Suzy Creamcheese became Suzy Marmalade because I couldn’t get the rights to use the Creamcheese name from the Frank Zappa Estate. I was crazy about the name, dickered around with Gail Zappa’s lawyers for months and months, but to no avail. As often happens, I now like the Marmalade name better, because the reference to “Marmalade Skies” of Beatles fame has more edge than “Creamcheese.” And that is a big part of who Suzy Marmalade is, she is all about the edge.
I recently read Just Kids by Patti Smith. I take that back, I didn’t read it, I devoured it, I inhaled it, I absorbed it through every pore, I reveled in it. Patti Smith was who I wanted to be, always, but I didn’t have the guts. To be fair, she came from little money and no privilege, no cushion, so it may not have been as hard for her to strike out on her own at a young age. Suzy Marmalade wanted to live with artists just like Patti did, see life as raw and real as it comes and create something of her own from the experience. The rest of me, the rest of the personas who make up “Lynn,” were afraid to go there, so Suzy Marmalade stayed in the shadows, making the occasional foray when the coast was clear. I remember so clearly the few times I stood at the edge—the club on Avenue A in 1985, the all night diner in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, the knife fight in Paris when I was in college. I still prefer the edge, maybe now more than ever. I’d rather hear a raunchy open mic riff than eat at the finest restaurant in the world. I am still not ready to shed the conformist world that I hang out in and move into that loft in the East Village. But I am getting closer.
In a way Suzy is Everyman (or Everywoman). Within every person and perhaps more so every woman there resides a place of uncertainty, of feeling like you are groping your way in the dark, vulnerable to forces you can’t even imagine. I just stayed in touch with Suzy a lot longer and a lot closer to the surface than most people I know. That created some dark times, but it also held open the place of magic and imagination and childlike wonder. “When I became a man, I put away childish things.” No you didn’t. You just parked them in the back of the lot. If you are lucky, the valet brought them up with enough frequency to inspire your life. That’s my journey now—to give Suzy Marmalade free rein, unbridled by social convention or the need for anyone’s approval, to let her inspire me and work her magic on me, until the edge is upon me and I not only step up to it but over.