Workin’ At The Car Wash Blues (1973) – Jim Croce

(Part Three of the Damned If You Work and Damned If You Don’t hexology)

Although he envisions inevitable white-collar success if given the chance, his daily grind is strictly blue-collar tedium. Such is Jim Croce’s plight in “Workin’ At The Car Wash Blues,” the grousing of a man who paints a not-so-sympathetic picture of himself with a palette of country blues boogie: he’s shirked his spousal/child-support obligations; he’d loaf as an executive and hassle his secretaries. To be sure, he’s incredulous that his untapped genius is wasted doing such menial work, that his just deserts elude him for the time being. But, despite the fanciful outlook of his reveries, it’s the string of adjectives he strews in the song’s hook that convey the depths of his “steadily depressin’, low-down, mind-messin’, workin’ at the car wash blues.”

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