1974 · Behind the Songs
A posthumous single about the world’s most cheerful dead-end job — Jim Croce turned a daydream at the car wash into a Top 40 comedy-blues.
Nobody wrote about dead-end jobs with more affection than Jim Croce. His songs are crowded with bartenders, truck drivers, pool hustlers, and small-time dreamers — working stiffs whose ambitions are always one size too large for their paychecks. But the funniest entry in his catalog of the daily grind has to be “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues,” a posthumous 1974 single that turns an ordinary shift at the car wash into a three-minute comedy routine with a backbeat. It’s the sound of a man laughing at his own circumstances, and it remains one of the most purely enjoyable novelties the singer-songwriter era ever produced.
The song comes from “I Got a Name,” the album released in December 1973, three months after Croce’s death in a plane crash. Unlike the album’s title track — the Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel movie theme that became a Top 10 hit — “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues” is pure Croce, written in his own hand, in his own voice, about his own people. It’s built like a talking blues: the narrator, a car wash attendant, spends the verses spinning elaborate fantasies about the glamorous life he deserves, while the jaunty shuffle underneath keeps reminding us where he actually is — up to his elbows in soap suds, watching other people’s luxury cars roll by.
Croce knew this world from the inside. Before “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” made him a star in 1973, he had spent a decade in the jobs this song winks at — driving trucks, working construction, playing guitar in bars where the audience talked through his sets. He wasn’t slumming when he wrote about working stiffs; he was writing his autobiography. “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues” belongs to a whole Croce subgenre you might call the dreamer’s lament: the song in which some ordinary guy explains, at hilarious length, why his life hasn’t turned out the way the movies promised. The car wash attendant is blood kin to the pool shark in “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim” and the lovesick caller of “Operator” — all talk, all heart, and all, in the end, stuck exactly where they started.
The record itself is a joy. Cut with his trusted team — producers Terry Cashman and Tommy West, and the irreplaceable Maury Muehleisen on lead guitar — it rides a bouncy, good-humored shuffle, with Croce half-singing and half-talking his way through the verses like a stand-up comic who happens to have perfect pitch. The arrangement is in on the joke: every time the narrator’s daydreams take flight, the band gives him a little lift; every time reality taps him on the shoulder, the groove just shrugs and keeps scrubbing. It’s comic timing set to music, and it reveals a side of Croce — the goofball, the ham, the guy who loved making a room laugh — that his tender ballads only hinted at.
Released as a single in the spring of 1974, “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues” climbed to number 32 on the Billboard Hot 100. It wasn’t his biggest hit, but it may have been his most revealing one. It proved that Croce’s gift wasn’t limited to the story-songs and the love songs — he could be flat-out funny, and audiences would follow him there. And like every Croce single released after September 1973, it carried a poignancy no one intended. Here was a man, gone eight months, cracking wise about a bad job and sounding more alive than most of the living singers on the radio. The laughter in the record made the silence around it that much louder.
The dignity of the joke
What lifts the song above mere novelty is Croce’s refusal to punch down. He loved his characters too much for contempt. The car wash attendant isn’t a fool — he’s a philosopher of the mundane, a man who has figured out that if you can’t escape the grind, you can at least narrate it beautifully. That was Croce’s great subject across all his work: dignity. In “Operator,” it’s the dignity of the heartbroken; in “Time in a Bottle,” the dignity of love trying to outrun time; in “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” the dignity — however misplaced — of a man with a reputation to uphold. Here, it’s the dignity of laughing at yourself, which might be the hardest dignity of all, and the most necessary.
The song also plugs into a deep American current: the comic work song. From “Sixteen Tons” to “Take This Job and Shove It,” pop music has always given voice to the folks on the clock. But where those songs shake a fist at the boss, Croce’s just grins. His attendant isn’t organizing a union or plotting revenge; he’s killing time the best way he knows how — by turning his shift into a story. That lightness is the whole trick. It’s a blues that refuses to feel blue, a complaint that comes out sounding like a celebration. In under three minutes, Croce makes hosing down a sedan feel like the best fun you can have for minimum wage.
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Still on the clock
There’s a particular ache to a comedy record released after the comedian is gone. When “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues” played on car radios in 1974, listeners were hearing a man crack jokes from beyond the grave — and the jokes landed, because Croce’s humor was never about the news of the day. It was about permanent things: the gap between what we dream and what we get, and the laughter we use to bridge it. The song doesn’t need 1974 to be funny. It needs only a tedious job and a lively mind, and the world has never run short of either.
The attendant is still out there, somewhere, wringing out the chamois and dreaming of better. Every time the record plays, he gets his three minutes in the sun — which, when you think about it, is more than most of us get. Croce would have liked that math. He always did like the little guy’s odds.