George Harrison revealed the secret weapon of the Traveling Wilburys: “He gives that edge to it”
A band is always much more than the people out front half the time. The frontman and the lead guitarist might be the ones acting as the group’s mouthpiece whenever they do interviews, but it takes every element of the mix to stand out whenever someone puts together one of their classics. Even though there were hardly any weak links in the chain in The Traveling Wilburys, George Harrison felt that there were some unsung heroes in the mix that not many people brought up as much.
If there’s one person who knew what it was like to be a dark horse in a band, it should have been Harrison. Outside of the album of the same name that he made during his solo career, he was always playing second fiddle to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and by the time everyone started doing their own projects, All Things Must Pass was proof that you should never count out the quiet one when they are left to their own devices.
In the age of The Wilburys, though, Harrison was practically the leader of his own group. Despite always wanting to be one of the band guys that faded into the background, the star power of being in one of the greatest rock acts of all time was enough to make Bob Dylan or Roy Orbison look like other session players by comparison.
But looking at his colleagues, Harrison was the one who was starstruck. Not all of them had the same amount of chart hits as he did, but the former Beatle was already a massive Dylan fanatic before the band even broke up, and when talking about The Wilburys sessions later, everyone said that Orbison towered like a god above everyone else, despite having the softspoken voice that could break your heart.
“If Bob wasn’t in it, it’d turn out sounding a little too smooth.”
george harrison
Of all The Wilburys, though, Tom Petty was always looked at as the new boy. There had been some fantastic musicians to choose from, but the heartland rocker had already proven himself to be a friend of any classic rocker, drawing from the same well of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry as they all had when making his first records. But after losing Orbison after their first album, Harrison thought the core of The Wilburys sound lay in what Dylan brought to the table.
Outside of his brilliant songwriting, Harrison felt that Dylan’s scratchy voice helped the entire project from becoming too soft, saying, “It sounds like the kind of raggedy Bob, or what you expect is just one-off or a second attempt or something. Then, the backing voices smooth it out. That’s quite a good thing because if Bob wasn’t in it, it’d turn out sounding a little too smooth. He gives that edge to it, the roughness, which is really nice.”
That doesn’t stop Dylan’s moments from being more than a little bit funny on the record as well. ‘New Blue Moon’ has this heavenly sound from the way that Jeff Lynne sings the choruses, but listening to Dylan do his strange scat singing in between the verses is so out of place that it practically works as one of the charming aspects of the song.
After all, the whole point behind the band was to make something breezy and have some fun in the studio, and listening to Dylan’s different vocal inflexions really tells you everything you need to know. Because if someone as stoic as Bob Dylan is managing to have fun in the studio, there’s a good chance that nothing could have gone wrong.
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