DAVID WIFFEN
The Canadian singer-songwriter – and cognoscenti’s choice – resurfaces to talk road travails, fate and cult fame.
“I smoked a lot of hash and pot.” DAVID WIFFEN
SOMETIME IN the ’70s, singer-songwriter David Wiffen was support act on a six-week tour of Ontario when, in front of a packed house, he heard the main act open his set with a song he dedicated to Wiffen. It was called Everybody Loves A Loser.
Declining to name his nemesis, an angry Wiffen (“thank God I had lots of hash and a good book”) reacted the best way he knew how. He wrote his own song – Fugitive, with the opening line, “Funny how a song can sometimes rob you of your pride.” The triumphant outcome would have been for it to become a major hit and transform his career. This didn’t happen. Instead Wiffen, whose long-lost first album At The Bunkhouse
Coffeehouse is reissued this month, disappeared, awaiting rediscovery as a cult hero. “Cult hero?” he says. “I’m glad to be any kind of hero. To know my music is still relevant and is still played and enjoyed. My songs seem to withstand the test of time.”
Rediscovery came in part from various covers – Roger McGuinn, Cowboy Junkies, Black Crowes, Tom Rush, Jerry Jeff Walker and Rumer among them. “I like all the covers, but the Cowboy Junkies’ version [of Lost My Driving Wheel] stands out. I think of myself as a vessel through which music passes.”
Wiffen is closely identified with the great generation of Canadian songwriters that included
Gordon Lightfoot, Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell and Ian & Sylvia Tyson, yet his story began in Surrey, England where, inspired by Lonnie Donegan, he built his own stand-up bass and joined the Black Cat Skiffle Group. When his father got a job in Toronto, the family emigrated to Canada.
He hung out at Toronto folk haunt the Village Corner. “There were only a few of us and we were absolute beginners,” says Wiffen, “but we paved the way in Canada. It was a collecting point for visiting artists like Paul Stookey and Bob Dylan. I lived upstairs so I played every night, performing
until at least 4 or 5am.”
In 1965 he went to Vancouver to join other musicians recording a sampler album, but a major snowstorm stopped anyone else making it, so he recorded At The
Bunkhouse Coffeehouse by himself in three hours. Only a hundred copies were pressed, and it swiftly became a silly-money collectors’ item tagged “the holy grail of Canadian folk” (“A fluke,” says Wiffen). He later joined bands The Children and 3’s A Crowd before he got a call to go to California to make 1970 solo album David Wiffen. “I got quite a bit of writing done while I was there,” he recalls. “I spent time with Denny Doherty in LA, and smoked a lot of hash and pot.”
He made one more album,
Coast To Coast Fever, toured incessantly, and then got out, supporting his family, for a time, as a limo driver. His next album was 1999’s South Of Somewhere, with the Songs From The Lost and Found collection following in 2015.
“It was fun while it lasted,” Wiffen reflects today. “I wish I’d done more concerts instead of bars and night clubs. My music is meant to be listened to – preferably in silence.”
At The Bunkhouse Coffeehouse is reissued by Mapache.