Did the Traveling Wilburys rip off ELO for their first hit?
The Traveling Wilburys didn’t really need to worry about putting together a great tune whenever they played.
They were five of the greatest songwriters of their generation, and even if the whole thing was thrown together as a goof by George Harrison and Jeff Lynne when they had the idea, it didn’t take long before it started getting more serious when Roy Orbison agreed to join them. This was the band that both of them had always wanted to be in, but Harrison could take a few pages out of his friends’ playbooks when working on some of their first major hits.
Then again, it’s hard for any singular person to take credit for any of the Wilburys’ tunes. Every one of them were contributing something whenever they worked on a tune, but even if the lyric sheet was passed around more than a few times, it’s easier to figure out which lines were written by Bob Dylan compared to Harrison, for instance. But in the background, Lynne was really the puppetmaster behind everything.
His work with ELO was the reason why he caught Harrison’s eye when working on Cloud Nine, and while working on tunes like ‘End of the Line’ were the furthest thing from their minds when making that record, ‘Handle With Care’ was the first time where they felt like they had a different kind of magic on their hands. Orbison’s voice sounds absolutely heavenly on the bridge, but when you look at the main riff of the song, Harrison may have been paying a little bit too much attention to Lynne’s model.
Which is hilarious knowing how much Lynne was pulling from The Beatles every time he made a record. There was already an ongoing joke that ELO was covering the ground that The Beatles never got to cover in the 1970s, but aside from their massive hits like ‘Telephone Line’, there’s a little bit more than influence going on when listening to the song ‘10538 Overture’ from their first album.
Both that tune and ‘Handle With Care’ are fantastic tunes on their own, but each of them share the exact same riff as the vehicle for the song. That descending figure is nothing new in the rock and roll world, and Harrison had even used it a fair bit like when he wrote pieces of Cream’s ‘Badge’ back in the day, but if you listen to both tracks side by side, even the rhythm is the exact same, only this time Harrison and Lynne ended up putting a shuffle beat behind their version of the tune.
ELO’s version sounds a lot more larger-than-life compared to the Wilburys, but the more rootsy approach actually suits the song a lot better. Every member of the band was only too happy to be playing together, and even if it wasn’t the most original lick in the world, Lynne would have gladly said that getting Orbison on the tune practically brought it up a few notches in his mind for the sound of his voice alone.
In fact, using that riff might have been Lynne’s small way of rewriting history in a sense. He never cared much for the early days of ELO once he started working on their pop hits, so being able to recycle one of his old tunes and make it one of the first major smashes for the Wilburys probably never stopped being a thrill for him, even after he coached Orbison through ‘Not Alone Any More’.
There’s a fair bit more similarities than most people would like to admit, but there’s a good reason why no one would have wanted to take legal action for the song by any stretch. Every member of the band was on a different label at the time, but there’s no real reason that someone could be accused of stealing from themselves when Lynne was already a member of the group.
