If You Knew Suzi

A budget-priced reissue for Quatro's fifth album which, in turn, took its title from one of her earliest U.K. press interviews, a mouth-agape appraisal of the leather-clad vixen: "If you knew Suzi...like the tattooist knew Suzi." Five years later, however, the second half of that statement wasn't simply forgotten, it was all but meaningless to the majority of her audience, so thoroughly had she reinvented herself. Gone was the leather, gone were the guts, gone was the violent threat that Quatro once posed to passing manhood, to be replaced -- as the album's cover made clear -- by a demure, corduroy-clad lass in a pastel blouse and a look of such winsome vulnerability that, when she sang "Don't Change My Luck" it was enough to break your heart. Five years earlier, she'd probably have cooked it. The continued involvement of songwriters Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman guaranteed Quatro a clutch of classic songs, of course, although their bodyswerve away from the glam trappings of old was just as remarkable as hers; indeed, of all the duo's attempts to "mature" musically, as they put it, Quatro remained their most convincing vehicle, and they rewarded her with two bona fide classics, "The Race Is On" and the hit "If You Can't Give Me Love." Elsewhere, versions of Tom Petty's "Breakdown" and Rick Derringer's "Rock'n'Roll Hoochie Coo," and a smokily redesigned take on the Kinks' "Tired of Waiting for You" both predict and preempt the arrival of the Pretenders a year later. ~ Dave Thompson|