respect you too much!’
‘You are!’ screamed Marcie. ‘You are!’
‘No, no, you got me all wrong.’
‘Admit it!’
‘There’s nothing to . . . Ow! That hurts!’
‘You’re having an affair! I know you’re having an affair!’
‘No way, babe. Like, no fucking way. Please, not my hair!’
‘Who is she? Tell me! Tell me or I’ll rip your head off!’
There was a loud thud and, leaning dangerously far out, I saw, by the light of a nearby streetlamp, that Marcie had grabbed a handful of Keith’s hair and was repeatedly banging his head against our front door. His sunglasses had fallen off, and he had his arms over his face to ward off her blows.
‘It’s you I dig!’ he kept shouting. ‘You’re my girl!’
‘Tell me!’ screamed Marcie. ‘It’s Libby, isn’t it! Oh God, I want to die!’
The banging continued for some while until, suddenly, in a manner no less violent than that she had recently been employing to berate her lover, Marcie seized his frightened face, pulled it towards her and jammed her mouth on his. Keith responded, throwing his arms about her ample waist and hugging her to him, Marcie treading on his sunglasses in the process. I could hear the slurp of their kisses, and Keith’s muffled refrain of:
‘I dig you too much to shag around, Marcie. I, like, dig you too much, babe.’
I watched them for some while, fascinated, as naturalists are by mating elephants or rare breeds of shrimp, wondering what it felt like to kiss Marcie, and whether she was as aggressive in bed as she was out of it; and then, rather repelled by the thought, turned my attention back to the pumpkin, hugging it to my chest, bending my knees and hoisting it off the parapet.