“A proper love song”: the track that makes Suzi Quatro cry
All young girls the world over will dream of someday falling in love, but when you also have the romanticism of music stardom set in your sights, that notion takes on an extra level of rose-tinted glow. Suzi Quatro knows that all too well – as a child growing up in Michigan, she became wrapped up in the worship of everyone from Elvis Presley to Billie Holiday to Mary Weiss from the Shangri-Las – which all, in their own way, pushed her on a path of rock domination.
What Quatro would later become, at least in the sense of image, is quite at odds with the idea of a hopeless romantic. Leather-clad and blazing, never without her electric guitar in hand, when the singer broke onto the scene in the early 1970s, she became a rapturous second coming in an all too often male-dominated market. Seismic European hits like ‘Can the Can’ and ‘Devil Gate Drive’ no doubt changed the game, but they were a world away from where her story really began.
Indeed, during her turn on Desert Island Discs in 1986, Quatro went to some lengths in exploring the songs and sounds that defined her life and artistry – and it’s a much more wide-ranging selection than you’d think. On the point of her image, however, it was in this moment that the curtain really drew back on the brutish rock star persona to reveal a woman much more exposed – and tender – at heart.
While the blazing bolts of the likes of Presley have their place on her sonic drawing board, Quatro turned to the crooning call of Nat King Cole and his 1956 hit ‘When I Fall in Love’ as epitomising her earliest memories of pining for romantic heights – so much so that she even wants it played at her funeral. Speaking of the song and her personal connection to it, she said: “I was very impressionable. I was about ten, just thinking about boys and falling in love.”
Quatro continued: “That was the first time I heard a proper love song. I used to actually sit in my sister’s room, play this, and cry. And think about one day when I would fall in love.” Under that lens, it’s no wonder music became her destiny because if she was already so affected at such a young age, could there be any other road?
Quatro’s wallowing tears aside, the span of Cole’s career took in rapidly changing musical tides, where he had first made his name as a jazz pianist in the 1930s before becoming the swooning master of a smooth ballad at the peak of his tenure, and then even branching off a little into the realm of rock and roll in the latter part of the 1950s as the genre took flight.
Although they initially seem a world apart from one another in sonic terms, the traces between Quatro and Cole are more significant than meets the eye once you really dig into them. But when it boils down to it, the truth is that they’re both just big softies – and you’d be surprised to know just how many rock stars of that same calibre would echo the sentiment if they were forced to lay their cards on the table.
