The 1991 album Roger McGuinn chose over Traveling Wilburys: “That was that”
The idea of a band like the Traveling Wilburys feels like some sort of strange miracle.
No one would have expected some of the biggest names in rock and roll to suddenly all become friends and have a band together, and for everyone who had grown up listening to people like George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty, seeing them in a group together would have been the musical equivalent of The Avengers coming together. It feels too good to be true in a lot of ways, but for Roger McGuinn, it kind of was in a sense.
That’s not to say that McGuinn ever had any bad blood with any members of the band. He was a constant presence backstage when Petty played with Bob Dylan on their tours together, and since Harrison was also a presence backstage, the beginnings of the Wilburys were already there without their instruments present. But McGuinn had something else on his mind than a supergroup of his buddies.
The biggest names at the time from his generation were already plotting major comebacks, and who said that he couldn’t do the same thing? Steve Winwood had a lot of great tunes in the 1980s, and John Fogerty had a great return to the charts when ‘Centerfield’ became one of the biggest hits of his career, but there was a lot less for him to work with when he came up with the idea for Back From Rio.
Based on the kind of recording sessions going on at the time, McGuinn seemed to have more stars in his eyes when it came to getting the right songs for his album. Petty had already shown up at the sessions and got into a major fight with one of the representatives from his label about songs he was being forced to play, and while McGuinn could see through that kind of bullshit, he didn’t have enough foresight to realise what he was saying no to after being asked to come down for a jam session.
A lot of the beginnings of the Wilburys were already about trying to find the best people to hang out with, and while McGuinn fit that description perfectly, he wasn’t quite ready for things to work out that way. He had too much time to focus on what he was working on, and when talking about the offer to come along with the Wilburys, he remembered letting his own album get the better of him when he put the phone down.
He could have worked perfectly in the group, but he felt that his strength at that time was writing the best songs he could for himself, saying, “I was in LA, busy building tracks from my Back From Rio album. George invited me to come and live at the house where they were all recording, it was around the corner. I said, ‘I really can’t, because I’m so busy with this pre-production.’ So that was that. You can draw your own conclusions of what might have happened.”
It’s easy to call him an idiot for making that kind of call, but it wasn’t like McGuinn was trying to turn them down. It wouldn’t have been an easy task for anyone to shoehorn their way into The Wilburys, and even when other people were asked to join, like Mike Campbell and Jim Keltner, they would have rather let themselves fade into the background than have the weight of being a member of the supergroup.
McGuinn’s priorities may have been somewhere else, but it does hurt knowing that his jangly guitar would have been the perfect icing on the cake for a song like ‘Handle With Care’. But chances are he keeps repeating the same mantra that he had back in the days when he was making his first hits: ‘To every season, turn, turn, turn/ This too shall pass away.’
