Suzi Quatro, the original female rocker, might have slowed down since her heyday, but her latest album and frank new autobiography prove that she can still rock'n'roll with the best of them, she tells Charity Crewe
There isn't much Suzi Quatro hasn't seen. The queen of rock'n'roll began playing bass at the age of 14 and is still touring as a 57-year-old grandmother. She's no ordinary granny, though; she almost jogs into St Martins Lane Hotel in London, wearing her jeans tucked into cowboy boots and clad in her trademark black leather jacket. She gives the waitress's pregnant belly a feel and declares it impressively firm.
It's immediately apparent that Quatro isn't easily fazed - but why would she be? She has filled stadiums worldwide, broken Alice Cooper's nose with a rubber-tipped dart, ordered a drunken Iggy Pop off her stage, sung to heavily wounded troops in Vietnam, turned down an invitation to meet Elvis - not to mention 30 or so wedding proposals - and has had an indecent amount of spectral encounters.
These, and a lot else besides, are revealed in her new autobiography, Unzipped, which, unusually for a book of its type, wasn't ghostwritten. She was motivated to write it after releasing Back to the Drive last year; the album is filled with very personal songs and resulted in a lot of interest in her life from both critics and fans. "I thought, well, I'm 57," she says. "I'm comfortable in my skin; let's write my story."
Quatro was born Susie Kay Quatro in Detroit in 1950 to a Hungarian mother and an Italian father. (Her paternal grandfather, Michael Quattrocchi, was given the name Mike Quatro when immigration officials declared his name unpronounceable.) Her dad worked at General Motors by day and performed in a jazz band by night. They were a musical family, and all five children played instruments.
"Every family get-together, from birthdays and Easter to Thanksgiving and Christmas, was an excuse to put on some kind of performance," says Quatro. But this was no family von Trapp; indeed, Elvis was Quatro's main inspiration. It was after seeing the King perform on The Ed Sullivan Show when she was five that Quatro realised her destiny.
"I was mesmerised, and when Elvis went 'Mmmmm' I felt my first sexual thrill, although I didn't know what it was at the time," she recounts. What she did know was that she "was gonna be him". In 1964 she and her sister Patti formed a band, The Pleasure Seekers, and she ended up playing bass. Quatro has never looked back.
She felt like a rocker from the off. "Even in this all-girl band I used to do all the guy songs. I'd do the screeching," she explains. This individual style caught the attention of Mickie Most, producer of The Animals and Donovan, who invited her to England in 1971 to record an album.
Quatro doesn't hesitate to call herself a mould-breaker. Of her first appearance on Top of the Pops, in 1973 with the No 1 hit Can the Can, she writes: "People still talk about that first TV appearance. It was a shock - no one had ever seen a girl like this before. I embraced this role because I knew exactly how to play it. Hell, I'd been practising since 1964."
She looked the epitome of 1970s cool in her black leather jumpsuit and knee-high snakeskin platform boots. People had seen women rock - Janis Joplin for one - but not in the way that Quatro did it. She was a woman in control; she rode her low-slung bass between her legs, fronted an all-male band and her lyrics didn't entertain the idea of being a victim. Quatro screeched "Put your man in the can, honey - get him while you can", in Can the Can, and poked fun at the male menopause, in 48 Crash.
Quatro says being a rock'n'roller came naturally to her. "Nobody instructed me how to play my music. Nobody told me to wear this, to scream like that. It was just me; I was very much a tomboy."
She wasn't conscious at the time that she was carving a path for female rockers, but she knew she wasn't like the other girls. She says that during her first difficult, lonely year in London "it crossed my mind that if I was a little more like Dana or Olivia Newton-John then maybe success would come easier, but something in me said, no, stick to your guns. It wasn't until two or three years after my hits started that I began to see what I had done. But standing there doing Can the Can, I didn't know what I was doing. And all of a sudden I had made a statement." Her statement paved the way for a generation of girl rockers, from Siouxsie and the Banshees and Joan Jett to Chrissie Hynde and Debbie Harry.
Although Quatro, as she puts it, could "rock and roll with the best of 'em (and I mean boys!)", she has no truck with being a rock'n'roll legend offstage. Her tally of trashed hotel rooms is one.
Her experience of drug hell began and ended in her teens, when she got so stoned with her sister that she almost couldn't eat her mother's pasta. "I'm not a big party animal," she says. "I am just a professional musician. The drink and the drugs never tempted me; I find it boring. I don't want to be lying on my back with my eyeballs popping out and ending up in rehab. I want to be around for a long time."
There's no sense of sanctimoniousness in her attitude to excess; she simply sees it as a waste. She experienced it first hand early in her career, when she was supporting Slade with Thin Lizzy. She says Phil Lynott was "either drunk, high on marijuana, or both. It was a shame because he was a very, very nice, intelligent man." Lynott did get it together enough to send her a telegram when she had her first hit, however.
Quatro recognises that her mother's strong Catholic faith had a big influence on her behaviour. When she was 18 she had a two-year affair with a married A&R man, which ended when she became pregnant. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about who that baby would be now," she says. "Children are a gift."
Her mother's faith also had an impact on Quatro's attitude to marriage. She was married for 16 years to her English guitarist, Len Tuckey, with whom she has two children. But the final six years of the marriage were difficult. Tuckey seems to have spent many evenings, when they weren't touring, in a pub or shooting clays, and most nights on the sofa of their Elizabethan manor house, in Essex. Quatro believes part of the problem was the fact that Tuckey "wanted me in a jumpsuit for the rest of my life."
When she took the part of the Fonz's counterpart, Leather Tuscadero, in Happy Days, starred in the West End musical Annie Get Your Gun and wrote a musical with Willy Rushton about Tallulah Bankhead, Tuckey didn't like it. But Quatro found it difficult to abandon ship.
"Mom had pounded into my head as part of my good Catholic upbringing that you don't divorce," she says. (This message didn't seem to have the same impact on Quatro's sister Arlene - mother of the Twin Peaks actress Sherilyn Fenn - who is on her seventh husband.)
In 1992 she asked for a divorce, and has since remarried. Quatro proudly declares that she proposed to both her husbands, who said yes immediately. "It's a control issue," she says, grinning.
There's no doubt that Quatro's ability to adapt and her level-headed attitude to stardom made her a survivor. "I've always been aware of the roller coaster," she says. "If you can't stand the ride, don't get on it. You're going to be hot, you're going to be down. I've never been scared, because I made my name. I'm a professional. I'm a good live performer."
Quatro, who has just started a tour of Australia, still has many strings to her bow. Her Rockin' with Suzi Q show is one of BBC Radio 2's most popular programmes.
She is also branching into documentaries. "Interviewing people is one of my most valuable assets. I'm really very good at talking to people one to one. The conversation is just amazing. I allow people the privilege of being themselves. As you see, I am very much an eye-contact person."
And she is. I don't think her big, bright eyes have left mine for a second during our interview, but she is so relaxed that it isn't the slightest bit unnerving. "I'm also going to write a novel, and the girl in my novel is going to be non-Catholic, so she can do whatever she likes."
Unzipped is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99 in UK