Australian Penthouse

By Dominic Cadden

I first saw Suzi Quatro screeching away to Can the Can in a leather jumpsuit with knee-high snakeskin platform boots; a lone girl backed by a bunch of heavy-looking dudes.

She wore that black leather like Rocco Siffredi wears a condom—it was incredibly tight, but in the end you knew she wanted to bust out of it. She had a voice so searing and head-kicking that in Japan they named a sake after her. At the same time, she had a ‘little girl’ cuteness (she’s a tiny five-foot zip) that made her look like your mate’s mousey sister had run off with a bunch of bikies…and tamed them.

Which wasn’t too far from the truth; Suzi had already laid her lead guitarist, Len Tuckey, a giant of a man, and left him a gibbering mess (they later married and divorced). In high-spiked heels, Suzi played an axe almost as tall as her, gyrating on it like she was in the cowboy position. With a tight little body that eventually won her Rear of the Year (1982), she ran her left hand fast up and down the fretboard of her five-string bass (she liked to use all her fingers) for no musical reason at all. She did it just to give the boys an image to work to as they ran their hand up and down their own axe later on.

You could listen to Suzi on the radio with your parents, and it wasn’t like getting busted with blue magazines. Songs like Can the Can had cheeky lyrics that seemed fairly innocent on the surface but were slightly porno underneath: Put your man in the can, honey / Get him while you can. From our knowledge of American slang, it seemed she was telling the girls to root guys in the toilet, fulfilling our schoolyard fantasies. Suzi was our heroine.

Of course, not all her songs were full of saucy double entendre. No, many of them had just the single entendre. Daytona Demon, Mama’s Boy and Rock Hard serve as a guidebook for Suzi’s predilection for a “heavy-hung he-man” who don’t waste time on dating and dancing or pussyfooting around in bed, but get rock-hard on demand. In Your Mama Won’t Like Me, she warns that she has “a bad reputation through playing around” and “I like your stimulation, but that ain’t enough,” then gives a demonstration of what her orgasmic shrieks should sound like—something copied by female singers from Wendy James and Courtney Love to Madonna.

It wasn’t all just for show, either. When she toured the USA with Alice Cooper, the wild couple used to have dart-gun wars. Cooper lost when Suzi broke his nose. In the UK, Carpenters singer Lynsey de Paul suggested in an interview that Suzi was a dyke who needed to “jump around with a bunch of sweaty, hairy, greasy-looking guys to be successful”. When both women appeared on Top of the Pops, Suzi grabbed de Paul by the throat, shoved her up against a glass door and demanded an apology. Thirty years later, she released a video for her own self-defence training program.
Suzi’s look rather than her reputation got her a part on Happy Days as Leather Tuscadero, the rocker sister of The Fonze’s girlfriend, Pinky. She stole the show, and every time she slapped her leather-wrapped thigh twice and pointed her finger like a pistol to meet-and-greet The Fonze, she out-cooled the King of Cool. In the mid 1970s, when Suzi was yelling “Come Alive” (Devil Gate Drive), that’s exactly what was happening to my sexuality.

I didn’t want to hear about sex and how to act like a man from Barb Streisand or Helen Reddy, and I wouldn’t learn these things from the chicks in ABBA. No, Suzi was the one.

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