“So amazing”: The best Traveling Wilburys song, according to Jeff Lynne
The fact that the Traveling Wilburys got together at all feels like a beautiful mistake.
Even though every band member could have kept on doing their solo careers without a care in the world, the idea of bringing each of them together for an album’s worth of tunes was a match made in rock and roll heaven. While any song made by the supergroup usually constituted a good time, Jeff Lynne believed that one tune summed up most of what the group were all about.
When they first started getting together in the late 1980s, there was no real idea for putting together a group. As George Harrison began working on his album Cloud Nine, he started collaborating with the ELO frontman behind the scenes, producing soon-to-be hits like ‘Got My Mind Set On You’.
For as much as Harrison and Lynne may have worked well together, they had a partner in crime in Tom Petty, who would later call upon the duo to add various pieces to his solo debut, Full Moon Fever. Once Harrison needed a B-side for one of his singles, the trio started to come up with material before deciding to get rock legend Roy Orbison to sing one of the breaks.
Recording at Bob Dylan’s home studio, Harrison’s label thought the song was too good to be put out as a B-side, convincing the group to write another handful of tunes. So, relocating the beer-sipping operation to producer Dave Stewart’s house when he was out of town, the band would spend time woodshedding songs by bouncing lines off each other, from Orbison’s excellent ‘Not Alone Any More’ to the pop bombast of Harrison’s ‘Heading For the Light’.
“The Wilburys was fun,” George Harrison would later tell Al Aronowitz. The pressure was off, too. “You can hide behind each other’s backs and maybe write lyrics that you maybe wouldn’t write on your own,” he continued.
Adding, “I thought that was fun. I like that last album we did. […] It took six weeks to write it, record it and mix it, everything. It’s really good because you tend to get bogged down doin’ solo albums. You get used to doin’ it over and over until you lose the point. So, it’s a little rough… It’s got that more natural feeling.” That ethos gave their songs an infectious sense of enthusiasm.
But there was plenty of naivety abounding, too. When the group were putting together the first song, Harrison didn’t have a clue what he was going to call it. Once Dylan asked the former Beatle what it would be called, Harrison got the title ‘Handle With Care’ by accident, looking around the room to find out what to name it when he saw a crate with the phrase marked on it.
Opening up the record, the song has all the hallmarks of what many would expect from such a supergroup. Starting with Harrison’s verses, Orbison answers him with his operatic vibrato before Petty and Dylan chime in with the backing vocals for the post-chorus. Even though the song doesn’t follow any conventional pop structure, every piece of the song is a hook by itself, culminating in Harrison’s lyrical slide guitar solo towards the end of the tune.
When talking about the legacy of the band later, Lynne would eventually single out ‘Handle With Care’ as one of the ultimate Traveling Wilbury tracks, saying, “‘Handle With Care’ was the first one that George had half-written. That one contains, for me, all the elements of the Wilburys at their best.”
He proudly continued, “What a thrill that first one was. When we struck up and the voices were coming down, and Roy was singing with Tom Petty. It was so amazing”. Given these guys were all flushed with hits anyway, that buzz is a startling thing to imagine.
Even though the band would only create one more album following Orbison’s tragic passing, every member would have fond memories of working with each other, with Harrison referring to the group as “his other band” until the day he died. While many artists never have the opportunity to work among their heroes, ‘Handle With Care’ marked the moment when the stars aligned for some of the finest songwriters in rock to come together.
The rest, as they say, is ancient history. And the classic track bears all the timeless hallmarks of the magic that brought it to buzzing fruition. Not to mention how bloody catchy it is to boot.
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