The one song that brought the Traveling Wilburys back together: “I can’t remember if it was Bob or Tom”
There was only ever going to be one time period where the Traveling Wilburys could have occurred.
The whole idea was a bit goofy anyway when George Harrison was first starting to get everyone together, but when everyone actually said yes, it felt like the stars had aligned in just the right way when they actually all had a free schedule. It took a small miracle to get all of them together, so it was bound to take an even bigger one to get them to pick up the pieces once one of them passed away.
After all, the camaraderie should have been gone after Roy Orbison passed away. If Harrison was the brains of the whole thing and Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne helped provide the basic skeleton, Orbison was the beating heart when they laid down that debut record. So how the hell were they supposed to simply move on without him?
Well, for a little while, it looked like they weren’t. The number-one rule of every Wilburys session was that everything had to be coming from a place of fun, and when one person isn’t there anymore, the air was going to get sucked out of the room pretty quickly. But when Dylan agreed to work on some new material, there were bound to be a little bit of gas left in the tank for everyone else.
Tom Petty was already on a hot streak with Full Moon Fever, and Lynne’s run of albums behind the board was becoming astonishingly iconic, especially given how well Armchair Theatre ended up sounding. But even if Dylan got the ball rolling half the time, it took a group effort to get that very first song off the ground.
Even though they were separated, the band were always looking to make each song a collaboration between everyone. They had already been throwing lines to each other in the beginning and adding everything on as they went, but despite Lynne’s hesitation about the whole thing, ‘Inside Out’ was the first time they could all look at each other and feel that they had a classic on their hands.
Being the first completed song from the project, Harrison still made sure to keep up that Wilbury humour as well, saying, “I mean, the first one we wrote was ‘Inside Out’. And that was within– I mean, this was from everybody arriving at the house, within an hour, we had that song written. Not the lyrics, but we had the format for the tune. I can’t remember if it was Bob or Tom [who] came up with the idea, ‘look out your window, the grass ain’t green.’ And then, I thought ‘it’s kind of yellow.’ And then somebody else says, ‘see what I mean.’ And then that one became a joke because every time the third line came, it kept being yellow– it’s kind of yellow.”
Then again, there are bound to be a few cynics that listen to ‘Handle With Care’ and think that they’re simply doing the same thing over again. Getting everyone to sing on the chorus like they did on their first hit may have felt a little redundant, but replacing Orbison’s voice with Harrison on the bridge is the musical representation of watching the sun come out, especially when it goes back to Dylan.
Nothing about the tune was intended to sound like a classic, but it was never supposed to, either. All of them had been through a tragedy watching their friend go so suddenly, so being able to hear new music from each other and actually have fun is all that they could have hoped for.
