“I look down, I see the empty pit, and I see a bass guitar against the wall. I said, ‘Right, I’m gonna show you guys what I’ve got’”: When a teenage Suzi Quatro laid down a marker by jamming with Jeff Beck and Cozy Powell

Suzi Quatro has never been an artist to sit shyly in the corner, and her impromptu jam with Jeff Beck and Cozy Powell while still a teenager proves just that.

Quatro, 75, was a trailblazer for women in rock when she first burst onto the scene with her self-titled debut album in 1973. An expansive tour opening for Alice Cooper soon followed, helping establish her in a male-dominated genre.

But even before she was a solo artist, she was doing everything she could to throw down the gauntlet. When she heard that producer Mickie Most (the Jeff Beck Group, the Animals, Hot Chocolate) was coming in town to record at Motown Studios with Jeff Beck and Cozy Powell, they were convinced to go see her family band, Cradle.

“This is a great story,” she tells Rock & Roll High School. “We do our set, and I was Miss Attitude with a vengeance. I didn't hear this till years later, but Jeff Beck apparently nudged Mickie while I was playing and singing, and he went, ‘Mickie, bass player,’ Mickie said, ‘I got it already.’ So when we were done, Mickie motioned for me to come back, and we sat in the little seats there, and he said, ‘I want to record you in London.’”

But just impressing influential people wasn’t enough. She wanted to prove her worth alongside them. Most invited her down to Motown Studios after the gig, and she seized her chance to play with two elite-level musicians without an ounce of fear.

“I didn't stop and think about it,” she recalls. “I'm up in the control room with the three guys, and I look down, and I see the empty pit, and I see a bass guitar against the wall. Me being me I said, ‘Right, I’m gonna show you guys what I’ve got.’ Well, I started to play, and then Jeff came down, and then Cozy came down, and we started doing [the Meters song] Cissy Strut.”

The pit was a room already fabled for the number of funk classics it had produced. Not to mention that the bass guitar she'd grabbed belonged to James Jamerson.

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“How cool is that?” Quatro says. “How many musicians can say that?”

Jamerson is her primary influence, and she was practically “weaned” on his records. During an early meeting with the low-end legend, he told her that her playing wasn’t bad “for a white chick.”

For a generation of musicians, Quatro was one of the few female role models in the rock world, and she paved the way for bands like Girlschool, who worshipped at her altar, to follow in her footsteps.