The Traveling Wilburys ideas Jeff Lynne called “whack”
The word supergroup does enough to send a shiver down my spine these days. Laced with commerciality and usually a self-professed title, the idea of music’s titans forming rarely works authentically. But in the late 1980s, when Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty joined forces to create The Traveling Wilbury’s, shivers were sent down spines once again, but entirely for good reason.
And with names as influential as those, you’d be forgiven for thinking the formation of the group involved endless litigation, contract negotiations, and bureaucratic hoop-jumping. But the reality was anything but. Jeff Lynne explained that the band’s genesis was far simpler—it all stemmed from spending time with George Harrison.
“When you hang out with George Harrison, you can do whatever you like. On the strength of that, that’s how the Traveling Wilburys came to me. One night while we were recording he said, ‘We should form a group’. I said, ‘Who should we have in it?’ He said, ‘Bob Dylan’. I’m going, ‘Bloody hell’. I never expected that answer. And then I said, ‘Can we have Roy Orbison?’ He said, ‘Great, I love Roy’. And we both loved Tom. Everyone we asked joined immediately, so that was a great thing.”
But the live circuit was less than appealing for an ensemble of stars who’d grown tired of the demands of mega-stardom. Although it’s hard to fathom, the bright lights of live shows and arena tours weren’t as appealing as the boots-on-the-ground creation afforded by the studio. Subsequently, the group never played any concerts, as Lynne explained: “We never played any concerts, though George had some whack ideas about how we’d do this tour. His first idea was that we’d rent an aircraft carrier and then we’d just fly to different ports and let everyone climb onto the aircraft carrier and have a listen to us”.
Adding: “The next idea was we’d do it on a train. We’d pull into a station and drop a stage and play for the people that came to see us at the station. But we never got around to either of them. Everyone else had their own tours”.
You can’t help but sympathise with Harrison, whose career in The Beatles had been confined to the walls of the studio for the last five years of its existence. But ultimately, it was a metaphor for the wider story of the band, who were sadly consigned to the making of two albums due to Roy Orbison’s passing in December of 1988.
While the band flirted with the idea of continuing on after Orbison’s death, the impact the great musician made on the group was too profound.
“‘Nobody’s Child’ was a charity thing we did after the first album,” Lynne said in relation to one of their releases. “It raised money for orphans. It’s an old American folk song. It’s got a real nice sentiment to it. We did a second album after Roy died, but I could have done without it. Roy was just too big a part of the original group.”
While a live performance of a Traveling Wilburys track never came to pass, it was ultimately the right decision. As a supergroup, they could have easily filled Orbison’s role with another similarly famous name—but that wasn’t what made them work. Their magic came from a shared artistic sentiment and the irreplaceable alchemy that emerged when the five of them played together.
