The Traveling Wilburys line George Harrison stole from Carl Perkins
The Traveling Wilburys didn’t really need any outside forces helping them whenever they performed.
Most of them would have been happy enough to learn a lesson or two from their fellow bandmates, and while that was definitely worthwhile in the long run for people like Tom Petty, it’s not like George Harrison needed to be reminded of what a hit song sounded like. He could write tunes in his sleep, but there are always those influences that find themselves creeping their way in.
Then again, most of the Wilburys may have had to be careful to not pull too many lines from each other, either. There are a lot of moments where any lyricist can find themselves taking a few too many cues from Bob Dylan, but it’s probably a much different story when he’s sitting right across from you when you’re throwing out lines.
But Harrison didn’t get into the industry off the strength of Dylan by any stretch. He was a major fan and would occasionally geek out over the fact that he had a legend like him in the band, but there were also the greats of rock and roll that could have been Wilburys as well. Harrison had no problem calling John Lennon an honourary member of the band had he lived, and while there was an idea for them to use old Elvis Presley songs and turn them into Wilburys tunes, they didn’t need to be a one-stop shop for all rock and rollers.
When it came to Harrison’s personal taste, though, it always came back to how Carl Perkins played guitar. He had been indebted to the sounds of Eastern music ever since listening to albums from the likes of Ravi Shankar, but outside of the brilliant slide playing that he could do, a lot of those early Beatles songs came down to Harrison slowly crafting his own style while throwing in the occasional nod to Perkins on tracks like ‘All My Loving’.
Beyond the occasional stolen lick, though, Harrison admitted that the basis for a song like ‘End of the Line’ came from an expression that Perkins always used, saying, “[It’s] sort of like Carl Perkins says on a lot of his songs, ‘Well, it’s alright.’ If you’re gonna be an optimist then it’s gotta be alright. If you happen to be a peg-legged old pirate who’s trying to make a Wilbury album, it’s still alright.”
Which begs the question: why the hell couldn’t Perkins have been a Wilbury? It may have been a case of the stars aligning for everyone in the band and making a couple of tunes together, but since Harrison was a massive fan of his and Petty even got to work with him on albums like Wildflowers later, he was practically already a member of the band that just hadn’t received a proper invite.
Then again, ‘End of the Line’ is what happens if you distill everything the Wilburys were great at into a single song. Not all of them needed to be playing the most flashy part in the world to get everyone singing along, but from the twang in the guitars to the round-robin way of playing, it was all about playing around with their best buddies and paying tribute to the music that they loved as kids.
Other tunes like ‘Congratulations’ may be more indebted to the realm of country and ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ has a dash of heartland rock, but the reason why this works so well is because of how much fun they sound like they’re having making the tune. All of them were going through some of the greatest moments of their careers, and even if this time together was going to be short-lived, they could still find time to say that everything was alright while they rode around in the breeze.
