The best songs of the 1970s, according to Suzi Quatro
The 1970s have always been seen as something of a golden age for music. Carole King released her masterpiece Tapestry, Joni Mitchell released Blue and Dylan unleashed his magnum opus Blood on the Tracks. Marvin Gaye asked What’s Going On?, Millie Jackson got Caught Up, Muddy Waters got Hard Again, and Randy Newman slyly taught us all about the Good Old Boys. And all that is before you even mention Songs in the Key of Life, Horses, Marquee Moon, All Things Must Pass and countless other revolutionary records released in that ten-year span.
Someone who knows a thing or two about releasing great albums in the 1970s is Suzi Quatro, one of the first female rockstars; a true trailblazer, and musical pioneer.
Her eponymous 1973 debut album is a raucous riot of frenetic drums, searing and screaming blues guitars, boogieing rhythms and glittering glam rock vocals. On songs like ‘48 Crash’, ‘Rockin’ Moonbeam’, ‘Can the Can’ and ‘Official Suburbian Superman’, she makes what David Bowie was doing in the studio at the time sound like Patti Page.
Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, the young Quatro grew up on a steady diet of rock and roll, rhythm and blues and, thanks to her father’s band the Art Quatro Trio, jazz. She had a broad taste and absorbed her early influences like a sponge, and they all came through into her own work at various times throughout her career.
By the early 70s, Quatro had relocated to England and was rubbing shoulders in London with Bowie, Marc Bolan and groups like Slade. Her debut album might display her glam rock credentials for all to see, but the blend of funk, blues, rock and soul, which she brought to the recordings as well, showed that she had more range than all the men on the scene at the time combined. She even had time to glam up and bring more rocking energy to the Otis Blackwell song ‘All Shook Up’ than even Elvis Presley had managed almost 20 years earlier.
Thanks to the quality of her impactful debut release and follow-up albums like Quatro and Your Mamma Won’t Like Me, you know that when Suzi Quatro highlights a song or an album that you can rest assured it is being given a seal of approval by someone who knows what they are talking about.
Considering the sounds of her own early work, though, Quatro may have surprised some fans with the songs she selected when featuring as a guest during a 1986 instalment of the BBC radio institution Desert Island Discs.
Ranging across the genres and the eras, her choices demonstrate her myriad tastes. The Billie Holiday song ‘God Bless The Child’ and Nat ‘King’ Cole’s ‘When I Fall In Love’ represented the jazz her father had given her, whilst Elvis’ ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ encapsulated her early and abiding love of rock and roll (each of her first four albums features at least one song most famously sung by Elvis Presley). Her most contemporaneous pick was Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’, which came out in the same year as her ’84 radio appearance.
The three songs she picked from the decade she is most associated with, the 1970s, are the most confounding selections of all, though. Out of all the songs she could have chosen, of all the artists you would expect her to name-check and single out, the three which Suzi Quatro would choose to take to a desert island with her were the mellow, soft-rock and drifting into the middle of the road ‘We’ve Got Tonite’ by Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, ‘Desperado’ by the Eagles, and Jackson Browne’s ‘Rosie’.
Just like the influences of Elvis and jazz stayed with her throughout her whole life, so did her love of Jackson Browne. She has singled him out, alongside writers like Dylan and Dolly Parton or Willie Nelson, as one of her favourite songwriters over the years, and in 2008, she was playing ‘Rosie’ on the radio again when she hosted her own nine-part BBC radio series.
