Rocker Suzi Quatro reflects on blazing new trails
The world had never seen the likes of Suzi Quatro, rocking her bass in an under-zipped black-leather jumpsuit inspired by Elvis Presley in the ’68 Comeback Special and Barbarella.
It was 1973 and glam was all the rage in England, where the Detroit rocker’s breakthrough single, “Can the Can,” hit No. 1, announcing the arrival of an artist who refused to be confined — much less defined — by traditional gender roles.
There’s a wonderful moment in Liam Firmager’s recent documentary “Suzi Q” where Chris Frantz is explaining how he talked his girlfriend, Tina Weymouth, into playing bass and joining Talking Heads by showing her a Suzi Quatro record.
As Frantz recalls the conversation, “Tina said, very wisely. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Rock ’n’ roll, that’s, like, for young men. That’s not for nice girls. I said, ‘Oh, that’s not true. Look at
.’”
Those reservations would never have occurred to Quatro.
“I’m kind of a strange animal,” she says. “And this is why it was me that had to kick down the door. It took someone like me. I’ve never done gender.”
It was in her early teens that Quatro joined her sister Patti’s garage-rock band, the Pleasure Seekers. She left the band, which by then had changed its name to Cradle, in 1971 and moved to England at the urging of hit producer Mickie Most.
Two years later, “Can the Can” was No. 1 in four countries, the first in a series of glam-era classics that charted all over the world, from “48 Crash” to “Devil Gate Drive” and “The Wild One.”
It wasn’t until 1977 that Quatro found a footing in the U.S. with a recurring role on “Happy Days” as Leather Tuscadero.
Decades later, Quatro is still rocking as relentlessly as she did in her trailblazing youth on “The Devil in Me,” an album written and recorded like 2019’s “No Control” with her son, Richard Tuckey.
“I think it’s my best work,” Quatro says. “It really has relit my fire.”
This may be the perfect time for Quatro to release an album as informed by the sound of her earliest work as “The Devil in Me,” arriving as it does in the wake of “Suzi Q,” a film that left her feeling “very humbled” and very happy she insisted that it tell the truth.
“I said to the director, ‘OK, ground rules. I know I have editing scissors because it is my life, after all. But I won’t use them if what is said is true and important to the story. I don’t care how embarrassing.’ And I stuck to that.”
The movie’s testimonials add up to is a fairly solid case for Quatro as a trailblazer who should have been inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame before that documentary was even filmed.
Quatro herself isn’t shy about calling the hall out on its oversight.
“I was the first one to do that, as every woman in that documentary says,” Quatro says.