Rock On (29 page)

Hobnoblin Blues

Elizabeth Bear

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
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.”