Creativity Quote by Suzi Quatro

Suzi Quatro’s metaphor lands because it refuses the romantic myth of rock as pure charisma. She frames the rhythm section as infrastructure: the bass and drums aren’t “support,” they’re propulsion. Calling them “the engine that drives the car” is a subtle power grab on behalf of the players who rarely get the spotlight but control the physics of a song: momentum, pulse, the body’s involuntary nod. It’s not an abstract theory of music; it’s a working musician’s diagnosis of what actually makes crowds move.

The sting is in the second clause: “everything else is merely colours.” Quatro isn’t dismissing melody or vocals so much as demoting them from command to decoration. “Colours” are what you notice; engines are what you rely on. That inversion is the point. Rock history is full of frontmen treated like auteurs while the groove is flattened into background. Quatro, a bassist who built a career in a male-dominated scene, is also talking about credit: who gets framed as essential, who gets framed as accessory.

Context matters. Coming up in the glam/hard-rock era, Quatro played music that had to hit hard in a live room, where weak low end isn’t a minor flaw, it’s a collapse. The car image also smuggles in a listener’s perspective: if the engine fails, you don’t admire the paint job, you pull over. Her intent is practical, almost blunt: respect the low-frequency labor, because it’s the difference between a song that looks good on paper and one that actually moves.