Earlier today I had a sudden realization and posted a comment to yesterday’s post about Shakers.
That realization was that many years ago, at Sunday Night Coffeehouse on the campus of the State University of New York College at Purchase, three friends of mine who were performing under the name the Tom Vick Trio (their names were Pat, Jack, and Olivia) were joined on stage by the actual Tom Vick.
The reason for this was so that they could perform a song which the actual Tom Vick described as having been “written by a very famous Shaker, Michael Landon, and another very famous Shaker, Lou Reed.” This song, it was said, was about the chair on which Jack was sitting.
It was a song about a Shaker and his workshop. It was called, as is this post, “Sweet Chair.”
The entire reason for revisiting all of this in a post of its own, rather than leaving it as a comment on that earlier post is this: I’ve found my audio cassette of the Tom Vick Trio concert.
Which, of course, means that I can make available an mp3 of “Sweet Chair” (6.7 MB). As far as I know — and unless they played at some point after I left behind my college “career” — this is the first time the Tom Vick Trio has been heard outside of that Coffeehouse performance.
As the song says: “Anyone who’d swear off sex to make furniture must truly love his work, and truly be a Shaker”
