What was Suzi Quatro’s first number one?
In the early 1970s, watching someone like Suzi Quatro tear up the stage was like experiencing a particularly vivid fever dream. As one YouTube commenter wrote under a 1973 performance of ‘Can the Can’, “It was so unusual to see a woman rocker in those days”.
Everything about her, from her leather attire to her general attitude on stage, seemed reminiscent of the kind of unbothered, devil-may-care attitude found only in male heroes like Elvis Presley. Like many, Quatro had also grown up besotted with ‘The King’ and wished for one day to follow in the same footsteps, unaware that women in the business found it twice as hard to rise to the top.
That said, because there had yet to be a defining female rocker that other aspiring musicians could idolise, barely anyone even considered it as an option. Quatro only did at the time because she wasn’t yet privy to the disparities in the music industry, and observed someone like Presley and simply wished she could do the same. As she once admitted to Tidal, “I never considered the fact that I was a girl. It just didn’t come into my head.”
As such, Presley informed much of Quatro’s aesthetic, like her iconic jumpsuit, which was partly inspired by his iconic 1968 Comeback Special. However, she also used this as a conduit to explore her own artistry, appearing as a pivotal force in her own right, especially when she’d appear on stage with her guitar and yell out her lyrics to a sea of pleasantly surprised onlookers, who probably never thought they’d see the day when a woman dazzled them as much as their male favourites.
‘Can the Can’ was an important moment in this journey, not just because she’d explode any room she’d perform the song in, but also because of its subject matter. A title that may not seem to mean anything that deep at first, ‘Can the Can’ tackled the idea of ditching a man who doesn’t pull his weight or keeps pulling you back, only to prove he’s still not willing to commit.
As is clear with Quatro’s semi-aggressive chant, “Make a stand for your man, honey, try to can the can / Put your man in the can, honey, get him while you can / Can the can, can the can, if you can, well can the can.”
What was Suzi Quatro’s first number one?
Her second single, ‘Can the Can’, was Quatro’s first number one single in the UK, and also marked the first-ever female bass singer to venture into rock star territory, smashing the glass ceiling for female expectations in music. During live performances, she seems perfectly at home, as if there had been many before her doing the same thing, though that’s not really the case at all.
But Quatro always had a feeling that the song would go somewhere, even before she’d officially shaped her artistic sound. Quatro wrote many of her own songs, but she also recognised that many of them veered away from commercial appeal, with a particularly heavy emphasis on the bass, so when Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman went away to work on her next single, she knew immediately she was about to smash the big leagues.
As she recalled, “I can hear a record for the first time and know whether it will be a hit, and I knew as soon as we had finished recording that we had a big hit on our hands.”
