The 1988 Traveling Wilburys line that knocked Tom Petty out: “That just kills me”
There was never an official plan in place when Tom Petty, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne all decided to start making music together, so it’s still amazing to think that a band like The Traveling Wilburys actually existed.
It was one of those instances when the stars aligned, and they shone brightly. Who would have thought that what started out as a fun jam and recording session would have turned into one of the greatest supergroups ever formed.
The whole thing initially started when Harrison and Lynne were working together, and former put forward the idea that they should start their own group. You would have thought that following his pretty traumatic run with The Beatles, Harrison would have been happy leaving the band life behind, but that wasn’t the case.
Lynne recalls the moment Harrison turned to him and mentioned starting a band together. He allegedly said, “‘D’you know what? Me and you should have a group’. I said, ‘What? That’s good. Yeah, I’m in! Who should we have in it?’ And he said ‘Bob Dylan’”.
Lynne continued, as the two of them reeled off the artists that they’d like to have in this supergroup, not thinking that it would actually happen. “Of course, I’m half laughing, but then I realise he’s serious. So I said, ‘Can we have Roy Orbison as well?’ He said, ‘Yeah, we’ll have Roy’, ’cause they used to tour together and we both loved Tom Petty. So we said, let’s have him. And of course, when it’s George Harrison that’s doing it, it was ‘Do you want to join our group?’ and the answer was ‘Yes’.”
It was a strange band to put together, given that each songwriter was very different; however, that seemed to be an advantage. They weren’t looking for hits, given each individual already had them in spades. Instead, they just wanted to experiment with new kinds of music and be in a band that they were all passionate about; the result was an eclectic mix of tracks from an eclectic mix of people.
Tom Petty was the kind of lyricist who used to write words almost without thinking. He described a lot of his songs as a stream of consciousness, as he would essentially just get lost in some music and then see what words came out. It’s a songwriting technique that a lot of artists are envious of, as, despite the speed at which he writes, he was still able to come up with absolute classics.
Bob Dylan was different. He used to take his time when trying to write new songs, as he would ponder over different lines for days on end. The result is that he and Petty would write lyrics completely separate from one another, but despite those differences, there was a mutual respect. Tom Petty, in particular, was a big fan of Bob Dylan, and one of the lines that he was really drawn to was one of his lyrics on the track ‘Margarita’.
“It’s amazing fun,” he said, “You know, Bob Dylan, you know, he’s got a lot of good lines, and you know, you could give him just a word and the line he’d come up with the key word. You were never expecting Bob to come in with that, ‘It was in Pittsburgh, late one night, lost my head, got into a fight, went to the Big Apple, took a bite’. It’s like that just kills me when that came in.”
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.