It was an extremely exciting time. I’m very proud of the Detroit pedigree. Musicians from Detroit have an energy level, an edge that’s second to none. I don’t know why that is.
Interview with Mark Savage for BBC online, October 2017
Born in Detroit on 3 June 1950, Susan Kay Quatro has always been keen to pay homage to her home city’s illustrious musical heritage, a music scene that would give the world the likes of Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Ted Nugent and Bob Seger, not to mention the wealth of artists who rose to prominence as part of the Motown Records roster. Quatro’s links to the Detroit scene were more than just a fleeting association. Even though she was to make her main breakthrough in Britain in the early 1970s, it was as a teenager in the 1960s that she became an intrinsic part of that scene through her membership of The Pleasure Seekers, the all-girl band that Quatro helped form alongside her sisters and school friends. Suzi Quatro’s immersion into the world of music and entertainment predates even that, however. Born to an Italian American father and a Hungarian mother, her father played professionally in dance bands in the evening while working at General Motors during the day. ‘Life in the Quatro household was very ‘showbiz’’, recalled Quatro in her 2007 autobiography,Unzipped. ‘Every family get-together, from birthdays and Easter to Thanksgiving and Christmas, was an excuse to put on some kind of performance.’
The ‘very showbiz’ home life would clearly have a profound impact. Suzi Quatro was one of five siblings brought up in Grosse Pointe Woods, a comfortable, mainly white suburb in the north-eastern corner of Detroit, alongside older sisters, Arlene (born in 1941) and Patti (born in 1947); brother, Michael (born in 1943); and younger sister, Nancy, (born in 1953). To varying degrees of success, all five would go on to have careers in music, with her three sisters each performing alongside Suzi at varying points in her early career; while her brother Michael, himself a musician who went on to release eleven albums, also worked as a music promoter and facilitated some life-changing introductions working on behalf of his sisters. A pivotal moment for the young Suzi Quatro was seeing Elvis Presley performing on TV. As she recalls in her autobiography:
I even know the exact date. 6 January 1957. Arlene and I were watching the Ed Sullivan Show, a Sunday night must for the majority of American families. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, here he is… Elvis Presley’. Pandemonium broke out and Elvis went into ‘Don’t Be Cruel’. This moment is forever burned into my psyche – Arlene was screaming, I was mesmerised.
Another pivotal moment would come seven years later with another act that would turn popular music upside down: The Beatles on theEd Sullivan Show in 1964. To be fair, Quatro always remained more closely aligned with Elvis than The Beatles. ‘I was only fifteen when The Beatles happened and I went along with
