The 1988 album Tom Petty didn’t remember making: “There wasn’t much time”
The whole premise of the Traveling Wilburys would have felt like a dream for someone like Tom Petty.
He had grown up idolising some of the biggest names in rock and roll, but nowhere in his wildest dreams would he have ever expected to be rubbing shoulders with Bob Dylan and eventually get to join a band with a member of The Beatles. The whole thing felt like it was ripped out of some strange movie half the time, but there were a few records that were so good that they managed to block themselves out of Petty’s memory entirely.
Then again, most people would be drinking in every single moment that they had standing next to George Harrison. It was going to take a lot for anyone not to freak out and start asking him every single Beatles question that they had in their arsenal, but Petty knew the grounds by this point. Harrison was just another friend that happened to be in a huge band, and when he had the idea for another one, it wasn’t about having the best musician for every single track they used or anything.
All they were looking for was to make a solid record of tunes, and a lot of their debut record reflects how they felt jamming together. Everyone would have been happy to be able to swap stories with Dylan or watch Roy Orbison absolutely annihilate one of his vocals, but the whole thing went by so fast that it was to keep track of what they were doing half the time they started playing.
‘Handle With Care’ was already being handled in a day because they needed a B-side for Harrison, but since they had the idea of turning it into a group, they needed a little bit more time to woodshed their tunes. The whole thing only took a few days to lay down since Dylan was going back on tour, but even after Orbison passed away, Petty felt that he wasn’t sure he didn’t just wake up from the greatest rock and roll dream he ever had.
He was still the same person he was a few months before when he began working on Full Moon Fever, but he felt that the whole thing went by too fast for him to even register what was going on, saying, “We started hanging around even more than we were and doing the Wilburys. There wasn’t much time. Reflecting on it is hard because it was all done so quickly. There wasn’t much time to think or make any decisions. We didn’t plan anything. We just started going until it was done.”
In fact, most of the band has the same reaction when looking at those handful of tunes. No one was coming in trying to make the best record of all time, and since they wrote the whole thing within the span of a few days at Dave Stewart’s house, all that most of them have to go on is the video footage from around that time.
The documentary that goes along with their records is still fantastic to watch, but it is more than a little bit funny seeing them all play off each other. Harrison was already one of the biggest Dylan fans in the world, but the idea of one of The Beatles turning into a fangirl is something that simply didn’t happen that much, let alone the rest of the band swooning over Orbison’s songs whenever he sang.
The whole road to The Wilburys might not have been the kind of thing that everyone grasped onto at the time, but it was never a case of them trying to make something that would stand the test of time. All they wanted to make was a great record, and while over half of the band is gone now, most classic rock fans can only smile knowing that they gave us two of the greatest records any supergroup ever made.
