“I still use laundromats, and one day I was walking to one carrying a bag of laundry. I had a hat on and sunglasses because I didn’t want to be noticed. All of a sudden I turned around and there was a gang of kids asking for my autograph. I mean, how much can I look like a star with a bag of laundry? I said, ‘No, I’m not her, I just look like her.' Another time in Germany I escaped to go to the bathroom. When I opened the door all these kids had crowded around the cubicle. I was waiting for them to come in and hand me the toilet paper!”

Not only does Suzi Quatro get accosted in public, assaulted with obscene phone calls, she gets letters, lots and lots of letters: “I got a letter one time and it said: ‘Dear Suzi:. I think you are great’ — all the usual fan stuff — and then it says: ‘I only have one problem, I wet my bed, honest to God, 1 piss in my bed. As a matter of fact, right now I’m watching the sheets dry over a hanger’... then he went on about sheets for a while, stopped, and said bye bye. I don’t know what he accomplished by that letter, maybe he wanted me to send him a dryer.”

"Being a sex symbol is the furthest thing from my mind."

Suzi Quatro has brought sex to the other side of the stage, k girl’s only access to rock and roll used to be a backstage pass and a quick trip between a visiting pop star’s sheets. But Suzi has raised the female pop mentality from the groupie’s backstage gutter to center stage.

She’s the bad girl, wearing tight clothes, smoking cigarettes, and proving she’s as good as the next guy, a rebel tomboy in black leather, showing that girls aren’t sissies — they can do anything. “When I was a kid, really small, I saw my brother go to the bathroom. I’ll never forget it. I tried it too... I stood over the toilet and tried to ‘do it’ the same way. My mother came in and tried to explain. I was outraged and demanded to know if he did it, why couldn’t I? I’m 23 and , still haven’t changed — I want to know why I can’t do it all.

“I want chicks to say, if she can do it, so can I — I’ll bet anything there’ll be three or four girls imitating me by the end of next year.”

There oughta be, because Suzi is raking in the British teens’ lunch money. She has had five consecutive hits in England, and has sold several million records. But there is nobody like Suzi, no one to compare with her rough and tumbling brand of rock. She was born in a town that nurtured Grand Funk, the MC5, Iggy and the Stooges, the Amboy Dukes, and all of Motown. Suzi is a motor baby, weaned and choked on the fumes of the Motor City, where there was no room for a sissy in that league of rock and roll. The rules are simple — full throttle and floor it.

From the days when Suzi was “shaking a tail feather” with the rest of the Pleasure Seekers, she was bending those boys’ fenders, earning a reputation as a prime p. teaser along the way. “That was Jbecause none of us used to sleep around. We’d be out doing our act in short skirts and thigh high boots, and then we’d go home alone. You know how it was if you didn’t put out... and I’m still a virgin,” she adds coyly.

For seven years the Pleasure Seekers worked at the seamier side of the music scene. Smokey bars, strip joints, army bases. You learn a lot on the road — about playing pool, bawdy drunks, staying in cheap motel rooms. Most of all you get that beat. But Suzi got out of girl bands. “Too many chicks were only in it for the glamor,” she explains. When she hooked up with Mickie Most, she threatened to surface with two male go-go dancers to show who was making the music and who was shakin’ that thing.

"I'll bet anything there'll be three or four girls imitating me by the end of next year."

“It makes no difference to me what sex I am. You’ve got to forget that, you’re a girl, and you’ve got to forget that it’s a novelty for a girl to play.” Maybe it’s easy for Suzi to forget, but those panting, heaving fans lining the stage are sure of her gender. Slobbering on the stage lights, they’ve unofficially touted her as rock’s newest sex symbol. It’s been a long time since a female has stolen that title from those super star studs.

“Being a sex symbol is the furthest thing from my mind,” she insists. “I’m going out there to rock and roll. I’m just a musician who wears leather suits, and that I’m a girl is just a happy coincidence.

“You can’t separate sex from rock and roll because rock and roll is sex. When you play rock and roll you move every part of your body because that’s what feels right. I don’t go out there and plan to be sexy, I just stomp.”

She reluctantly admits that the sexual association is probably a result of her black leather. In her leather jump suits, zipped down to there, Suzi looks like no garage mechanic you’ll ever see. Penthouse ran a spread of her in the skin — her leathers, that is. Suzi was fully clothed in tight, white leather.

“I’d never pose nude. I’m not spending my life trying to be accepted as a musician and then do the most blatant female thing I could do — pose nude. It doesn’t take any talent to take off your clothes. I don’t think girls are sexier with their clothes on, but for years girls havebeen taking their clothes off. Now, how many times can you look at a pair of tits and still get excited. If you’re going to do that, have the guys strip because that’s what I want to see. I think it’s only fair. I get tired of looking at tits. I want to look up and see something else.”

Suzi’s fans are mixed. She doesn’t have the large lesbian following of, say, Anne Murray, but they do make up a portion of her audience. “It’s only natural,” she admits, “if you’re gay, I’m a girl up there doing a butch thing, and you’re attracted.” The butch thing, as she calls it, has earned her comparisons to male rockers like Fabian, Jim Morrison, and Elvis. She calls it unisexual appeal. Jagger has it, Bowie too. Anita Pallenberg and Bianca. Suzi describes it as “riding the middle line.”

I call it balls. She’s the motorcycle moll, the tough rider who’s not afraid to fight, who is cool and remote, yet still vulnerable. “I’m afraid to be on the other side of the generation gap. I’ll probably be 40 years old, playing rock and roll, wearing a leather and saying fuck. Like Elvis — that’s what I’m going to do if I can manage.”

Creem