The best writer the Traveling Wilburys ever had: “He could make it better”
The sheer pedigree in a band like the Traveling Wilburys feels impossible.
There was no chance that a band with this many legends could have possibly existed, but when George Harrison had the right idea for what he wanted, he was willing to move mountains in order to get it right. But even when the band were making some of the greatest rock and roll tunes that they could on each of their albums, there were more than a few times when they could take a back seat to the true professionals in the band.
But it’s not like they were ever in danger of stepping on each other’s toes or anything. All of them had the good sense of checking their egos at the door whenever they played, and even though some of their colleagues, like Mike Campbell, were a bit wary about even joining them for a few seconds, that didn’t stop them from having a laugh whenever they made some of their records. Their whole MO was about having a good time, but there was no chance that they were competing with each other.
Because if we’re talking about raw vocal tone and timbre, Roy Orbison would have probably won every single time they performed. All of them were in awe that he actually managed to agree to join when he did, and even though they picked the right voice that suited the tone of the song they were working on, no one would have argued if they decided to build the entire band around Orbison.
Then again, all of them seemed to fall into particular roles. Tom Petty was the new kid who could throw in the occasional great line, Harrison was the one who kept the good times rolling and brought his own sense of spirituality into the mix, and Jeff Lynne was the one producing everything to a high-polished sheen. But in the context of the rest of the band, Bob Dylan seemed to be a little bit wary of what he had got himself into when they first started.
The thought of working among the biggest artists in the world was a bit daunting for him, but the rest of the band were more in awe of the folk icon than anyone else. Dylan was practically a piece of American culture in many people’s minds at this point, but even if he felt out of his element more than a few times during that first album, Petty remembered that Dylan would always have an endless amount of great one-liners that could find their way into almost any of the songs.
There was a round-robin style of lyric writing going on, but Petty was aware that Dylan made almost any song better when he had a good idea, saying, “I had never written more words than I needed, but he tended to write lots and lots of verses, then he’ll say, this verse is better than that, or this line. Slowly this great picture emerges. He was very good in The Traveling Wilburys: when somebody had a line, he could make it a lot better in big ways.”
That wasn’t lost on the rest of the band, either. Even though Harrison was part of the biggest band on the planet, he was always studying how Dylan worked half the time, even mentioning that he and Lynne weren’t nearly as steeped in American culture as the folkie was when penning a song like ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’.
But Dylan never wanted to be considered too untouchable for the rest of the band, either. For a brief moment in time, he was just one of the guys out to have some fun, and even though he was going through a major shift in his career at the time, it wasn’t out of the question for him to begin working on a handful of lines that could blow away virtually anyone in the band when he wanted to.
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