Suzi Quatro’s favourite album of all time: “He gets me through life”
In general, asking someone for their favourite album of all time feels like an impossible question. My answer changes week on week, depending on the weather, my mood, or how strong my brain capacity is feeling to be able to remember a whole history of music I’ve known and loved. For Suzi Quatro, a musician who has been there through some of the most exciting years of musical history, that question must be even harder. That said, she seems to have her answer locked in.
Quatro feels like something of a jack of all trades. She’s a singer, a highly influential bass player, an actor and a songwriter. With so many channels of creativity, it feels like her personal tastes could stray down several different paths. As Leather Tuscadero in the cheesy sitcom Happy Days, her tastes could be more pop-rock leaning as a mainstream crowd-pleaser. In her own musical career, she seems to favour heavier and more glamorous rock sounds.
In the same sphere as Thin Lizzy, Slade and all the glam rock greats of the 1980s, you might expect her favourite album of all time to be along those lines with huge guitar riffs and arena-ready sounds. But instead, her answer is softer and more sincere. As a homage to the way music soundtracks memories and how some albums come to define an era in our lives, Quatro hands over her top album position to a release that reminds her of the early days long before flashing stage lights and major tours.
She picks out Bob Dylan’s 1966 release Blonde On Blonde. “All roads led to Bob,” Martha Wainwright once said of the folk legend’s impact on all musicians, and it seems that Quatro would agree. However, in her case, Dylan was the very start of the road, setting her off on the journey of her career.
“I was 14 years old, newly in my first band, The Pleasure Seekers, working the clubs and perfecting my bass and singing. And my mind was like a sponge,” Quatro said, recounting how she soaked up his influence. “After seeing the Blue Magoo’s at the Chessmate in Detroit, my home town, we ended up hanging at their hotel. I heard, for the first time, this album.”
Blonde On Blonde was a gateway drug, turning her interest in Dylan from an occasional fling to a full-on dependency as she added, “I knew the artist of course, and was a fan, but after this, well I was hooked for life.”
I have to agree with her. While all too often overlooked for Highway 61 Revisited or The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Blonde On Blonde is a real stand-out. Bridging the gap between his early pure folk days and the electric Dylan era, the record proves his expansive mindset. Yet, at the same time, it feels like one of his more cohesive releases as all the songs weave around the same difficult relationship and conflict, supposedly with Edie Sedgwick.
“I was such a fan that I used to sit in my basement bedroom with incense burning and trap people into coming down and listening to me recite his lyrics,” Quatro said of those early days playing the vinyl over and over. With so much to unpack in the lyrics as Dylan weaves emotion with religious and spiritual symbolism, myths and metaphors, it’s no wonder Quatro wanted to read it all like poetry.
For the bass player, the difficult question of trying to pick a favourite album feels like a simple one when she considers her lifelong love for the folk-rock legend. It seems that when she talks about him, she’s transported back to that 14-year-old self, burning with obsession over a new star as she says, “I am a fan! He gets me through life.”