The failed supergroup that launched The Traveling Wilburys
The Traveling Wilburys wasn’t something that anyone could have ever dreamed up.
George Harrison didn’t even envision getting every member together when he was first working on ‘Handle With Care’, but sometimes the stars align in just the right way to turn a decent song into one of the biggest opportunities for a supergroup that anyone has ever made. And while the Wilburys were a supergroup in many senses, it was probably a good job that that name didn’t follow them around when they first started coming up with their greatest tunes.
When you look at the biggest supergroups that came before, all of them only managed to stick around for a few years. Cream was known as the greatest band in any line of work, but it only took a few albums before they were at each other’s throats, and even Crosby, Stills and Nash would often have breaks between their records after getting way too temperamental with each other behind the scenes.
But Harrison didn’t like the idea of working alongside a bunch of egos. He just wanted an excuse to play music with his friends, and even when the band did get together, there was no thought of them making a career out of it. They wanted to have a couple of decent tunes that reflected where they were at that particular time, and you can feel them practically smiling through every one of their songs, like ‘Handle With Care’ and ‘End of the Line’.
Then again, Harrison was used to working with some of the biggest stars in the world long after The Beatles broke up. He couldn’t get enough of playing with the right people, and when The Concert for Bangladesh started, he had a smorgasbord of the best players in the world raising money for a good cause. When he tried to do the same thing when playing The Prince’s Trust Concert, though, Harrison first got the bug about playing with a bunch of his friends when Elton John and Eric Clapton performed with him.
With Ringo Starr rounding out the lineup on drums, Harrison remembered getting a few mentions from John that they should put a band together, saying, “The older we get, the nicer we become, or they become, I don’t know about me. They are really good; their egos have all been satisfied. Elton is apparently forming a group of over-40-year-olds, which I’m told I’m going to be in.”
That idea may have ended up falling through the cracks, but given where Harrison would go directly after that, it was clearly still in his head. He had already begun working with Jeff Lynne on his comeback record Cloud Nine, but when you look at the way that The Wilburys unfolded, it did have the same kind of mentality of the content middle-aged rockstars from the time, with Tom Petty being seen as one of the few “kids” in the group.
John might have never got the call to become a part of the band or anything, but Harrison was still open to jamming with people if they were under the Wilburys banner. He definitely needed to sort out who would or wouldn’t be a member of the band, but given what they were all trying to make, it seemed like the order of the day was all about making music that was just about having some fun.
No one needed to take themselves all that seriously, and while John could have found himself in that kind of band later down the line, Harrison felt that he needed to get his group together under the right circumstances. The whole thing almost happened by magic, anyway, but sometimes all it took was that one germ of an idea from one of Harrison’s friends to spark his imagination.
