‘You Got It’: Ground zero for The Traveling Wilburys
The whole story of the Traveling Wilburys felt like one of the happiest accidents in music history. No one in the group needed a boost from their bandmates to get back in the limelight, but when they all came together, it felt like watching the old guard of rock and rollers getting together to prove to everyone they could still rock as they did back in the day. Although ‘Handle With Care’ earns a lot of credit for getting everything off the ground, the Roy Orbison song ‘You Got It’ should deserve the title as ground zero for the band.
Because out of all the members of the Wilburys, Orbison was the one who was comfortably out of the limelight for years. While George Harrison intentionally limited the amount of music he was putting out and Jeff Lynne had moved on to the production side of life without ELO, Orbison had become almost a relic of the 1960s, being known as the inspiration for fellow rock legends and the handful of iconic tunes like ‘Crying’, ‘(Oh) Pretty Woman’, and ‘Only the Lonely’.
Then again, the 1980s were a great time to be a living legend from yesteryear. Outside of the Wilburys making waves, John Fogerty was seeing some later success, and even though no one was asking for it, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had a major return to the mainstream with American Dream, which proves that these legends didn’t even need good songs to get back in the public eye.
In terms of Orbison’s album Mystery Girl, though, the groundwork was being laid before Harrison even became involved. The whole process of creating ‘Handle With Care’ came together through happenstance, but looking at the people working on the song ‘You Got It,’ Orbison may as well have been the glue holding everything together at first.
So how did ‘You Got It’ bring The Wilburys together?
Considering where Orbison was in his career, the real catalyst for the Wilburys began with Jeff Lynne. Aside from having connective tissue to Tom Petty’s solo career and Harrison’s, Lynne was helping to get Mystery Girl off the ground when he figured he would help write a song for his idol. Everything was in place, but looking back on how everything worked out, Petty was also instrumental in ‘You Got It’, including showing up at the studio to play guitar and singing background harmonies behind Orbison’s voice.’
While not every member was there yet, all of the embers from The Wilburys’s best material are here. It has the same formula of the prototypical love song to Orbison’s other half, and even though he doesn’t go nearly as high on this one, there are also subtle glimpses of ‘Not Alone Any More’ from the group’s first album, especially in the way that the harmonies overlay on top of each other.
And with Harrison getting an uncredited cameo on background vocals, it’s easy to think of this as a staple Wilburys cut that happened to be left off of their album. Outside of being one of the forgotten gems from one of the greatest supergroups in the world, though, ‘You Got It’ deserves more than that.
This was Orbison also closing the chapter on his career following his sudden death after the Wilburys’ first album came out, and hearing him sounding so lively meant that he knew his luck. He hadn’t lost an ounce of polish on those trademark pipes, and with The Wilburys being right around the corner, ‘You Got It’ became his last wave goodbye to the world as well as a joyous precursor to his “other” band.
