Suzi Quatro
She could have ended up a classical pianist, but then one day she picked up a bass guitar, and found herself on the road that would lead to her becoming a glam-rock icon. Suzi talks about this and much more in the Classic Rock Interview.
She could have ended up a classical pianist, but then one day Suzi picked up a bass guitar, and found herself on the road that would lead to her becoming a glam-rock icon. Along the way she’s appeared in a smash TV show, been a published poet, a DJ, a West End star and much more…
Arriving into an early-70s landscape of clearly defined gender roles, where rocking was the exclusive preserve of the male of the species (all then caked in catastrophic glam-rock slap), and music’s pop-confined women were invariably reduced to simpering Stepford encouragements while trussed up in pinafore dresses of quite astonishing ugliness, Suzi Quatro was impossible to ignore. Bursting on to the UK scene, fresh from an invaluable apprenticeship on the Detroit garage circuit, Suzi dyed her hair pink and went on tour with Slade.
Having hooked up with Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman, glam’s premier tunesmiths, she made her Top Of The Pops debut in ’73 poured into a figure-hugging leather catsuit that stopped clocks. Her single Can The Can immediately rocketed to No.1 in the UK (similar chart-topping success followed across mainland Europe, and even in Australia, where Suzi’s star soared to unprecedented heights), and a run of perfect hits followed that set her legend in stone.
Today’s Suzi – a published poet, novelist, star of West End musicals, TV chat show sofas, Happy Days, Radio 2’s Rockin’ With Suzi Q and Wake Up Little Suzi, touring solo rock star (with new album No Control), and the Q fronting Q.S.P. (her glam supergroup with the Sweet’s Andy Scott and Slade’s Don Powell) – lives in an Elizabethan manor house in Essex. As we prepare to settle down for our chinwag, Suzi takes me on a detour into her Ray-Ban room, which is exactly what you’d expect: a room full of racked vintage sunglasses. Hundreds of them… And it’s very probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
Growing up in the Quatro family, did you have to be an extrovert to get noticed. I didn’t want to be just another child. I had to find a place to be. I had to separate myself somehow. And I found I could hold an audience at a very young age. Because we were a big musical family, we used to do family shows, and when I was seven or eight years old I noticed that whenever I did, whatever I was doing, I held them. So I developed it. It wasn’t a case of being an egotist, it was more a case of just going: “Oh, I can do this.”
Your father was a semi-pro musician who also worked at General Motors. There were four children in the house; from time to time foster brothers and sisters came in and out of your life. Presumably solitude became something you craved? Oh God, yeah. You were never alone, even in the bathroom – my sister could pick the lock, and she often did. So you’re in there thinking: “I have my space.” You don’t. It’s fun in a way: crazy, loud, opinionated, argumentative and warm. But this [indicates her surroundings] says it all, doesn’t it? Here I am in this Elizabethan manor house, most of the time by myself. My husband [Suzi married German concert promoter Rainer Haas in 1993] and I live in two countries a lot of the time, so I’m often here on my own with my peace and my space, and I love it.
When you took up bass playing it was considered a very male-dominated discipline, so for you to adopt the instrument was… Unusual, weird. I’d already played drums,
I could read and write for percussion and classical piano. But when the band started I picked the bass up and, like seeing Elvis on Ed Sullivan, it was an epiphany. When I put it down I went: “Yeah…” It was just correct. You can see by the way I play and hold it that it’s just part of me.
How was it attending Catholic school, and did your interest in rock’n’roll immediately set you at odds with authority figures? My mother took me out of Catholic school after the first year because I was driving the nuns crazy, but then she made me go to the Catholic afterschool once a week for all the training, so that I was raised Catholic. I can’t ever remember rock’n’roll being at odds with my beliefs. It’s my profession, it’s what I do, it’s rock’n’roll and it’s natural.
Rock’n’roll seemed synonymous with rebellion back then, so an interest in the music might well have cast you in the role of a rebel, however unintentionally. When it began in the fifties it was very tribal, very sort of ‘we have our own music now’, but by the seventies, when I started to have my success, the most rebellious thing about me was that I was female.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in sixties Detroit, Berry Gordy was sending The Supremes to charm school, teaching them deportment. I didn’t go to charm school [laughs].
But women in music were expected to smooth off their rough edges, to be demure. Did the Shangri-Las offer a refreshing glimpse of the shape of things to come? They were edgy. I used to dance on a TV show when I was twelve and thirteen in Detroit, part of the regular audience. We’d see all the acts up close. And I remember The Shangri-Las impressing me. I thought [Shangri-Las lead vocalist] Mary
Weiss had a lot of balls, with the leather waistcoat, and I thought: “Yeah, there’s something happening here.” As you’re coming through, you get your bits and pieces from a lot of people. Everybody does. As an artist you soak things up.
The Pleasure Seekers, started by your elder sister Patti after seeing The Beatles, was soon to include two more Quatro sisters: Arlene, and you – Suzi Soul – singing and playing bass. It was a promising start, contracted to Mercury. So how was life in a mini-dress and wig in the mid-sixties? The mini-dress thing, that was the sixties. I looked quite cute in it. But mainly we had to dress in that era’s style because we weren’t successful. At recording, anyway. We were a successful working act, and club owners always wanted us to dress like women. There were some cute outfits, but I always felt more comfortable in T-shirt and blue jeans.
The Pleasure Seekers split in ’69 and transformed into Cradle. It was a big, pivotal moment in my life. From age fourteen, 1964 to ’68, I was the main focal point of the Pleasure Seekers, I sang 98.9 per cent of the songs. About two years after we began, my eldest sister’s first husband, who was managing us, said: “We need to put more lights on Suzi.” Everybody went quiet – and I never asked for this conversation, I was just up there doing my job. He said: “She is the focal point.”
Then in Cradle, my brother [Michael Quatro, an independent entertainment executive and songwriter with 11 albums to his name] put us on at these big rock’n’roll festivals. Now we were a show band, so we went on dressed in our club outfits and we died. People were going: “What?” because we didn’t fit. Then I saw this other girl band go on after us in T-shirts and blue jeans, barefoot and jamming, and I went: “Wow, I like that.”
So we went home, had a big band meeting, and everybody agreed that it was time to change direction. Which I agreed to. The drummer decided she wanted to write her own songs, I agreed with that. Let’s get a bit heavier, and let’s bring Nancy into the group, my little sister, to be singer. Nancy was of this generation coming up, three years younger than me, and it was decided I’d better step back from the main limelight, which I was happy to do. So she started to sing, it became a different band, and I concentrated on my bass guitar for eighteen months, I only sang a few songs a night. And it was invaluable. I became really good on my instrument. So when Mickie Most discovered me [producer Most signed Suzi to his RAK Records label in 1970] in that band – he picked me out from doing two songs a night – I was able to marry the performer, the upfront person, with the bass. So now you’ve got Suzi Quatro.
“I didn’t want to be just another child. I had to find a place to be. I had to separate myself. And I found
I could hold an audience at a very young age.”
Mickie Most was a confirmed hit-maker, and while he saw enormous potential in you as an artist, he didn’t really know what to do with you at first. Ultimately, isn’t it fair to say that
he just allowed you to be an ever-so-slightly exaggerated version of yourself ? The image always was me. I found my image more in Cradle, because it was tie-dye T-shirts and blue jeans and really more tomboy. When I was in London and I wasn’t having success right away, I’d sometimes question what I was doing. And I would always come to the same conclusion: ‘Mickie saw me in that band and saw something, and if I can’t make it just like me, I don’t want to make it at all.’ So I stuck to me. Mickie never moulded me, he let me develop. There was no blueprint, no Suzi Quatro prototype. I was the prototype, and a lot of people came after me. Joan Jett took a lot of stuff from me. She’d be the first to tell you. And why not? She saw me, like I did Elvis, and said: “Oh my God, I can do that.” As indeed she could. But I had to be my own blueprint, and that’s lonely and scary. Doing something brand new, you have to really believe in yourself or you can lose yourself. But I didn’t, I stuck to it, no matter how hard it was.
How did you come to work with Chinn and Chapman (an established hit machine Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman had already taken New World, the Sweet and Mud into the UK Top 10)? Before I finally formed the band in late 1972, I said to Mickie: “I’m going crazy here. We’re recording, using session players, and I’m writing, but I gotta gig. I’ve been doing it my whole life.” So I got a band and started doing all my own songs. I was writing all the time, I’m a very prolific songwriter. But then Mickie admitted he didn’t know how to get me on record. Then, after we supported Slade on tour, he said: “Why don’t we get Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn along to a show and see if they can write you a hit single?’ So they came, Mike saw a rock chick boogie-ing, wrote Can The Can and pushed the bass right up. He saw me live and was able to translate that into a hit record, which Mickie Most couldn’t.
“Doing something brand new, you have to really
believe in yourself or you can lose yourself.”
When putting the backing band together, was creating a visual image of yourself surrounded by a gang of physically robust men, but with you clearly in a dominant role, a deliberate thing? Absolutely. Start as you mean to go on.
It was an interesting dynamic, casting you as the gang leader, holding dominion over these big, beefy guys, and it gave
Chinn and Chapman a scenario to work with; they weren’t just writing for Suzi Quatro the artist, they were writing for Suzi Quatro the character. That’s exactly what they did. And everything from there on is history. Once Can The Can was done, we had everything: the sound, the look, it all made sense.
And that sassy Suzi Q character endured as the central protagonist of 48 Crash, Daytona Demon and Devil Gate Drive. It was timeless, yet very reminiscent of the fifties. If you look at me as an artist, although I started having hits in the glam period, I’ve never been glam-sounding, I’ve always been rock’n’roll, my love was for Elvis, and my love of rock stems from that. There are some weird things along the way, but that’s who I am.”
Elvis 1968, Gene Vincent, but beyond such tributes you must have been aware of the effect that a leather catsuit would have on sweaty-palmed adolescent males. I never realised until recently, because now I come into contact with the people who had me on their wall, and they always say the same thing: “You were on my wall.” Thank you. “Do you know…?” Thank you [laughs]. They all do it. Do they really think I want to hear the details? But if you go a step further, I guess they think, well, you were there.
In their mind, at least. You gotta laugh. [British actor] Berwick Kaler once said to me: “Suzi, you helped me through puberty.” “Is that a compliment?” “Yes.” “And the music?” “Oh yeah, that too.”
Looking back on the Mickie Most/Chinnichap/ RAK set-up, it echoed the Motown hit factory ethic of everybody mucking in and helping out on everybody else’s sessions. I believe you were on Cozy Powell’s Dance With The Devil? I was. Before Can The Can, Mickie used to give us sessions to help us out. I was on New World sessions, Donovan’s Cosmic Wheels album, I was the female voice on Emma by Hot Chocolate. I happened to walk into the studio while they were recording, and Mickie said: “Suzi, get on the mic… Okay, sing this line…” Mickie was a big fan of the Motown that Berry Gordy created, including the family atmosphere, and it was very much like that.
You’d answer the phones sometimes, I used to go and babysit the publicist’s kids…
Was your first wedding, to your then guitarist Len Tuckey, a grand showbusiness event, and was getting married in ’76 emblematic of an intention to settle down, to take some time out and maybe raise a family? It wasn’t a big event. I’d been with my first husband since ’72. We got together on the Slade tour. It was pretty immediate. I proposed to him on the Slade tour. But Mickie [Most] didn’t want me to get married right away, he wanted me to live together first to make sure. He was very much a father figure to me. We got married in ’76. We had it at the house we lived in, so it was quite a small affair. And it was never a case of settling down. It was just a case of being married. I’m a married girl at heart. Twenty years with him, and twenty-five with my husband now [Rainer Haas], so I’ve only had one year single in my entire adult life.
And both times it was you who proposed. Yes [laughs]. I’m that kind of person. If I’m in love and I want it, I just say: “Marry me.” And they both said okay.
“Although I started having hits in the glam period, I’ve never been glam-sounding, I’ve always been rock’n’roll.”
And then, as Leather Tuscadero, you’re suddenly co-starring in Happy Days, arguably the biggest TV show on the planet at the time. You were even offered your own spin-off series, which you ultimately turned down. Do you ever wonder: “What if…?” No. I would have liked to have done more Happy Days, but the decision was made without me knowing about it. Stumblin’ In was big in the charts, and I was with Mike Chapman and Nicky Chinn’s Dreamland Records at that point, and Nicky thought that playing a character so close to my own personality was interfering with the public’s perception of me. I didn’t think so, but he did. The spin-off was originally my idea, then as it got closer I had a lot of discussions with Henry Winkler about how he couldn’t lose The Fonz. Not that he’s not proud of it, he’s very proud of it, but it defined him. And I thought, do I want to be Leather Tuscadero for the rest of my life? No, I don’t. Doing three
years in that show was enough to establish that character. But if I’d stayed, maybe my whole career would have taken a different turn and I wouldn’t be creating the music I’m creating now. I could have ended up being just an actress.
There was a country slant to Stumblin’ In and If You Can’t Give Me Love, your preceding duet with Smokie’s Chris Norman, that served to broaden your audience, and finally, to conquer America. Country rock, yeah, it did. There are more facets to my personality than just rock’n’roll. I do a lot of things. There’s my poetry, my radio career, my novel. My base is rock’n’roll, but any artist who sings rock’n’roll like I do – very natural – can also do country. Jerry Lee Lewis? Great country. Elvis? If you can embrace rock’n’roll like I do, you can do country. And my voice suits country. It’s got that kind of twang to it. It was never my intention to just do rock’n’roll. I’m a very creative person, I always need to be creating something or I’m not happy. A song, a poem, a radio show, it’s just who I am.
Despite the early eighties being a busy period in your professional life, it was when you also started a family. A lot of things happened at once. I did want to have babies before I was thirty, but it didn’t happen. I tried, but then I had a miscarriage, and that takes up a year. Then I had my kids, so I didn’t tour in ’82 and ’84, but I did tour in ’83 and ’85, so as soon as the kids were born I was back on the road. Then I wanted to start spreading a little bit more. Annie Get Your Gun came into the picture [in ‘86 she starred as Annie Oakley in the West End production of the Irving Berlin musical], and I really wanted to do that. I love musicals, I was raised on musicals. Then I had my own TV talk show [ITV’s Gas Street in ’88].
Perhaps the most interesting thing about your pioneering story is that you’ve done it all simply by being yourself. Yes. I’ve had that discussion with numerous musicians down the years. We’ll end up in a bar after a show, and while we’re talking and I’ll ask: “When you first saw me on Top Of The Pops, did it look to you like I was a woman trying to show you that I could beat the guys?” And they say no. Did I look like I was natural? Yes. Did I look like I was trying to be sexy? No. So yes, whatever I do, it’s me. That’s why I’ve lasted so long, because it’s not manufactured.
You’ve also remained refreshingly clear of any problems rooted in substance abuse. Yeah, not me. I come from the sixties, so of course I smoked marijuana and did whatever everybody else did at that time, but it never grabbed me. I didn’t like the out-of-control factor. I didn’t like that somebody could give you a puff of a joint that was so strong you were out of it for days. It happened to me, I hated it and I thought, no, this isn’t who I am. I like a drink, but not to excess, but I’ve just never been into drugs. It’s a waste of time and I’ve too much to do.
Like conquer Australia? Australia and I have had a love affair since the beginning. I might as well live there. I outsold The Beatles there, and then ABBA outsold me. That’s the hierarchy, and it’s not a bad place to be.
You seem to be enjoying the ultimate rock star happy ending, chilling in the country house with a wall full of gold discs, still fit and hungry enough to keep rocking for some time yet. You recently played at your daughter’s wedding. Is this the kind of success you always hoped for? Yes. I always wanted to reach as wide an audience as possible, to be creative in every area I chose, and I’ve been allowed to do that, but I wanted to have a normal life as well. And I’ve got that too. I’ve a place for my ego, a place for my humility and it’s just what I always wanted. I’ve got a normal life, full of exciting things to do, full of accolades and full of good friends and just full of everything. I’ve had two good marriages, two beautiful kids, a lovely grand-daughter, you know? Can’t complain.
“I’ve never been into drugs. It’s a waste of time and I’ve too
much to do.”
You seem very comfortable within this life that you’ve made for yourself. I’m comfortable within me, that’s the key.
You come from blue-collar Detroit, your father worked for General Motors, so now, logically here you are… …In an Elizabethan manor house in Essex [laughs]. Yeah, how does that work?
No Control is out now via SPV/Steamhammer.