I discovered Wyckham Porteous in a very un-folk way: while working in commercial radio as a rock ‘n’ roll-loving teenager.
I was taking night classes in BCIT’s radio broadcasting program, and the then-music director of CHQM, Clara Carotenuto, came to speak to the class.
She mentioned going to a showcase by Penta Records, the short-lived imprint run by Bryan Adams’ manager, Bruce Allen, and seeing him there.
Wyckham, who died on Aug. 17, was, believe it or not, one of Allen’s signings.
He wasn’t right for her station, Clara said. But she was impressed.
So the name stuck in my mind. After all, how can you not remember the name “Wyckham Porteous?”
Eventually, I came upon his song “Farewell to Brooklyn.”
It’s an allegorical number about a woman chasing happiness around the world without ever realizing it was there all along in what she left behind.
It’s sad, uncomfortably relatable, and written in a plain-spoken style with a literary novelist’s attention to detail.
It was sung in a truly distinctive, resonant, slightly world-weary and expressive voice that had no obvious parallel.
A handful of years later, I was looking for a place to go for a date with the woman I had just started seeing, and Wyckham had a show at the Railway Club in Vancouver.
I knew exactly one of his songs at that point. But my date and I were transfixed by his performance as we sat holding hands and grinning at each other across the table.
That night at his show was the start of a seven-year romance, and a few years in, my then-girlfriend found Wyckham’s Penta release in a sale bin at a record store and bought it for me as a gift.
That relationship ended decades ago, but my relationship with Wyckham’s music did not.
He was an uncommonly gifted songwriter. His melodies travelled in unexpected directions and culminated in truly memorable hooks.
The songs were like gut punches, character studies of ordinary, flawed people, trying to find an illusive “something better” – like the musician on “Somebody Gonna Dance” who leaves his wife at home to descend into alcoholism while he pursues success; the wandering young man in “Looking for Ground,” a song Wyckham allegedly wrote for his son; or the popular woman and the local eccentric in “Martha” who never really allow themselves to settle down together.
But others, like “Are We Not Young Enough” and “Kids Are Gonna Be Alright” assured us that Wyckham experienced mature love and happiness just as sure as he understood emptiness.
Wyckham’s music displayed a rare understanding of human emotion and the human condition.
He was orders of magnitude more talented than many people who achieved more success, and yet he has no Wikipedia or Canadian Encyclopedia entry, no gold record, no Juno, no high profile cover versions of his songs.
What’s more, I worked full-time in the Canadian folk scene for 20 years, about half of it in Wyckham’s stomping ground of East Vancouver, yet I never met the man let alone knew him. We became Facebook friends in the way that people sometimes do when they share a network. That was it.
I have no idea why Wyckham never became famous despite obvious talent, the backing of people like Allen and the much more favourable conditions in the industry at the time that could have lifted him relatively easily.
But perhaps the clues exist in his own songs, in which pursuing dreams is sometimes seen as a kind of folly that pulls people away from the joy and love already present in life.
Perhaps Wyckham, in the words of the title of one of his albums, was simply looking for ground.
Besides, what is success really?
Some 40 years after I first heard his name, this writer who never met the man is sitting here sobbing recalling how his music moved her and how his songs will forever be associated with happy memories.
I’m quite confident I’m not the only one, and maybe that’s enough.
