The song the Traveling Wilburys played after Roy Orbison’s funeral
No one was expecting the Traveling Wilburys to go on forever.
As much as they might have loved playing music, they were some of the biggest names in music history, so it wasn’t like people weren’t clamouring for what all of them could do on their own once they had their fun playing amongst friends. Then again, there’s a good chance that no one was ready for the party to end so quickly when Roy Orbison passed away.
It’s hard to pick a “most important member” of a band that has Bob Dylan and George Harrison among their ranks, but Orbison was the older brother of the whole operation. Harrison may have put the band together, but even he was intimidated to talk to Orbison when going down to one of his shows and asking him to join the band. It was a long shot, but after Orbison worked on ‘Handle With Care’, the entire band got a musical ray of sunshine to perform with.
Orbison didn’t necessarily have the biggest hits out of every member of the band, but it was more about the tone of his voice than anything else. The performances on his solo hits like ‘Only the Lonely’ and ‘Crying’ are some of the most heartwrenching vocals in all of classic rock, so when that voice suddenly fell silent, all the band could hope to do was regroup and see where to go as a four-piece.
There was no chance anyone could replace that voice, but after Orbison’s funeral, it’s not like the train had to stop. The band were still on the promotional cycle for the album, and while they would have to go it on their own, Petty remembered that their next order of business was going from his funeral to the set of the song ‘End of the Line’.
The air was still heavy once they stepped onto that soundstage, but Petty said that camaraderie was still there when they entered that mock train car, saying, “[Roy’s] funeral was only about a day before the [‘End Of The Line’] video. But we just tried to go on and hope that we did him justice. And it turned out to be a curious song for the next single, you know, ‘the end of the line.’ But I think it — you write these songs and then it’s funny how events come down, and later on when you hear the song it can mean so much more than when you were writing it.”
And you can definitely still feel the grief on their faces as they work their way through the video. The idea of getting an empty rocking chair to play the role or Orbison when his part came in may have been a stroke of genius, but when they pan to any other member of the band doing the harmonies, you can tell that they were still trying to process losing a legend that they had come to know as a friend.
They may have soldiered on for one more album, but when they didn’t have that magical voice behind them, it did feel like something was missing. Harrison did an admirable job filling in for the tuneful moments on the next album on tracks like ‘Inside Out’, but it’s no surprise that Jeff Lynne eventually said that the band shouldn’t have released their second record after Orbison’s passing.
‘End of the Line’ was probably a better note for the band to go out on, but if there’s one silver lining to their story, it’s knowing that they gave Orbison one more gigantic smash before his passing. He had been written out of the history books to a certain degree, and the best thing that they could hope to do was give the world one more glimpse at the voice that shook the world back in the late 1950s.
