The filthiest song the Traveling Wilburys ever made: “Love your sexy body”
The number-one rule of the Traveling Wilburys was to never take anything too seriously.
Though the band members could easily put together one of the best albums ever made if they wanted to, most of them had enough sense to leave their ego at the door and make songs that didn’t have to be the most complex things in the world. They were more than happy to sing about the simple pleasures in life, and while most of their records didn’t need to be that complicated, they could get a little bit nasty when they wanted to from time to time.
Their biggest song up until that point was pretty much put together on a whim, but if ‘Handle With Care’ was proof that they had chemistry, the real test was going to be if they could all work together to get a nice flowing record. And while most of the album does have a few funny songs like ‘Rattled’ and ‘Last Night’, ‘Dirty World’ did have a little bit of a different angle when it came to the rest of the record.
As much as people look at the Wilburys as the most wholesome supergroup on planet Earth, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that this song is about sex. The biggest names in the group were already coming in with tunes where they would just throw lines out to everyone, but when you look at the lyric sheet, Bob Dylan certainly had a specific agenda in mind when he was talking about all of the different members of his gang.
The entire thing was meant to be innocent fun, but when you get to the round-robin ending where everyone starts naming different things that they love about their girlfriends, it’s clearly them filling every line with innuendo. And no matter what George Harrison said about getting the idea from a couple of magazines that were lying around at the time, it’s hard not to think of it in connection with sex.
That said, Harrison does at least state his source of where he got those lines from, saying, “[Bob] just started banging away, ‘Love your sexy body. Ooh, baby.’ And it just turned, you know, like into that tune. And [as] Jeff was saying, we decided to do this thing about ‘he loves your– he loves your–‘ I mean, I don’t know how other people write songs, but that bit… I mean, I just picked up a bunch of magazines and gave everybody a magazine. And Roy Orbison had Vogue magazine. I had some copies of Auto Sport which I think I gave to Bob Dylan. And then we just started reading out things like ‘five speed gear box’. And just wrote down a big list of things. And then we reduced it down to about twelve ones that sounded interesting.”
And since the whole song started off sounding like Prince, is it really any shock that the song ended up leaning towards the sexual angle? It sounds nothing like ‘The Purple One’, but when you’re starting by getting inspired by a man whose catalogue is 90% about sex, you’re not going to get away clean. But even if this was the only song that they specifically wrote about sex, it can’t help but be a little bit funny.
No disrespect meant to any of them, but they weren’t exactly the same sex symbol types that the 1980s were looking for at the time. That didn’t necessarily matter to them, though, and given the fact that the descriptions of what they love about this woman’s body get more and more graphic, it doesn’t take a super sleuth to figure out what kind of slang they’re trying to talk about when they joke about ‘five speed gear box’, ‘clothes that stretch’, and ‘big refrigerator’.
While most other rock and roll legends could have been a lot more filthy when gathering to write a song about sex, there’s something about ‘Dirty World’ that’s almost endearing in a certain way. It might sound a bit more gross if you end up thinking too hard about it, but if Springsteen could manage to make a car sound sexy on ‘Pink Cadillac’, the Wilburys were going to have no problem doing the same thing.
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