The Girl from Detroit City - Single

Suzi Quatro is a performer as famous for her image as her music; Quatro was rock & roll's prototypical Bad Girl, the woman in the leather jumpsuit with the enormous bass guitar (well, it looked enormous, given that Quatro is only five feet tall), looking sexy but ferocious as she banged out her glam rock hits in her '70s glory days. Quatro is a woman who titled one of her albums Your Mamma Won't Like Me for a reason. But there's more to Suzi Quatro than all that, and she seems determined to show off the full range of her 50-year career in music on the box set The Girl from Detroit City. Quatro is a rocker but she's also a showbiz lifer, and the music spread over these four discs is the work of someone up to do a little bit of everything, and along with Chapman/Chinn thunderboomers like "Can the Can," "49 Crash," and "Daytona Demon," you also get vintage garage rock (three numbers from Quatro's first band, the Pleasure Seekers, including the gloriously snotty "What a Way to Die"), easygoing pop numbers like "Stumblin' In" (her hit duet with Chris Norman of Smokie), power ballads such as "Lonely Is the Hardest," heartbroken numbers like "Heart of Stone," country-inflected songs such as "Two Miles Out of Georgia," an electro-processed dance version of "Wild Thing" (with Reg Presley of the Troggs as Suzi's duet partner), show tunes (two songs from the British revival of Annie, Get Your Gun with Quatro as Annie Oakley), a tribute to Elvis Presley ("Singing with the Angels," featuring James Burton and the Jordanaires), and even a hint of smooth jazz on "If You Can't Give Me Love." The Girl from Detroit City is sequenced so that the first three discs play like a writ-large "best-of" collection, while disc four is mostly devoted to rarities and unreleased material, including such puzzlers as a sexed-up cover of the Normal's "Warm Leatherette" and a lushly melodramatic version of the Eagles' "Desperado," with Jeff Beck on guitar. This set's desire to cover all the bases of Quatro's life in music is its blessing and its curse; her most devoted fans will be thrilled with the eclectic track selection, but folks most interested in Suzi the Rocker will find themselves skipping through much of disc three and nearly all of disc four. (Those folks would be better served with EMI's single-disc The Essential Suzi Quatro.) Still, The Girl from Detroit City certainly goes the extra mile to tell the Suzi Quatro story in all its complexity and detail, and Suzi offers plenty of her own thoughts on her life and career in the extensive liner notes and song-by-song commentary.