Jeff Lynne on the happiest time of his life: “The most fun”
While supergroups seem cool on the surface, in reality, life in them seems to be a nonstop cavalcade of drugs, egos and in-fighting. Cream fell apart because Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker wouldn’t stop trying to kill and eat each other. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young lasted a single album as a quartet before their egos destroyed the whole project. The less said about ZWAN, the better. Then, you get The Traveling Wilburys, where Jeff Lynne singlehandedly proved that a bunch of famous people can get together to make music, and it can be genuinely heartwarming.
This mainly came from the fact that the band was built upon a long-standing and very genuine friendship. Jeff Lynne and George Harrison first met in a professional capacity when Harrison was in pre-production on the record, which would later become Cloud Nine. Harrison contacted the Electric Light Orchestra main man to see if he would be interested, and since Lynne had just disbanded the Orchestra to work with his heroes, he very much was.
However, their relationship immediately became a lot closer than professional. As Lynne explained in an interview with NPR, “One of the first things he asked me was, ‘Do you want to go on holiday?’ We’d only just met! I think that he got it, that I was so keen to do this particular thing that I would never give up on it.” Off the duo went to Australia, and they began working on what would become one of the biggest hit albums of that year.
After work was finished on Cloud Nine, though, they wanted to keep going, this time as creative equals. They hatched a plan to not just form a band together but also to at least pitch the idea to their musical heroes and see if they’d be interested, too. Harrison wanted Bob Dylan, Lynne wanted Roy Orbison, and both jumped at the chance. Add the finishing touch of one Tom Petty, and you’ve got the Traveling Wilbury’s. One hell of a stew, I’m sure you’ll agree.
With that level of musical stardom in the room together, maybe the most star-studded supergroup of all time, you’d expect an intense amount of ego in that room, right? Apparently not. Each Wilbury had nothing but good things to say about their experience in the band. Mostly due to the existing friendships that Harrison had with the vast majority of them, but I think it goes deeper than that.
There’s a real argument to be made that a group made up of Bob Dylan, a Beatle, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and the creative force behind ELO is a group of equals. Sure, Dylan and Harrison are the most famous, but they’re both Orbison fanboys who deeply respected his influence and experience. By assembling a group with precisely nothing to prove, they assembled a group that played together for the love of it, and Lynne, in particular, had an amazing time in the band.
When asked in an interview with The Republican about how he feels about his experience of being in The Wilbury’s, he replied, “It was one of the happiest times of my life, one of the most fun times and one of the most astonishing times.” That’s the ongoing legacy of The Wilburys to me. I can take or leave the music, but the guys are clearly having such an incredible time that you can’t help but appreciate them.
