Man, Do I Like Fridays!



Roy Esser – Can I Pawn My Teeth To You?
Roy Esser – Man, Do I Like Fridays

These tunes form the a and b side of a random-junk-shop-discovery type single I downloaded off the WFMU blog a while ago and rediscovered at random this week whilst browsing through my iTunes.

By and large, I am not one who much enjoys the pursuit of chortling over mystifying ‘Songs In The Key of Z’ type oddities recorded by forgotten lunatics and unfortunate misfits. As such, an inexplicable one-off single featuring a guy who sounds like a drunken pensioner hollering about being so poor he wants to pawn his teeth to get money for something to eat, backed by a low budget recreation of syrupy fifties pop strings, would not usually tend to be my cup of tea.

That though does not take into account the sheer enigma, the raw, unrefined genius of Roy Esser. Roy Esser did not write “Can I Pawn My Teeth To You?”. According to the scanned record label, that honour goes to messrs Kaye and Wilson. (surely not THAT Kaye or one of THOSE Wilsons?) Quite what inspired them to pen such a stupid song I can scarcely imagine, but boy howdy, did they ever find the right guy to sing it!

I would expect that most professional singers of the era, if presented with material like this, would treat it as a comedy number, singing it in a kinda gurning faux-hillbilly fashion over some lolloping, tongue in cheek country n’ western. Not so Roy Esser, who approaches the song with an earnest spirit of open-hearted joy in the face of adversity, with a sense of soaring, implacable faith in the righteousness of human endeavour, that must be heard to be believed. In doing so, he effortlessly transcends his place in the world of music, transforming a bizarre, grotesque parody into an inexplicably moving pop masterpiece, packing more complex, mixed up emotion into 100 seconds of old garbage than the most carefully-wrought of contemporary girl group melodramas. Appropriately, given the toothless theme, I can’t quite hear what he’s saying on the verse that begins “when I go to kiss my gal..”, but whatever it is, it almost makes me weep.

Maybe I’m giving it too much of a build up here. Just take a deep breath, turn this up loud, and let me know what you think.

The flip-side, “Man, Do I Like Fridays” is also well worth your time, exhibiting as it does that that same sense of implacable, universal optimism. If you were to commission a thousand songwriters to each compose a tune called “Man, Do I like Fridays” (perhaps with a ten minute time limit), chances are about 68% of the results would sound exactly like this one. And that would be a wonderful thing, because, MAN, we ALL like Fridays. And at some point mid-way through the twentieth century, Roy Esser approached a microphone with the intention of making sure we will never forget that simple truth.

Does he really sing “Oh I’m always goofing off on Fridays, they always tell me off on Fridays”? Roy Esser, we salute you through tears of joy.

Labels: Roy Esser, song reviews, weirdness