The Best of Elizabeth Bear

Hobnoblin Blues

Tracks: How do you define yourself?

Loki: I don’t. (laughter) Fuck, why do you people always ask me that?[1]

There’s always a secret history, stories that remain unreported, tales too ticklish to tell. No matter how many soul-and-skin-baring biographies are writ, no matter how many groupies sell their stories to The Midnight Sun.

It’s a source of intense frustration to the press that more—don’t.

Something about Loki makes people keep secrets. Not just his lovers (the ephemeral ones or the few that linger over more than breakfast). Even the interviewers do it, as if they need to hoard clandestine fragments to gloat over.

You do it, too.

But you have more to work with. You know his real name isn’t that stupid collection of nonsense syllables. And you know he doesn’t come from here.

When he fell, you fell with him.

Not for rebellion, but for love.

Monster Bones, the second album by controversial British songwriter Loki, looks to be a major breakout. The nine tracks, unified by themes of loss and catastrophe, range from “Golden Apples,” a meditation on mortality—the apples hold the secret of eternal life, but like Sleeping Beauty’s are poisoned—to the epic, Zeppelinesque crunch of “Bad Water,” while the title track—a transparent commentary on the likely eventual legacy of the Vietnam conflict—uses crisp guitar and a killer bassline to underscore the point of view of a giant-killer revisiting the resting place of the adversary that crippled him: Prone under a forked white sky / I stare up a roof of bones / Bake under a crucified sun.

For a rock-and-roll singer, Loki demonstrates an astonishing vocal range. It’s surprising to learn that he has no classical training, because the overall impression of his soaring performance is something like a Carole King with balls. With Monster Bones, Loki takes a hard look at the blues, and dumps it on its ass to take up with rock n’ roll. A brilliant departure.[2]

Loki says, laughing, “Look at this nonsense, Hob. They can’t even get their own fairy tales right.”

You pull the flimsy magazine from his hand, already folded to the important page. Loki is paying more attention to the pretty redheaded boy nuzzling his neck.

Later, on the title track of a 1983 release, Loki will revisit those lyrics, in a song that most people will assume is about cocaine addiction.

People, you will both have learned by then, will almost always assume.

The cancer, he’ll sing, in the wailing apocalyptic style that’s just a crippled echo of his true voice, speaks with a forked white tongue. The cancer croons with a forked white tongue.

He was born Martin Trevor Blandsford in Manchester, UK, in 1950, where he attended grammar and vocational schools. In 1966, he dropped out, ran off to London, and in the company of three other young men took a famously squalid two-room flat in Soho.

There was nothing to indicate that within six years, Martin Blandsford would be transformed into a rock-and-roll avatar.

He craved shock, but for years it must have seemed he was born just a little too late. His mid-seventies revelations of drug abuse, bisexuality, and financial mismanagement failed to adequately galvanize a press already inured to the excesses of performers such as Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, and the Rolling Stones.

The fulfillment of Loki’s desire to set the music establishment on its heels—or on its ear—would have to wait until 1980. When he’d do just that, in the most spectacular manner possible.[3]

Robbin Howard “Hobnoblin” Just:

7 July 1950—

Instruments: saxophone, mandolin, keyboards, rhythm guitar. Backing vocals.

A respected and steady-handed session musician, most noted for his work with Loki. Just was one of two members of the legendary 1970’s touring band to continue performing with the singer after his 1980-1981 transformation (the other was bassist Ramona Henkman). He continued to record and travel with Loki until 2004, when the androgynous rocker put himself, Just—and the entire music industry—out of a job.[4]

Loki purses his lips, sips Irish coffee, and lifts the back-folded newspaper in his left hand. He reads over the tops of his sunglasses. “Seven months ago, when Loki toured in support of Monster Bones, he and his five-man backing band shattered attendance records—and possibly a few eardrums. Ranting, charismatic, with an indefatigable stage presence, the tall black-haired rock God bestrode the stage—and the microphone stand—like a modern titan.”

But the flesh around his lips is taut. Fine furrows lead from his nose to the corners of his mouth. You wince in anticipation.

He doesn’t disappoint. The paper crumples in his hand, ink smearing under his thumb. “Titan. Titan. Wankers. Can’t even tell the difference between a giant’s son and a goddamned pansy titan. Do you believe this rubbish?”

“At least they’re not making any misinformed cracks about fire gods,” you say, eyes on your eggs.

It’s unwise to provoke him. But sometimes irresistible.

He snorts, and hunches down to the paper again. His hair falls over his eyes. He shoves it back with a gaunt hand, sniffling. He sniffles constantly.

It’s the cocaine. The gauntness is that, plus amphetamines. He takes them when he works, in heroic quantities, as if they could replace the forbidden mead of poetry.

Loki never knew when to shut up. Which is both why he’s here, and why you followed him down.

He drinks more coffee and continues reading. “But the tour for the follow-up album Barbed Hearts is little more than bloated indulgence, the raw edges of the rock and roll buried under a stage show whose self-importance might give pause to Blue Öyster Cult. Dear Mr. Loki, a message from your loyal fans: lasers and lipstick are not the markers of a brilliant career. Bah!”

He smacks the paper down on the table, splashing your tea, and finishes his whiskey-laced coffee. One of the staff is at his elbow in a moment with the pot, and—always polite—he remembers to thank her. It’s as reflexive as the thanks he offers when you pass him the silver flask kept warm inside your gaudy velvet waistcoat.

You could refuse. But that wouldn’t stop him drinking, and he’d be even worse in a rage. You pass him the whipped cream too.

At least it’s calories.

“Fuck ’em,” you say. The reek of alcohol from his coffee stings your nostrils. You pick a flake of skin beside your nail.

These bodies. There’s always something going wrong. Exile is a kind word for death sentence. Nobody likes spilling the blood of a god if they can help it.

Bad precedent.

“You should see what they say about your sax, sweetheart.” He finger-flicks the paper away. “Gods rot it, Hobnoblin. I want to go home.”

He doesn’t mean England. You don’t mean England either when you say, softly, “Yeah,” and reach over and pat his hand.

He shakes it off, though, and jerks his head side to side, sniffing. “Well, as long as we’re stuck here, maybe we can bust things up a little. Let in some damned light and air.”

It never worked on the Aesir, but you don’t say that. It won’t help either of you to remind him that he provoked the exile he mourns. Loki has never been any good at all at keeping his head down.

You’re a little too good at it. That’s one of the reasons why you love him: when the Aesir came, Loki was the one who would not be silenced, who forced them to treat with him as an equal.

For a time.

But that’s a second thing you can’t say. And the third one you don’t tell him is that, despite the coffee mug, his fingers are chill.

Tracks: Would you rather talk about the music? How much of the process is collaborative?

Loki: Oh, let’s. And—frankly—a lot! I mean, the songs are mine, but the arrangements, that’s all of us. And that’s most of what makes it work. The Hobnoblin [Robbin “Hobnoblin” Just is Loki’s saxophone player—ed.] has a great ear for layering sounds. (Loki laughs and takes a drag on his cigarette, holding the smoke while he finishes the thought.) And a good bass player, that holds the whole thing together. We hired this chick you’re gonna love. (Smirking.) Oh, it’s all collaboration. I’m pretending modesty this week. I just write the pretty words and play a little lousy guitar.[5]

He drifts on the music sometimes. The sound system in the estate in Kent is extraordinary, and sometimes you’ll walk out on the patio and find Loki in jeans and a T-shirt, arms spread wide, head lolled back, letting the music lift him like a thermal lifts a hawk.

It’s not his own stuff he plays to go there. As often as not, it’s not even rock. Beethoven; Mozart; Charlie Parker; Thelonious Monk; Bessie Smith; Big Mama Thornton; Joni Mitchell; Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

You won’t disturb him while he’s listening.

But sometimes you’ll sit at the breakfast table and watch.

Word gets around.

I knew when I arranged the interview that Martin Blandsford—Loki, to his young fans—would rather be interviewed at home. He doesn’t go out much. He’s been assaulted by feral packs of adolescent maenads one time too many, and says self-deprecatingly that it’s in the interest of everyone’s safety if he stays home with his slippers on.

Not that he was wearing slippers when I arrived. His bare knobby feet looked cold on the tile floor of his half-furnished house, and his white summer-weight pants were rolled up to show equally knobby ankles. He wore no shirt over his sinewy, hairless chest. His shaggy black hair stuck to itself in streaks of blue and goldenrod.

He’d been painting the upstairs bedroom, he explained.

To this reporter, accustomed to his commanding stage presence—the black leather and platform boots and smeared eyeliner—he seemed younger in person, slight, polite, dangerously thin. But the lack of costume bulk did make him appear even taller. He offered me a glass of wine and a cup of coffee, took one of each himself, and showed me into his den.

The actual interview did not go as smoothly.[6]

Melody Monitor: Do you categorize yourself as feminine?

Loki: Oh, no. I’m très butch. Don’t you think?[7]

The rest of the Barbed Hearts tour is a kind of hell, though you manage to tempt him sometimes with chocolate milk and yellow apples dipped in honey. Everybody in and around the band—the road manager, the guys from the record companies—assumes you are Loki’s loyal and long-suffering lover, and you are treated with equal parts pity and disdain.

They expect you to play his keeper.

So you do.

He’s worse at home, where it’s just the two of you and whatever girl or boy (or girls, or boys) he’s collected.

He doesn’t eat for days. He hates the human food, the life-or-death choice. You’re not immortal anymore, not without Iduna’s stolen apples, and you’re prey to all the needs and ills the flesh is heir to. Feed yourself, and live, and with it acknowledge that you are bound unto death in this mortal realm.

Well, that, and cocaine kills your appetite.

He stays up for four days writing songs for an album that never does get cut, because he pitches the whole lot into the woodstove one night when you’re out by the pasture, feeding perfectly unmagicked apples to the perfectly unmagical horses, four bays and duns and chestnuts and grays with a leg at each corner, whose hides do not shine like faceted jewels, like beaten gold and steel and silver.

He never rides. You think perhaps he keeps them around to make himself sad.

Before the next tour, he wants to reinvent himself.

You sit behind him and chat and hand him the comb and scissors while he cuts his hair in front of the mirror. You help him bleach it white-blond, and once he’s rinsed off the searing chemicals, the pair of you drink champagne and eat peaches and watch this month’s crop of girls splash in the pool.

You kid yourself it might keep getting better.

But by month’s end, you’ve packed for the new tour, painfully titled Ragnarock-and-Roll. It’s soon apparent that the “fresh start” has been only a moment of reprieve.

Loki has always been thin, but the drugs and anorexia whittle him to bone and wire. He suffers hallucinations and fits of cocaine paranoia. He has a houngan brought in to exorcise the drum kit, because you can’t trust those damned Norns.

Okay, that one is almost reasonable.

At his worst, he weighs one hundred and seven pounds at six foot two, and won’t wear his earplugs on stage because he feels them squirming. He keeps singing, though, even if nobody can hear him. Because what he has to say is important, even if it’s doomed to go unheard. What worries you most is what will happen if he forgets himself enough to raise his voice—because he could make people listen. He could.

If he were willing to pay the price.

He’s a dying man clutching a microphone, and it’s an ugly thing.

Melody Monitor: Seriously, your sexuality’s been an open question for years—

Loki: My sexuality is an answered question. But apparently nobody likes the answer. I am what I am. Musically, personally. I don’t like categories. I’m not going to assign myself to one.

It’s boring to repeat myself.

“Wankers,” he says, with that polite measured quietness. He drops a copy of The Rolling Stone on the floor and kicks it under the table. It skitters, pages fluttering, and fetches against the leg of your chair. You butter a scone. “Loki hasn’t got a damned thing to do with fire. That’s Surtr, for fuck’s sake. I swear they do it just to piss me off. It’s a goddamned conspiracy.”

You break the scone and lay the larger portion on Loki’s empty plate.

He sniffles and ignores it. “They called me ‘a Ziggy Stardust-influenced Elvis impersonator.’ Bunch of ignorant fuckers in the press.”

“Yeah,” you say.

He’s not even drinking the coffee anymore.

While he’s in the hospital, you clean out his stash. There’ll be Hell to pay when he gets back, and you’ve no illusions you can keep him straight for long. But he’ll be straight when they let him out, and he might still be straight long enough to yell at, if the pills and cocaine are gone.

Of course, he can get more. There are always people around who will get it for him.

But Ramona, the bass player, catches you going through the trunks and suitcases.

Silently, she helps you flush the pills.

Melody Monitor: Would you say you go out of your way to make yourself seem unusual?

Loki: D’you know about left-hander syndrome? No? Left-handed people make up around thirteen percent of the population. About the same percentage as homosexuals, give or take. And left-handed people die, depending on who you listen to, two or nine years earlier than right-handed people.

This might be because of accidents caused by bleedin’ navigating through a right-handed world.

Being different can kill you, can’t it?

Melody Monitor: Are you left-handed?

Loki: I’m ambidextrous. As in so many things.[9]

He breaks his hand when he hits you.

Actually, he was swinging at Ramona, but you step in front of it and take the punch on the side of the head, to nobody’s lingering pleasure. He’s taller than you by a good ten inches, but frail from starvation and speed, and the swing that barely turns your head lands him, flailing, on his ass, all spiky elbows and knees.

He sits there, spraddle-legged as a colt in black leather and heavy boots, his T-shirt untucked at the waist, and shifts his gaze from the hand he clutches, to your face, and back again.

Ramona steps forward. You stand your ground, the same way you stood it beside him when the Aesir handed the sentence down and the rest of the dvergar stepped away.

You wonder if he can read the memory in your face, or if he has one of his own. He doesn’t get up. He doesn’t look down.

“Hob, can you get me into a program?” he says.

In 1977, the punk zine Beat Down proclaimed of The Esoteric Adventures of Kittie Calamatie, “What the fuck is this? It sounds like Frank Zappa mating with an alley cat. Who told this bloated arena rock asshole that he should ditch the laser show and synthesizers? And what’s with the fucking mandolin? And why do I like it?”

It marked a new creative era for Loki, a regeneration of the innovative, questing spirit of the early 1970’s. The album and subsequent tour, in which he assumed the persona of a drag queen punk rocker—the eponymous Kittie Calamatie—rejuvenated interest in his work, and the album reached #5 on the UK charts and #3 in the U.S.

Loki was sober and pissed off again, and the result was beautiful music.[10]

“Oh, fuck me running,” Loki moans, head down in his hands, his hair—black again—standing in spikes between his fingers. There’s a newspaper open on the table, dented by his elbows; you have come to know it as a sign of dread warning.

“What is it this time?”

Wordlessly, he leans back and rotates the paper with a fingertip. You shuffle forward, slippers scuffing on the tile, and clutch your bathrobe closed over your chest. There’s a photo from a recent gig on page five. You’re not in it, but Ramona and Loki are leaned together, jamming, guitar and bass necks bobbing in time. “It’s a rave,” you say, scanning the review.

“Look at my face.”

You stare; it looks like Loki. Both the photo and the man sitting in front of you, idly turning his orange juice glass around inside its ring of condensate.

“I’m not getting any younger,” he says, when you blink at him stupidly.

“Oh,” you say, and sit down in the other chair. “Right. Happy birthday.”

He tosses the wing of black hair out of his eyes. He’s wearing a shaggy long-fronted punk cut, streaked purple and indigo, these days. It changes without notice, like the music on the stereo.

“It’s not working,” he says.

“Of course it’s not working.” You pour coffee from the thermal carafe, add cream, two lumps of sugar with the tongs. So civilized these days. There’s only his cereal spoon on the table, so you swipe it and stir. “What did you expect?”

“I thought I could make them understand,” he says. “But it’s all I can do to keep their attention.”

“Some of it gets through. Subliminally.” The coffee is delicious, hot enough that for a moment you forget the cold of the world. You pour a second cup. “Change takes time.”

Fretfully, he picks the skin at the back of his hand. It snaps down, taut, but you know what he’s imagining. “I haven’t got time.”

You don’t answer.

“What if I showed them?” he says, conversationally, ten minutes later.

It’s a tone you know not to trust. “Showed them what?”

He shrugs. “How silly the categories are. I got Thor into a wig and dress. Surely I can inject a little chaos into a complacent, self-consumptive media culture. I mean, Reagan’s president-elect. Iron Maggie… don’t even get me started on her. It’s like the counterculture never happened. So… what if I turned into a girl?”

You’re trained, by now. You don’t let him see you choke on the scalding coffee. “It’s not like turning yourself into a mare by magic, Jotunsson.”

He tweaks skin between nails again. “It’s only meat. What’s the difference? It’s just meat. It’s dying anyway.”

By the last days of 1980, John Bonham and Keith Moon are dead, Mick Jagger is divorced, David Bowie is sober, and Loki has finally pulled off a stunt that defies comparison.

Loki: You wankers—and when I say you wankers, I mean the press, Bob—never let go of anything. You take it all out of context. When I started reassignment, you should have seen reporters trying to come up with coded ways to ask me if I’d had my pizzle cut off yet.

It’s all a fucking hype machine. You say something like, rock and roll, it’s the devil’s music, it’s concerned with subversion and revolution and kicking back at authority, and the headline the next day is “Loki Declares Self Lucifer!”

Badger: Well, that’ll certainly be my headline.

Smoke wreathes her face as she studies me. I can see the moment when she decides it’s funny after all, and gives a weak laugh.

Loki: Don’t be silly, I hate fire. Ask me about the drugs, why don’t you?

Badger: What about the drugs?

Loki: Don’t ever fucking get started. And if you are started, stop right now. I’m not a role model, and you don’t want to be like me.

Badger: Like you? Famous, talented, respected? Or like you, a freak?

Loki: Oh, the freak part is fine. That’s a scream. If anybody gets anything from my life, I hope it’s that the real freaks are the ones who try to program and condition everybody to conform to a conqueror’s culture.

But I’d rather nobody emulated the drug abuse. You should see the films from my last nasal endoscopy. Not pretty.

Of course, the way it works is people want to idolize rock stars, pretend these stage personas are gods. They want to make rock star mistakes, but they’re so busy pretending we’re immortal and special that they don’t want to learn from those mistakes. Live big, die gagging on their own vomit.

All these lovely illustrations of perfectly asinine behavior, and people want to be just like them. Same thing you people have always done with gods.

Badger: You people?

Loki: I’m an atheist. And you know, I could make people listen. But it’d be the last thing they ever heard.[11]

In 1980, when Loki revealed his plans to become a woman, the announcement was greeted by a jaded media with first derision and then disbelief [needs cite(s)]. While the singer had long been open about his bisexuality, his confession that he had entered treatment for Gender Identity Disorder and decided to undergo sex reassignment surgery was treated as a publicity stunt.

In 1983, Badger published a nude photo layout of Loki, post-op, provoking a media frenzy.[12]

Loki walks around where you can see her, catches your eye with her upraised hands. “What are you doing, Hob?” she signs.

Your fingers lift from the keyboard. She watches intently. “Updating your Clikipedia entry.”

“Packing it with lies, I hope.”

“Do you want me to take out the bit where it says you’re controversial in the trans community for refusal to politicize your sexuality?”

“Is that code for I fuck people who aren’t transfolk?”

“I guess.”

She sighs, swings the opposite chair around, throws a leg over it and plunks down. She straddles the back and leans forward on crossed arms. A moment later, she leans back. Her hands work jaggedly. “Even when they learn to listen,” she says, “they still want to force you to say what they think you should be saying. Everybody wants the power of mind control. I just wanted to make them stop and think.”

She stops talking. You let her sit motionless until she shakes herself and finishes, “Besides, I fuck transfolk too.”

“Sweetie,” you tell her (you never called her sweetie when she was a man), “you fuck anybody you think is sexy.”

She grins, runs her tongue along her upper lip, and bats her eyelashes. “And what the hell is wrong with that?”

“Here,” you sign, and wave her over. “You’ll like this bit.”

Since her retirement from music, Loki remains a controversial and public figure. Her refusal to conform to political or social ideology has been described as anarchistic by some; however, the maverick ideology has been embraced by youth culture, some of whom describe her as a messiah.[13]

“Fuck, Hobnoblin, you wanker,” she says. “Take out that word, messiah. And this bit in the quotes, “Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so you’ll hear the other half.” That’s me misquoting John Lennon misquoting Kahlil Gibran. Take that out.”

“Consider it done. You know you’re not supposed to edit your own entry.”

She laughs and kisses you on the head. “You’re editing it, not me. I like this bit though—‘The real freaks are the ones who try to program and condition everybody to conform to a conqueror’s culture.’ Did I say that?”

“In 1982.”

The stars crack in the cold.

The only messenger is you.

Ride on

Killing horses.[14]

Groovecutter: How would you categorize what you do?

Loki: I leave that to the critics. They have time.[15]

Melody Monitor: You must get asked about your surgery a great deal, and what influenced your decision. Before your gender reassignment, you were very open about your relationships—

Loki: Relationships. There’s a juiceless euphemism.

Melody Monitor: How has your gender reassignment changed things?

Loki: [inaudible]

Melody Monitor: Could you repeat that?

Loki: I said, should it have?

The media still depresses her. The mortal world is both too subjective and not fluid enough. She doesn’t read the papers anymore, or the biographies, or watch the tell-all exposés. She’s aging. You both are.

The exile is a death sentence, too.

It’s not as if anything mere humans could devise would shock her, who knew the treachery of the Aesir overlords. But thirty-odd years of this nonsense isn’t enough to make either of you used to it, or resigned.

People, it seems, still assume you’re fucking her. And some people still don’t approve.

She paces your hospital room, fuming, hands balled in the small of her back. You’re fine, you assure her. Loosened teeth, a cracked cheekbone, a couple of busted ribs. A few nasty names can’t hurt you now, and the MPA are treating it as a hate crime. They take those seriously.

And you’re alive. Mostly unbroken.

It could have been worse.

It doesn’t seem to be a good time to remind her that she once hit you herself, when she was he, and you and Ramona flushed his cocaine.

“Don’t hold back,” you tell her, when her silence grates too harshly. The IV pinches in the back of your hand. The tape itches. “Tell us how you really feel.”

She checks and turns to you, and her hands fall down by her sides. “I could. What if I did? What if I made them listen?”

“Loki, you’re mortal now too. And so am I.”

“I would miss the music,” she admits. But shakes her head and continues, dark eyes narrowing under the black fringe of her bangs. “If you tell me not to, I won’t do it.”

As the world now knows, the purported Martin Trevor Blandsford was revealed on 24 February 2004 to be a supernatural being, bearing a message of peace and open-mindedness that had gone too long unheard. [disputed] Through the divine auspices of the heavenly messenger Loki, it was demonstrated unequivocally that “There are none so deaf as will not hear.” [disputed; cite needed][16]

The Patuck Reader: What do you think about the furor surrounding your last concert? What some are calling, in fact, The Last Concert.

Loki: That’s melodrama. There are babies born every day, and thousands of years of musical history for them to grow into. I certainly haven’t stopped composing, and I don’t imagine anybody else has. Beethoven can always serve as a good example.

The Patuck Reader: You were jailed, there are death threats…

Loki: Let ’em come.

The Patuck Reader: You’ve been called a visionary, or accused of suffering a messiah complex. You’re often assigned credit or blame for social changes in the last thirty years. For example, the advancing debate over what people are calling nontraditional marriage rights—domestic partnership regardless of gender or number of partners. Do you deserve any of it?

Loki: Don’t be ridiculous. There’s nothing visionary about anything I’ve said. Whatever you’ve done, you’ve done for yourselves. All I did was show you how to stop listening to the program and think. All I did was show people how to stop listening to the lies.

(She laughs.) If I were a messiah, I would be upset that more people don’t agree with me.[17]

The last album is released early in 2004. The Let Silence Ring tour kicks off the same day, with a worldwide live-televised gig from Madison Square Garden.

The encore is “Ride On.” No great surprise there: it’s the only reason it wouldn’t have been in the regular set. You feel bad for Ramona; she doesn’t deserve what’s coming.

But as you walk back out to re-take your places, you pick your earplugs out and flick them into the darkness at the side of the stage.

For luck.

Once upon a time, Loki could sing gold from a dwarf, love from a goddess, troth from a giantess. He bargained kidnapped goddesses away from giant captors and blood-brotherhood from the All-Father. She talked Thor into a dress, and nearly into a marriage.

She’s never used the full strength of her voice before mortals before. When she does, it reaches every corner of the world, a high windblown cry of truth and chaos.

It’s the last sound any of us hear.