The Traveling Wilburys musician who George Harrison thought was “unbelievable”
George Harrison was always more than The Beatles allowed him to be. The songwriting partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCarney may have been a fruitful one, but it also blocked Harrison’s progress as he struggled to find the right placements for his newly written songs. It wouldn’t be until he left the band that he really hit his stride.
Harrison, of course, had some hits with The Beatles, but it would take his going solo to truly spread his wings and fly into the distance as a fully-fledged songwriter. With his debut album, All Things Must Pass, he found his voice. It was an album for the ages, and, if not only with its mammoth tracklisting, it showcased the sheer breadth of songwriting talent Harrison possessed and the tunes he had amassed over the years.
He spent the following years collaborating here and there with the artists who inspired him, including a brief stint with John Lennon, helping to record his embittered insult ‘How Do You Sleep?’. Eventually, though, Harrison would once again find his way back into a band as he formed the magnetic supergroup The Traveling Wilburys, comprised of Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and the legendary Bob Dylan.
The latter had been a longtime collaborator with Harrison ever since those stifling days in The Beatles, having once famously said: “George got stuck with being the Beatle that had to fight to get songs on records because of Lennon and McCartney. Well, who wouldn’t get stuck? If George had had his own group and was writing his own songs back then, he’d have been probably just as big as anybody.”
When two icons of their fields got together as part of the Traveling Wilburys, Harrison was left in awe of the gifted songwriter, but not just lyricism, how he delivered his songs. “It was just fantastic watching him do it because he had like one take warming himself up, and on take two, he sang ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ right through, and what he did was change some of the lyrics,” Harrison said.
Of course, ever the perfectionist, those takes came with a few changes for Dylan: “Maybe in about four places, he’d change a couple of lines and improve them and drop those lines in. And that was it. The way he writes the words down, like very tiny. Looked like a spider’s written it. You can hardly read it. And that’s the amazing thing. It’s just unbelievable seeing how he did it.”
It was clear that Dylan and Harrison were great friends, but there’s a good chance that the latter was more of a fan of the former’s work than vice versa. “George quoted Bob like people quote Scripture,” Tom Petty said of their friendship. “Bob really adored George, too. George used to hang over the balcony, videoing Bob while Bob wasn’t aware of it. Bob would be sitting at the piano playing, and George would tape it and listen to it all night.”
George Harrison’s career is littered with some of the most incredible musicians of all time. However, few have amazed him quite like Bob Dylan did when he sat down to scribble down some words for The Traveling Wilburys.
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