The one regret Tom Petty had about the Traveling Wilburys
Not every band manages to say everything that they want to say before they have to bow out. Time can sometimes be cruel when it comes to the greatest bands on Earth, but while the Traveling Wilburys were in the business to have a laugh, Tom Petty knew that there was bound to be some unfinished business when looking back on everything.
Because no one simply walks away from a band that was having that much fun without having a few regrets. There were bound to be moments where a song didn’t work, but it’s not like they were struggling for collaborators, either. If Petty came in with a song and George Harrison felt that it wasn’t working, it might be easy to hand it over to Jeff Lynne or have Bob Dylan look over the lyrics to make sure everything sounds air-tight when it came out.
But not every song needed to be the most complicated thing in the world. Dylan never forgot the importance of telling a story on his contributions to the group, but is anyone going to be looking at their fellow WIlburys fans and admit with a straight face that a song like ‘Wilbury Twist’ was a stroke of genius? Probably not, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t still fun to play whenever they got into the studio.
Once the records were put out, though, fans weren’t going to be clamouring for any rare B-sides or anything. Outside of the token covers that they would perform like ‘Runaway’ and Harrison’s ‘Maxine’, what you saw was what you got when you picked up the album on the shelf, but Harrison did at least have a few ideas or actually bring the band out on the road for a little while.
Despite the scheduling nightmare that would have been to satisfy everyone’s need to tour, Harrison seemed to have a few half-hearted ideas about hitting the road, even mentioning that they were going to be going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The whole idea of a tour was never going to happen given Harrison’s resistance, but Petty figured that there were a few elements that were bound to change his mind when he performed later.
While some of the Wilburys only managed to get back together following Harrison’s passing, Petty couldn’t help but regret not taking them out on the road when playing at The Concert for George, saying, “When we did ‘The Concert for George,’ and Jeff came out with us and we did ‘Handle with Care,’ I remember thinking at that moment that George would have loved this so much. But there was a lot of pressure on us all to go out on the road together.”
It’s not like the band didn’t have the chops to pull it off, either. Petty had been through the wringer of serving as part of Bob Dylan’s backup band years before the Wilburys were an idea, and considering how well he got along with Lynne whenever he made Full Moon Fever or even later albums like Highway Companion, they knew that whatever was going to come out of a tour was going to sound great regardless of how many fans bothered to show up.
And even when the 1990s kicked in, Harrison seemed to be warming up to touring a little bit after playing Japan with Eric Clapton at the start of the decade. All the pieces were there if they wanted to make a stab at being a touring act, but sometimes it’s better to have the memory of what the group sounded like in your head rather than having to watch them in the flesh every night.
