“In a second”: The Beatle George Harrison said would have joined the Traveling Wilburys
After the split of the Beatles, things were messy and complex and stayed messy and complex for a long time. As they all splintered off into their solo projects, it became a strange web of collaborations or complicated maps of who would work with who and who wouldn’t. Often, one of the other members would pop up in the liner notes of another’s album, playing on some track or another. But when George Harrison joined the Traveling Wilburys, that was all his own – even if he knew some of his old bandmates would have loved to be involved.
Take a deep breath, and we’ll dive in. Ringo Starr played on John Lennon’s solo debut, George Harrison played on Image. Lennon contributed some claps to All Things Must Pass. Harrison added some guitar to Starr’s third album. McCartney kept himself to himself till the 1980s, when he finally called up Starr for some drumming. And so it goes on.
The men naturally stayed in each other’s orbit despite the rocky split. Even in tense periods of hostility, there would never be a way to separate them. Publicly, their names would forever be tied together, but those ties couldn’t even come close to the personal and emotional ones. Everyone knows how all-consuming it is to fall out with a friend or how close friendships stay with us. Now imagine that times 100 when those friends are the people who learnt to make music with, the whole world brings them up with your every move, and no matter what you do in your career, the foundation of your musical mind will always have their shape.
That’s the situation the Fab Four were in, but when George Harrison joined the Traveling Wilburys, it felt like a moment when he was finally completely standing on his own feet by refusing to hold the door open for anyone else.
It was a supergroup born spontaneously. Harrison and Jeff Lynne have been working together, and when they needed to borrow some equipment, they landed in Bob Dylan’s studio. All friends and peers somehow picked up Tom Petty and Roy Orbison on the way, and after a few jams, the band was born. It wasn’t overthought, and to Harrison, that’s why it worked, “I think people got stuck in a concept of what the record business is, whereas, with the Wilburys, it was just something that was very flippant,” he said, “I think that comes across, just the playfulness of it. We don’t really give a damn kind of attitude.”
But it was also, specifically, something he was doing on his own. According to Tom Petty, though, the topic of the Beatles often came up. “He was very funny, like, “The Beatles, they weren’t all that they were cracked up to be [laughs]. He loved the Beatles,” he said, “He used to bitch sometimes about individual Beatles who got on his nerves. But he really loved them down deep, and I knew this.” In the classic way that old, somewhat estranged friends often bring each other up, the names of his old bandmates were often heard in the Wilburys’ rehearsal space.
Now, standing on his own in this new project, the memory of his old mates was still there. One member in particular lingered loud in the room. Petty recalled, “He looked up to John so much. He said, ‘Oh, John would be a Wilbury in a second.’” This was 1988 though, Lennon was gone.
Maybe a part of Harrison needed this new band of brothers during a period of grief. Maybe he wanted to do something alone, apart from those old bandmates, but still have a collective around him—meaning that he didn’t introduce McCartney or Starr into the supergroup despite how momentous that would have been. Either way, the Wilburys worked, set apart from the complex map of post-split feelings and collaborations.
