The 1988 song the Traveling Wilburys called the best: “It was too good”
The stars usually needed to be aligned in just the right way to get a band as perfect as the Traveling Wilburys.
The entire group seemed to be charmed in a certain way from the moment that they started playing together, and when they all got together to make an album, it was like listening to a bunch of friends having a jam and playing whatever tunes came into their heads. And while there were no real stakes in making the record, all of them knew that they had something special when the right song came along.
But it’s not like the band could agree on every single thing that they were working on. They weren’t going to throw their egos into the mix every single time they wrote one of their songs or anything, but it took a lot of hard work to turn in some of their classic songs. Sometimes there would be tunes that could be recorded in a few hours, but there were also tracks like ‘Not Alone Any More’ that Jeff Lynne spent days working on until it sounded absolutely perfect with Roy Orbison’s voice.
And while Orbison’s death did put a wrench into things, the band did have some conflicting thoughts about how their sophomore record turned out. While Dylan felt that the whole thing sounded a lot more ramshackle in a good way, Lynne felt that there was never really any need for them to be making the same kind of tunes now that one of their leaders was gone. But at the very least, you could still feel that the four remaining members were trying to at least have some fun.
Because that’s what the album was really all about. George Harrison didn’t get another band together just to go through the same problems that he had in The Beatles, and a lot of their best work came from them just adding the right notes to their songs. And they would have been able to get that same sense of camaraderie if it wasn’t for them working on songs like ‘Handle With Care’ at the very beginning.
The whole thing seemed like a miracle when Harrison first put together the idea, and while Dylan was willing to use his studio and Orbison showed up to watch, there was an electricity in the room from the moment that all of them started working together. The band and the label knew it was too good to be true, and while the song was supposed to be a Harrison B-side, they were simply having too much fun to have it end after one song.
Harrison was already knocked out, and given how everyone else felt after this song, it didn’t take that much convincing on his part to get the rest of the band on board, saying, “I thought, well, not gonna have Roy standing round and not sing on it. I said to Jeff, ‘Gotta get Roy to sing.’ He said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Why not? Why not?’ And then, as it was taking shape, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll get Bob and Tom and Jeff, get ‘em all on this one!’ It was too good to miss, and so I sort of conned them into doing it.”
And judging by what the remaining band members felt about it, it’s not like they needed someone to twist their arms. Lynne called the song an example of the band at their best, and while Tom Petty had a bunch of favourites, he figured that their signature song was the ultimate version of what they did, recalling, “I couldn’t have dreamed that one up. It was so crazy. George was so good in the studio, he really knew how to make a record. It was kind of like a production line. George has some chords, let’s play those and find a melody.”
Nothing about the song could have been thought of in a lab or anything, but in an age where many bands were trying to relive their glory days, the Wilburys were the kind of band that weren’t going to be defined by their legacies. They wanted to have some fun and make music that appealed to them, and while their star power certainly helped, the only thing that mattered was whether or not they were having fun once they started recording.
