Scratch Out Her Eyes!

Objective: To write a fair-minded and seriously objective review of Suzi Quatro The Wild One: The Greatest Hits without mentioning her black leather, my hormones, or the adjectives sweaty and/or feral. Challenge accepted.

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So dear readers there I was in a rare frisky mood the other afternoon and I found myself reaching for Suzi Quatro The Wild One: The Greatest Hits, being assured that the loud, feral, sweaty grooves within would take me up the black leather stairway to hormone heaven. This is serious music, at least three of the best singles of the seventies live right here.

You've got the kind of a mind of a juvenile Romeo-o
You're so blind you could find,
That your motor ain't ready to go-o o-o     (48 Crash)

I am slightly too young to remember Suzi well from the time, I’m pretty sure I still wanted to be an astronaut, droid or farmer at the time* and so the short shouty lady on Top Of The Pops was of only minimal interest. Ah well, I made up for it later.

Just in case you’re in any doubt whatsoever, I ducking LOVE glam rock in the sense of that early 70’s British stomping primitive glitter guitar boogie; facile, fun and flash**. As Suzi said about why she was drawn to the bass guitar, the sound hits you ‘right between the legs’.

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Wow! Hey! You heard about Suzi from Baton Rouge? ^
You have? Well let me tell you about her!     (I May Be Too Young)

The product of a musical family and a teenage garage rock band, Suzi Q’s glam story starts when she hit out for London in ’71 at the behest of producer Mickie Most. After a misfiring first single Most guided her towards the stone cold glitter genius of producers/writers Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman.

At the same time Quatro and Most figured out her image – enter the black leather jumpsuit. Goodness me. It was damnably clever and sexy, glam was dominated by feminised men, Suzi inverted that with her skin-tight tomboyishness and self-styled masculine personality (‘Bowie makes me feel real ugly’). She was tough and in your face, inspiring and enthusing both sexes. Over in Los Angeles County, the fourteen-year-old Joan Marie Larkin goggled at the pictures and attitude and lost her mind – becoming Joan Jett just a few years later^^.

All of which is all so what, without the sounds to back it up. Boy did Suzi have those.

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The run of hit singles chronicled on The Wild One is pretty tough to beat. Her best and first UK #1 was ‘Can the Can’. It’s just a perfect piece of music, stomping beat, utterly nonsensical lyrics^*, a febrile teenage attack on your senses. Chapman got her to sing higher and higher until she was right at the top of her range and it’s that slightly unstable attack that makes it such an exciting blast, its an animal thing. The way Suzi snarls ‘Scratch out her eyes’ just does it for me.

https://youtu.be/xYoogY-UGio

Whatever ’48 Crash’ is about, theories include the post-war economic depression and male menopause*^, it kicks like a stack-heeled mule. Ditto the slower, more suggestive ‘Daytona Demon’ and the sublime nonsense of ‘Devil Gate Drive’, a one-woman rock and roll revival revue.

There’s no frills here at all, what you see is what you get a gloriously gaudy explosion, teamed with Neanderthal drumming and undertones of teenage musk. Screw all that meaning, that was sooo sixties, the seventies were here to party.

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The hits kept coming, but commensurate with their slightly diminishing quality, they were lesser ones. The likes of ‘Too Big’ and ‘I May Be Too Young’ wear their faux naïve charm well, but Suzi is starting to sound more like a singer than a cat on heat and that’s what we all tuned in for.

A brief entertaining foray into funk disco in 1975 paid dividends in the raucous shape of the genuinely sassy ‘Your mamma Won’t Like Me’ which pre-empted Wild Cherry by a year. It is genuinely a superb tune, as Alice Cooper clearly grokked, covering it on his Breadcrumbs EP, he and Suzi having been friends since she was 14. Ditto ‘I Bit Off More Than I Could Chew’ which is equally great, a real Detroit sound.

That’s when and where I check out.

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Playing ‘Can The Can’ for about the seventeenth time today, I have to state my utterly unbiased opinion that The Wild One: The Greatest Hits just freakin’ rocks. It’s nothin’ but a good time all the time. If it is a bit one-note at times that’s EXACTLY the point – Quatro-Chapman-Chinn briefly dialled right into the maelstrom of the teenage Id, all those instincts, desires and the pleasure principle***, why vary it?

No reason, no reason at all.

Don't let the cat get into the eagle's nest at night
Because the eagle could say "yes" without a fight
Scratch out her eyes!

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The Wild One: The Greatest Hits is a cheap shot compilation, that’s fine. Some basic sleeve notes and a variation on the Suzi-Band-chains picture, which annoyingly is almost obliterated by an overlarge Q. Ah well.

1033 Down.

*sadly, being a mindless worker droid is the closest I’ve come to realising any of these ambitions.

**just three of my many middle names. True story.

^okay so our Suzi is from Detroit, but shhh.

^^that last sentence was stolen almost verbatim from Simon Reynolds Shock And Awe: Glam Rock And Its Legacy, which I heartily recommend.

^*I didn’t quite realise how batshit crazy they were until I read for the first time them today.

*^personally I think the title was just a handy rhyme for ‘silk sash bash‘ and ‘lightning flash’. Word up.

***that Freud dude may have been onto something, shame he never signed with Mickie Most or we could be shaking our manes down the disco to ‘Super-Ego Sweetheart’ and ‘Wham-Bam Preconscious Thanks Man’.