The songwriter The Traveling Wilburys could never match: “I don’t think we knew”
There didn’t seem to be many options that were ever off the table when working on a record by The Traveling Wilburys.
Every single member was already one of the greatest in their field, and even if they had moments where one of them hit a snag, it was easy to pass the song off to the person next to them and see what they could do with it. But even though Tom Petty felt like the luckiest member of the group for being able to work with such giants, he didn’t think that the band were capable of doing every single thing that the world expected them to do when they made a record.
For one thing, the band made it a point not to go around the world on a massive tour throughout their career. George Harrison never wanted his new band to feel like work, and while the passing of Roy Orbison was already a body blow to their lineup after the first record, the fact that they worked to make their sophomore release sound great is because they simply had the time of their lives playing together.
But there’s no doubt that Orbison was the glue that held all of them together on that first record. No one would have guessed that they would have snagged one of the single greatest singers of all time, but when listening to Orbison’s smooth voice coming in on a song like ‘Handle With Care’, it almost feels like a ray of sunshine comes through the speakers whenever he starts singing.
Then again, Orbison wasn’t looking to dominate everything. Each song needed to suit one person’s voice better than others, and while ‘Last Night’ was Petty’s moment to shine, he and Dylan were the ones really going back to their Americana roots when making ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’. Or at least that’s what they thought before the media started calling the song a cheeky knockoff of Springsteen.
If you look at the lyrics, you can certainly see how they got that idea. The whole point of the song was to tell one of those rambling stories that Dylan was always so good at, and while the whole thing does take place in New Jersey, the fact that they manage to namecheck a lot of Springsteen classics like ‘Thunder Road’ was purely a coincidence based on what Petty remembered about the session.
Even when talking about the song later, Petty felt that there was no point in trying to make a record when they weren’t engrossed in ‘The Boss’s music, saying, “I don’t think we knew that music well enough to rip it off. Thunder Road, that goes way back beyond Bruce, that was that old Robert Mitchum record. Bob and I wrote most of those lyrics together, and I don’t remember that ever coming up.”
And, really, Springsteen would have been long past the days of those rambling songs, anyway. Although Tunnel of Love served as his own version of Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks around that time, it did feel like a bit of a letdown when the Wilburys were managing to make records that had more in common with Springsteen’s music than the upbeat pop tunes that ‘The Boss’ was trying to deliver a few years later on Human Touch.
The Wilburys were definitely fans of Springsteen’s work to namecheck a handful of his tunes, but it wasn’t like they were actively trying to make a record that sounded like heartland rock – they were much more accustomed to making old-school rock and roll, so why would they need to go back to Springsteen when they were already getting inspiration from people like Carl Perkins?
