SUZI QUATRO – "Can The Can"

There’s a side to glam that I rather liked at the time and like even more now. The previous entry is a fine example, and there’s one coming up in the not-too-distant future that does even more for me.

On the other hand, there are things like this one that are inclined to turn me right off. The best thing about it, for me, is the little outbreak of funkiness just after the caesura. It’s something to cling to. Otherwise I hear an atonal shrieking that feels like toothache!

No more than 4 from me I’m afraid (Wizzard would have been 7, maybe 8.)

The first and last of these categories should be equal.

Is that right, though? Given a bunch of pop songs from roughly the same era that might be true. But don’t you have to factor in that you have no context for many of the older songs marked so far? Or, to put it another way, once we get to the 80s isn’t it quite likely that the percentages will be skewed the other way due to the “I was there” factor?

…tho’ possibly the marks will have evened out once you reach #1059 and grumpy old man-dom prevails 😉

“Haha – the new layout/custom fields thing means that people have to click to see the mark. Sorry casual browsers!”

arf. i’ve set it to add the score on the end when you are in the full article only. I think it will be simple to change it so that if the full article appears elsewhere without a “More>>” label it will be tacked on the end. I’ll have a look see.

Obv, if you prefer ppl having to click through … 🙂

I agree with Rosie actually – click through to mark is good!

“Can The Can” is great; I think a 7 is fair, because it would leave room for the non-qualifying “48 Crash” to have taken an 8 or a 9. Agreed about the role played by the eye-scratching interjection, also the slightly earlier “AH HAHHHHH!”

I discovered Suzi in a backwards way – a few years ago I kept seeing her records in the cheapie bin and eventually my curiousity won out: who was this woman with the funny name? Why was she surrounded by all these mutton-chopped guys? Boy, that’s a great outfit! etc. “Can The Can” was probably the first thing I checked out by her and it was enough to convince me to buy the debut record…which turns out to be a really good album, nice mix of glittery single-things and generic but enthusiastic bar-band material. “48 Crash” is the highlight for me, a little more singable, its chorus less woozy… (Woozy Quatro?) You can also pretend they’re saying “Party ain’t crashed” which is fun. Check this great, wind-machine-a-rific lipsynch video!

As for “Can,” the great thing about it, aside from the overdubbed shrieks, is the sweaty, dead-serious conviction of the performance; it’s enough to make an unattentive listener believe the lyrics are something other than continual patent nonsense. In general I have a soft spot for hits that try to capitalize on the fleeting popularity of specific bits of slang – here, Quatro sings like she’s convinced “Can the Can” is or should be slang used by somebody, anywhere…rather than a completely and totally nonsensical phrase. It’s in this gesture that she manages to do something none of these other glammy glittery people have done for me: create the impression of being a “real” “rock” band. Obviously these are loaded terms, and I have nothing personally invested in rock “authenticity,” but I think in terms of showmanship it’s worth noting when someone manages to pull off “the look” – considering how many acts try and fail!

One time I sang this (badly) at karaoke to no reception at all; some weeks later I sang “Shock the Monkey” and afterwards Blount was mocking the lyrics: “It’s like, ‘Wow!! This noun is also a verb! Fox the fox…rat on the rat…'” (pause) “…can the can…”

Addendum, I wonder if my preference for Suzi over, say, Slade has to do with not being around at the time – so the burly guys in spaceman suits has a sort of wacky charm to me, but I’m not pressing my eyes to the screen going, “Oh my god, what is this? This is exciting and new!” Suzi Quatro and co look more like what I expect a rock band to look like, so even if their song is considerably less addictive than the Sweet singles by the same team, it somehow holds my attention more? That seems like a sad appraisal of my unexpectedly conservative preferences, so I suppose I’ll have to muse on this some more….

I was slightly dreading the entry of Suzi Q (*insert punchline of your choice here*) since to talk about what she meant to me in my youth would I fear necessitate straying into waters (ahem) which are perhaps not appropriate for a public website. Suffice it to say that my response to her and her hits was, and remains, just out of reach of rationalism (although my, um, moment of revelation coincided with her second number one).

Just as Pete Waterman still moans that Bananarama were the most difficult of all the acts he ever worked with, so Mickie Most’s trickiest customer was Suzi; unsurprising for a Detroitee who once frogmarched Iggy offstage for being a pest – when discussing how she was going to be presented she was adamant about the black leather, Most yawned “It’s been done before” and Suzi retorted “Not by ME!” And with a low-slung bass guitar to boot.

Her hits were all (or mostly) Chinn and Chapman numbers but the working relationship was symbiotic and there is evidence that both Suzi and Len Tuckey contributed a fair amount of their own musical and lyrical ideas (they didn’t get credited, but usually got the B-sides for their own compositions, so they received the royalties anyway).

But anyway…”Can The Can” is monstrous and the alternating between stormbursting and sotto voce purrs is of course proto-TANTRIC glam; percussion heavy with the feel that the beat definitely came first and the tune added on later, and it is unruly in a way which goes beyond even Slade and Wizzard; there is a threat or promise of something new here and the final “over the top lads” yelling and shrieking, joined by Tuckey’s top-line lead squeal (so he’s eventually come too!), has been described as proto-punk a thousand times but I will do so again anyway because here begins Joan Jett and the Runaways, here two years before Horses come Women In Rock…

From my own “marking” viewpoint I find it impossible to escape a tendency to give “routinely” high marks to records which meant a lot to me in specific periods of time I lived through, because of course it’s impossible for me to be objective about them…there is another future year (and it’s not the one you think) where, three clinkers notwithstanding, I would be exceptionally inclined to give all the number ones marks between 8-10.

But yes, I lived through 1973 as a boy and in pop kept hearing and seeing things, ideas, people I could never possibly have imagined before, and so the year has always retained a high reputation in my mind. As I say, Suzi opened up things of another kind in me, so I’d give this an 8, two marks away from perfect because of (a) Alastair Neal’s slightly superfluous electric piano and (b) “48 Crash,” her number three follow-up, redefining the male menopause as apocalypse, and hey, hello Lydia Lunch…

I have a foggy ( or fogey ) recollection that Suzi Q appeared on ” Happy Days “….or was it Pat Benetar.

Sad to say, Suzi had been superseded in my affections by others by that stage, but she was very good in that show, directly before the Fonz indeed jumped the shark…

She sure seemed to have a knack for playing people’s rock singer relatives and girlfriends. Ironically enough, she refused a Leather Tuscadero spinoff show for fear of being typecast…

I find myself in the position of concurring mostly with Marcello on this one. Suzi was radically different from other female artists of the era. Her ‘Girl on a Motorcycle’ image & primal shriek certainly spoke to me in more ways than an ONJ country girl next door in a flouncy dress type possibly could. Prior to Suzi (and pretty much for some time after) it was more usual to see pop princesses veer off into (or start in) TV variety show hell. I’m thinking Cilla, Lulu, Petula, Olivia, Dana, Hopkin etc. Although there were other women in rock (Joplin, Sonja Kristina etc) they were more hippy chic. Suzi provided a new blueprint which was simultaneously sexy & threatening and almost certainly influenced the likes of The Runaways & Siouxsie Sioux.

Having said all that Can the Can isn’t my favourite Suzi single, I still prefer the next few releases to this. A 7 from me.

The irony was that she did eventually end up in West End musicals doing exactly the kind of song and dance routines that Lulu, Cilla &c were compelled to do at that period.

Ah, Dave Hill! – Who can forget the scene from “Slade in Flame” when the goofy simpleton emerged from the place “Flame” were staying at in order to mingle with a crowd of girl fans outside? This was clearly supposed to be a treat for these young women but I could never see it. The inference, of course, was that Dave was the “cute” one, which is rather like trying to pick out the white guy in The Four Tops.

I MUST see that Willie Rushton/Suzi Q musical about Tallulah Bankhead NOW!!!

Not sure about the girrls in rock thing; I’m not accessing any database but an imperfect memory, but in the UK was not Maggie Bell already with Stone the Crows, maybe also Elkie Brooks with DaDa, pre-Vinegar Joe? Not that I like either of them any more than SQ, i.e. didn’t care for any of ’em really. For the attractive female singers, I think one has to turn to the soul and r’n’b field, (but please exclude Tina Turner)

No rock chick could hold a candle to Clodagh Rogers. She looked just like the girlies who featured on the covers of all those “Top of the Pops” albums, the “Now…” of their day.

Marcello – Exactly right. And, as I have mentioned at another time, Clodagh’s Euro song, “Jack in the Box” went even further with her promise to “bounce up and down on my (ie: MY) spring…” Boom Boom indeed. And Woo-Hoo as well.

Erithian – It’s a good job I’ve never mentioned my Joyce Grenfell fetish…

Margaret Rutherford?

I just heard this on today’s POTP and thought I heard the first female punk!

Hard to fault, tho if it had been Angel Fingers, The Dean And I, and 48 Crash the hat would have been worn at an even jauntier angle.

Loved this too, even though I was a shade too young for Suzi’s leathers to mean much to me.

Intreeged to know exactly which ‘soul/r’n’b tomboys’ lord sükråt was referring to… trying to think of a 1973 proto-Kelis. Could they really exist or are you just teasing us, Noddy lover?

Sadly predictable but the young ONJ was one of the first femme singers to make me “feel all weird inside”, as Harry Nilsson would have it.

I am not quite sure that anyone here is aware of the fact that music like Suzi Quatro’s-at the time of release-was important on a few different kinds of levels. Her music was a new kind of approach to rock and roll…in that Americans associate good solid rock, many times with the English…and although Suzi is not English, it had a British cool to it. To try to dissect it, rate it is foolish. It was fun and remains so. Who really cares what “Can the Can” means! Or a “48 Crash”? The Suzi Quatro look, the sound, was new and sexy and fresh…think Bowie circa ’72, Roxy Music,etc. In retrospect, they all might seem over the top and kind of “not so shocking” now…but Suzi Quatro, David Bowie, Roxy Music,etc., made it really cool then. Fond memories and what a sountrack for the time that uniquely still rocks today.