Suzi Quatro Deems Her Continued Omission from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 'Really Dumb'

Whenever the latest list of nominees for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame emerges, there are inevitably artists who express their dissatisfaction about not having gotten the nod. More often than not, however, that dissatisfaction only ends up being expressed as a result of a music journalist approaching one of those artists and asking, "So how do you feel about not being nominated?"

As a groundbreaking female rocker, Suzi Quatro has been asked this question more than once, so when this year's list of nominations emerged and proved to be decidedly Quatro-less, it was only a matter of time before someone posed it again...and, as ever, her continued - and somewhat understandable - annoyance came shining through.

“It is actually funny to me now," Quatro told Australia's Daily Telegraph. "And I think I’m in more salubrious company not being in it. I say it’s really dumb, it just doesn’t make sense, you know? I mean, I was the first one, so duh. Either they do it or they don’t. I just don’t care.”

Quatro's annoyance with her omission became palpable after one of her female rock predecessors, Joan Jett, was inducted in 2015.

“(Jett) deserves to be in — she’s an excellent artist — but it’s disgusting that I’m not,” Quatro told Billboard in 2019. “I’m a real stickler for the truth, and I’m p**sed off that history is being rewritten. I was first, right? I was there before anybody else had a twinkle in their eye — that’s a fact of life. I’m happy that I opened a door because that door needed to be opened. I’m so proud of that, and I get thanked by everybody — all the girls, they all say ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you…’ I said in in very early interviews there would be loads of (women) after me and there were. I’m happy about that, absolutely."

“I think it’ll happen eventually – maybe soon now,” she told New Musical Express later in 2019. “It really is remiss of them. How can they not have me in there? I was the first. And that’s what they stand for. It’s dumb of them but maybe they’ll fix it. I’ve got enough awards to keep me going but I only get annoyed because it’s just disrespectful not to honour the first female to have success. It’s just stupid to me! I’ve stopped trying to understand it!”

Although still annoyed about the situation during a 2020 interview with Yahoo, Quatro did manage to have a laugh about the passage of time, asking, “How many years before I get too old to walk up and accept my award? Give it to me!”

Many have rationalized that the reason behind Quatro's continued failure to make her way onto the list of nominations for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame may be the fact that her chart success in the US has been considerably less significant than in the UK, where she topped the singles chart twice - first in 1973 with "Can the Can," then again in 1974 with "Devil Gate Drive" - and found top-10 success with "48 Crash" (No. 3), "The Wild One" (No. 7), and "If You Can't Give Me Love" (No. 4).

That said, Quatro did have at least one top-10 hit in the US, albeit as part of a duet with Chris Norman of the band Smokie: "Stumblin' In" went to No. 4, providing her with the only US top-40 hit of her career, one which is - as anyone familiar with her discography knows - absolutely in no way representative of the average Suzi Quatro song.

In a 2014 interview with Popdose, Quatro acknowledged that having such comparatively limited commercial success in her native land was frustrating, but that the success elsewhere served as a salve.

"To be honest… I was still selling a lot of records," said Quatro. "I mean, I’ve sold 55 million. So I guess I’d get a little bit p**sed off, but then at the end of the day, I was still there touring, and I still had my following, so I kind of went, 'Oh, well, it’s more like a cult thing over here.' Whatever. It is what it is. You can’t allow yourself to mind one thing when you’re having so much success on another thing. People still know who I am."

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