The singer Jeff Lynne thought was too good for the Traveling Wilburys
The idea of any band as good as the Traveling Wilburys coming together would have been unthinkable before the 1980s.
There have been plenty of supergroups that have come both before and after the Wilburys, but it’s anyone’s guess whether any of them are genuinely super like Led Zeppelin or a manufactured product like what we got with Damn Yankees. The Wilburys may have been together for all the right reasons, but there were bound to be some people that were a stretch to even join the band in the first place.
Granted, George Harrison could also be a fairly persuasive guy when he had the right idea. No one in their right mind would have said no to a Beatle at any stage in their career, but when Harrison started working with Jeff Lynne, he already had the idea for getting together a band of the best musicians that he could think of. Then again, being able to play their instrument was almost secondary whenever they walked into the studio.
Harrison may have liked to surround himself with the best musicians that he could, but even when making Cloud Nine, some of the guest stars on the record had more to do with the kind of people that he could hang out with after they walked out of the studio. Eric Clapton and Elton John were longtime buddies of his long before he called them up to work on the record, but Lynne was practically a kid in a candy store seeing some of the biggest stars in the world walk into the studio to jam.
But when the Wilburys started floating around, anyone would have thought that someone like Bob Dylan would have probably said no. Aside from the fact that he never leaves the road, Dylan was never the kind that played well with others outside of his backing groups, so being treated as an equal when writing songs was always going to be a little bit strange with people like Tom Petty in the room.
If there was one person that everyone stood in awe of, though, it was Roy Orbison. Compared to every other legend in the band, Orbison had the kind of voice that went a lot deeper than what Harrison or even Dylan was doing. They were both legends in their own right, but Orbison brought an operatic feeling to every song he sang, so when Harrison got everyone together to work on ‘Handle With Care’, he wasn’t going to let Orbison look onward as he laid down the vocals.
That voice needed to be put to use properly, but even Harrison remembered Lynne being a little bit hesitant to even ask Orbison to work on the record, saying, “We started, got the first line: ‘Been beat up, battered around,’ and then, wow, they just kept coming with all these lines. And then I thought, well, not gonna have Roy standing round and not sing on it. I said to Jeff, ‘Gotta get Roy to sing.’ He said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Why not? Why not?’”
Even if Orbison was in his own league as a singer, he fit perfectly in with the rest of the band when he started playing. Dylan may have seemed like the most standoffish at first, but there’s a good chance that no self-respecting rock star would have turned down the opportunity to hear one of the greatest singers of all time practice their craft the minute that Orbison sang that prechorus.
And since Orbison wouldn’t live long enough to see a second Wilburys project, the fact that he could see one last masterpiece to see his career out on. He might have been a bit intimidating for any other rock star to even hope to touch, but Orbison was more than happy to see that some of the biggest names in music hadn’t forgotten the magic that he made back in the 1960s.
