“Me and you should have a group”: The conversation that formed The Traveling Wilburys
“Who would be in your fantasy supergroup?” It’s a classic music nerd question, but one that you grow out of pretty quickly, I find. It’s a question normally asked when we’re teenagers. When our musical heroes aren’t real people but gods of rock, sent from a higher plane of existence to change the lives of mere mortals. There’s no question of chemistry, it’s merely maths. A factual statement that if one artist is great, and another artist is also great, then putting them together must make greatness. Except sometimes you get The Traveling Wilburys, where that seems to be true.
With them, we can live in a world without Them Crooked Vultures, or Asia, or Chickenfoot or any of the thousands of so-called “supergroups” that do nothing but let the world know that great music is essentially luck. Sometimes it can work. Boygenius were pretty great at their peak, ditto Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. However, each of them was less of a ‘supergroup’ and more of a band of musicians with chemistry, who just so happened to be successful musicians in their own right.
When you ask the question that opens this article, you’re thinking lineups like “Hendrix, Bonham, Entwistle and Aretha up front.” “Tina Weymouth, Sheila E, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mitski.” “On guitar, Prince. On bass, Prince. On drums, Prince.” The Traveling Wilburys have a lineup like that. I’m sure before the Wilburys debuted, many a starry-eyed kid imagined George Harrison and Bob Dylan forming a band. How many of them in their wildest dreams imagined Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne joining them, though?!
This is fitting because the band came together more or less from one of those conversations about who would be in your fantasy band. Except in this case, it wasn’t between two starry-eyed 14-year-olds high from their first listen to ‘Are You Experienced?’, but two people who could have reasonably called Hendrix a peer in their heyday. For all the star power in the band, the twin engines behind its formation were Harrison and Lynne, who struck up a working relationship in the 1980s that blossomed into a lifelong friendship.
How did The Traveling Wilburys form?
After Lynne produced Harrison’s 1987 comeback record Cloud Nine, the duo wanted to remain working together but as a more evenly matched creative partnership. In an interview with Hot Press, Lynne explained the conversation that got the group off the ground. He said that Harrison turned to him and said, “‘D’you know what? Me and you should have a group.’ I said, ‘What? That’s good. Yeah, I’m in! Who should we have in it?’ And he said ‘Bob Dylan’.”
“Of course, I’m half laughing, but then I realise he’s serious. So I said, ‘Can we have Roy Orbison as well?’ He said, ‘Yeah, we’ll have Roy’, ’cause they used to tour together and we both loved Tom Petty. So we said, let’s have him. And of course, when it’s George Harrison that’s doing it, it was ‘Do you want to join our group?’ and the answer was ‘Yes’.”
A truly charming reminder that, for all my patronising talk of teenage music fans as starry-eyed fans, are we not always those starry-eyed fanboys? After all, if a literal Beatle can form The Traveling Wilburys, essentially his dream supergroup, based entirely on, “I love their music and want to see what happens when they work together”, surely all of us can, right?
