Lover, You Should've Come Over

Did half of Manhattan, at one point, decide that I was Jeff Buckley? In the Nineties, my resemblance to Mr. Buckley was widely noted. I hung out with scenesters who had been his friends and bandmates, too. So: this one's about Jeremy, but I've decided it would be too boring just to do The Smiths or Morrissey again, as usual. The twist is that this piece takes place in the autumn of 1997, in Manayunk. Some the action happens at the La Tazza Coffee-house, a base of operations for Jeremy, 'd' magazine, and the entire Villanova-Manayunk Nineties revolution crowd. The rumor in Manayunk at that time, related to me by an authority, is that, a few months before his untimely death in May 1997, Jeff Buckley showed up at precisely La Tazza to play, unaccompanied, for a few hours. Buckley died in Memphis. Hmm. The whole thing was even more el bizarro because, again on semester break, I myself had shown up at La Tazza to play unaccompanied, in about March 1997. Play I did. Was the whole Jeff Buckley Manayunk thing an urban legend? In any case, the night in question in the piece, Chris and I probably played some of Grace while we were car-bound. Grace, and Jeff Buckley, did take off in the world once Jeff passed. Whether La Tazza really had Jeff there, co-terminous with myself, thirty-odd years later, we may never know. Or whether people in Manhattan called me "Jeff" behind my back. Thank you, Briana and Gina...