Product Description

Little Susie from Detroit grew up to be legendary rocker Suzi Quatro, international superstar musician and actress, icon of the Seventies. The transformation was fuelled by huge talent, determination, hard work and a fabulous sense of humour, but it wasn’t easy.

In UNZIPPED, Suzi tells her story of life behind the scenes and in the thick of it , working, partying and rocking with other legendary figures such as Noddy Holder, Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop. Little Susie learned a love of music at home with her fascinating, fractious family, then she forged her sound by touring dives all over the States. She came to London just as Glam Rock was kicking off and became a star, a passionate woman in a man’s world.

Then there was fame as a Hollywood actress in Happy Days, a turbulent personal life and the need to juggle her family with her career, touring all over the world. There were lows as well as highs, but she never lost her total joy in music or her sense of adventure.

Suzi Quatro has met anyone who was anyone in music over the last thirty years. She remembers it all and this brilliantly personal, funny book is her thrilling account of a life lived going hell for leather.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #163583 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Review
“Nobody messes with Suzi Quatro. It shows. No wonder she made it to the top” (Irish Sunday Independent )

"A fascinating memoir of a life lived out loud” (Glasgow Evening Times )

“All this action makes a ‘wow man, groovy’ rock’n’roll read” (Daily Mail )

“A raw talent that made even Mick Jagger sit up” (Sunday Express )

About the Author
Suzi Quatro has been a professional musician since she was 15 years old when she played bass in an all-girl band with her sisters. She left America to pursue a solo career in London at the age of 21 and has been based here ever since, not counting all the time she's spent on the road all over the world and an interlude in Hollywood starring in Happy Days. These days, Suzi is married and living in Essex. She has two children and a granddaughter and still loves to play bass and write songs.

Customer Reviews

Get to know the real Suzi Quatro
I do not read much as I have a year old son, so spare time is few and far between, but I read this book non-stop and at the end of the weekend I was at chapter 7 already. What an amazing woman! I admire her strength and determination. This book was easy to read and I battled putting it down. You get a real insight into the way of the seventies and the music scene, She really opens up on the loves in her life and you can feel her pain, her drive and her success and her adaptability. I would recommend it!!
Thank you Suzi Quatro for sharing your life with us, and for taking the time to jot it all down. Even if you are not a fan, well worth the read!!

Rock and roll and tears before bathtime
"Unzipped" starts well for a celebrity autobiography. How many times have you started to read someone's life story and had to plough through the formative years and life before The Big Break? Not in Suzi Quatro's story, because from the age of 14 it's been all about rock and roll. She really has spent her entire life on stage, pounding a bass guitar.

The first half is a very readable blast through a life in the music business in the 60s and 70s. As Suzi Quatro says, this may have been the last time people in the music business had to work hard and pay their dues. She certainly played the long game, touring local dance-halls and even Viet Nam in an all-girl band for eight years before producer Mickie Most brought her to England. Fans and any true child of the seventies will enjoy the detail about the two years RAK records invested developing the Suzi Quatro sound, band and image, and the three-year gravy train that followed as she became a truly global, endlessly touring pop icon

Despite Noddy Holder's ominous cover quote that promises "Suze ... you remember everything", "Unzipped" isn't a warts-and-all expose of the glam rock scene. There are some stories about late nights and vomit on tour, but she is surprisingly discrete about other people's misbehaviour and this isn't a detailed or candid glimpse behind glam rock's sequined curtain. Despite cover quotes from Richie Cunningham and the Fonz, there's also disappointingly little information about the year or so she spent as a recurring character on "Happy Days". Instead as the book goes on there's more and more about Suzi Quatro's own dysfunctional American family, her marriage problems and the effects of her life choices on her children.

Some men will find "Unzipped" increasingly hard going because after the tales of making it and touring, the second half is about how tough it was in the 80s and after to have been more famous in the 70s. This part of the book is a heart-on-her-sleeve confessional about failed relationships and the price of fame. The candour about family and spiritual matters is admirable but not everyone will be able to take all of it seriously and a number of "open letters" to friends, family and acquaintances are a long way up the foothills into embarrasment country. There's also an uncomfortable amount of poetry, but this is easy to spot and - if you choose, in a manly way - to skip.

From the start it's clear that "Unzipped" wasn't ghost-written, which is a double-edged sword. We're told in the introduction that the book was written to a tight deadline, so it rushes along at speed but also feels like a first draft. It's also held back by an odd choice to try and write as a split personality, first as real-life Susie Quatro and then from 1972 as rock star Suzi. Each comments on the other's memories, but the "voices" aren't really very different, and sometimes it seems to be a way to step back from responsibility for what's being said.

A couple of words of warning, especially about the hardback edition which could also have been called "Unproofread". Some of the dates dropped into anecdotes don't match up, as when stories apparently about 1977 feature a band member fired in 1975. There's a writing technique called the "unreliable narrator", but I don't think it's intentional here. Also lot sentences don't make sense due missing words and. Bizarre punctuation.

unzipped -suzi quatro
While the first half of "Unzipped" was enjoyable to read and Suzi's candour is disarmingly frank, I felt that she dwelt too much on her own personal traumas in the second half of the book. I agree with the previous reviewer who noticed that there were some inconsistencies about the facts, which suggested that the book may have been written in a hurry. I also noticed quite a few typographical errors. That said, it is still worth reading and Suzi can only be admired for making it in the tough world of rock-and -roll.