Icons in Bob Dylan’s garage: The night The Traveling Wilburys met
As far as supergroups go, there are few more massive or sonically seismic than The Traveling Wilburys, bringing together five of the biggest titans in rock with so much thunderous force that it shook the foundations of the genre and then re-laid them to encompass this whole new golden league. The transcendental blazing power of George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, and Tom Petty was never in doubt in many ways – but ultimately, the roots of the band had to start somewhere.
If the five-piece hadn’t had anything less than an instantly electric chemistry, there’s no doubt The Traveling Wilburys would have been an unmitigated disaster, failing to revive certain careers while leaving the legacy of others in total ruin, so it’s fair to say there was a lot riding on it. For this reason, as much as they were all rock icons in their own individual capacities, they had to be absolutely certain that the outfit would work before they attempted to gift it to the world, which meant going back to basics.
Despite the swirl of rumours surrounding the genesis of how The Traveling Wilburys came to be, according to Lynne, the idea was simply born out of his existing partnership with Harrison. He explained in a 2018 interview for Billboard that the pair had been working on the former Beatles’ Cloud Nine album when: “George said, ‘You know what? Me and you should have a group’. And I said to him, ‘Oh, that’s a great idea’. What a lovely thing to be asked to be in a group by George Harrison. And I said, ‘Who should we have in it?’ I don’t know what I was expecting, but he said, ‘Bob Dylan’.”
Quickly adding Orbison and Petty into the mix, Lynne’s next job was to get on the phone and convince the dream lineup. Thankfully, “they all said yes immediately,” he added. But in order to get the ball truly rolling, the rockers had to get in a room together and really hash out their sound.
To do that, Lynne said: “George had half a song done, and then we all convened at Bob Dylan’s garage, which is kind of wacky in itself. He had a little miniature studio in there, and [the song] was called ‘Handle With Care’, and that was the first one we did.”
Garage bands may be the realm of many a nascent after-school teenage outfit ultimately destined for nothingness, but it proves that all you really need to create a monumental group is just a space and a passion for the music. Admittedly, you can imagine Dylan’s garage might be slightly swankier than most, but nonetheless, at their heart, The Traveling Wilburys were a good old-fashioned rock band starting from scratch and grafting to carve out their sound just like the rest of the hopefuls.
Releasing their two albums over the next few years – confusingly enough called Volume 1 and Volume 3 – the Wilburys were undeniably the biggest supergroup to ever grace the rock stage in all the short but seismic period they were together. Now with Lynne and Dylan as the last two surviving members, it’s high time for a new combination of forces to take to the airwaves, though who that might constitute is anyone’s guess.
