The five worst Traveling Wilburys songs
It’s hard to imagine now just how exciting it would have been if you’d grown up with all of their music, the first time you heard that George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne had gotten together to record an album under the moniker The Traveling Wilburys. Each member of the group, to varying degrees, was entirely legendary songwriter, performer and musician.
Even if the group only contained one of the great stars of Sun Records, a former Beatle and the voice of his generation, then it would have been hugely noteworthy anyway, but this group contained all three of those things plus two of the brightest writers from the generation that came along after, in Petty and Lynne, for good measure. Throw in drummer Jim Keltner—not as a main Wilbury, of course, but as an acclaimed Sidebury—and you’re surely set with one of the greatest rock groups of all time.
So what do you get when you put some of the finest songwriters, melodists and guitarists in a room together in 1988? Well, you get a great record, of course. A great record bursting with great songs. ‘Handle With Care’, ‘Last Night’, ‘Not Alone Anymore’, ‘Congratulations’, ‘Heading for the Light’, ‘Tweeter and the Monkeyman’ and ‘End of the Line’ would have all put this band on the map, whether the group was made up of the biggest names in rock already or not.
But, as well as their legendary reputations, the elder members of the group all had something else in common, too. None of them had had a particularly favourable 1980s. Harrison hadn’t released a record in five years until Cloud Nine, which reestablished him as a commercial force, but which wouldn’t lead to further solo successes. Orbison had been out of the spotlight for years, as well, and his next solo album wouldn’t be released until after his death, in 1989. Dylan, meanwhile, had been continuing to release music with some consistency, but unfortunately, to consistently and increasingly negative reviews.
So, it’s no wonder that there are a couple of missteps for all the highs on the first album. That’s only natural with any album, but especially so with artists who were not exactly at the peak of their powers. Owing to the success of the first record, the group reconvened for another album in 1990, although, of course, by then, they were a man down following the loss of Roy Orbison. There are plenty more great songs on that second album—‘If You Belonged to Me’, ‘The Devil’s Been Busy’, ‘7 Deadly Sins’, ‘Where Were You Last Night?’ and ‘New Blue Moon’—but for the most part they didn’t hit the heights that they did with Volume 1.
To complain about any songs from such a group feels a little rich considering the talent at their disposal, and the quality songs they put together, but it was those wonderful songs, that wonderful blend of ideas and styles and voices, that made the few songs which fell short seem as bad as they do in the first place.
The five worst songs by The Traveling Wilburys
‘She’s My Baby’
At their best, the Wilburys were an inventive, exciting, humorous, and joyous ensemble that meshed the best aspects of each member’s sounds and styles and singing voices into unexpected and wonderful new material. At the other end of the spectrum, as on this song, they sounded like what you’d expect to hear if the Eagles had been asked to write a new theme tune for Top Gear and had it produced by Jeff Lynne.
Maybe it’s the absence of Orbison—the first song on the first album without him—which makes this one a harder listen than most of the Wilburys’ catalogue, or maybe it’s the horribly insistent, over-the-top hair-metal guitar which embellishes the end of every refrain, or maybe it’s the corny and forced opening lyric from Jeff Lynne which lets it down, but by the end, there is a lot of fun to be had with Dylan hollering the lines “she can build a boat, she can make it float. She can play my guitar note for note. She loves to stick her tongue right down my throat”.
‘Poor House’
Where so much of the first album felt fresh, spontaneous and relaxed, a lot of the second album feels forced and mechanical. These guys could write great songs in their sleep, and that’s why there is still such strong material on the record, but this feels more like they were making an album because the first one went down better than expected, rather than that they were making music because they felt they really wanted to, or that they really had something to say.
‘Poor House’ is by no means a bad song, but it’s also by no means a good one, either. It’s the kind of filler that was clogging up so many albums by stars from earlier eras in the 1980s. You forget you’ve ever heard it as soon as it’s over; it has no great memorable lines or melody, and even the slide guitar which slightly elevates the whole thing can’t completely redeem it. That the song is surrounded on either side by the far superior ‘7 Deadly Sins’ and ‘Where Were You Last Night?’ on the album doesn’t help it’s case at all, either.
‘Nobody’s Child’
One of the rare left-over tracks from the sessions, ‘Nobody’s Child’ is a song about the plight of an orphan and, ironically, is something of an orphan of itself in that it never made it to an official album. Initially released as a standalone single in 1990 and then later as a bonus track on the 2007 compilation of all the Wilburys material (alongside another cover song, and one that is a far-superior performance, in Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’), the song plods along and feels every bit like a warm-up for the session, rather than a performance which was ever destined for an official release.
Originally written by Cy Coben and Mel Foree and first recorded by Hank Snow, Dylan has given plenty stronger performances of Hank Snow songs over the years, meanwhile an early version of The Beatles recorded a much better version of this very song, in Hamburg, with Tony Sheridan on vocals in 1961.
‘Willbury Twist’
In 1958, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters released their latest single, ‘Teardrops on Your Letter’, with a song on the B-side called ‘The Twist’. The song set the world alight and kickstarted the twist dance craze into life. Just like the rest of the world, when the members of the Wilburys were young, they’d have spent many nights twisting away to the song, and though they might have moved on to writing their own lyrics by the time Chubby Checker released his iconic version in 1960 (on this side of the pond where Jeff Lynne was growing up, Checker’s 1961 sequel song ‘Let’s Twist Again’ was a bigger hit), they couldn’t help but notice the impact of the song. Everybody was talking about the twist, and everybody was twisting and shouting (not least, The Beatles).
The final song on the second and last album from the Traveling Wilburys wouldn’t catch on or take off in quite the same way, though. It’s not clear if this is nostalgia, pastiche, parody or satire, but one thing is for sure: the best joke in the song comes in the final lyric, which says that “everybody’s crazy about the Wilbury Twist”.
‘Rattled’
Though a lot of their songs pitched at a sort of 1950s throwback sound which only Roy Orbison was really synonymous with, it’s ironic that the song which gets closest to the real feel of that era is one that he’s not on. Maybe this would have worked better as a song if it was done by Elvis in Sun Studios in the mid-50s, but even then, it would have been one of his tracks which was carried to the top of the charts on the strength of his name, rather than on the strength of the music.
With Jeff Lynne taking the lead, it just feels slight and light, and the song doesn’t feature any of the characteristic harmonies, interplay or chemistry with the rest of the Wilburys, which really elevates the best of the rest of their work. Lynne is hardly the most exciting, biggest or best of all the Wilburys anyway, and this song would have sounded like filler if it was taking up space on one of his solo albums, let alone on this group project. As it is, it sounds like something he worked up whilst he waited for the rest of the band to arrive for that day’s session.
