Devil Gate Drive – Suzi Quatro

The first album that I bought with my own money was Slade’s Old New Borrowed and Blue. If my memory serves me right the second might have been a Suzi Quatro album.

Whether that’s true or not there’s no doubting that Devil Gate Drive was one of the earliest rock songs that had a profound impact on young Andrew.

Listening to it now it holds up pretty well.

“Hey, ya’ll wanna go down to Devil Gate Drive”

“Yeah”
“Well come on”

Before the drums have even started on this song a bold declaration has been made.

Suzi is the leader of this gang and she’s going to lead us to this dark and mysterious place that an impressionable 12 year old in Melbourne Australia could not even imagine going. We’re not sure what we’re going to find at Devil Gate Drive but sure as hell it’s going to be more exciting than anything to be found in a suburban bedroom.

By the end of the song there’s plenty of whopping and hollering and you just know that a good time has been had and you feel pretty cool to have been invited. You’re not sure what exactly happened in that forbidden location and in fact there’s nothing in the lyric to suggest that anything actually happened at all! But you had been invited, you were one of the gang and you managed to get through the experience without making a fool of yourself.

You belonged.

Devil Gate Drive was perhaps surprisingly built around a honky tonk piano and a tribal beat with the guitars actually playing a supporting role. It’s got a great chorus, a fist pumping anthemic feel and its sounds like a party on the wrong sound of town.

Try resisting that when your a 12 year old boy from Glenhuntly.