The Traveling Wilburys member Axl Rose always wanted to work with
Any artist would have given anything to be anywhere close to the Traveling Wilburys in their prime.
They were all at the top of their game at the time, and even if you weren’t the biggest classic rock fan in the world, no one would necessarily shake a stick at the idea of hanging out out with George arrison or Tom Petty But when they first debuted, the biggest names in music had started to look a lot different than the kind of old-time rock and roll that they had started with.
But the band was already a nostalgia act before they even started. The whole idea was to bring together the biggest names from rock and roll’s past to create the perfect little group, and they never once expected to be the biggest act in the world. They wanted to have fun playing with their musical buddies, but the vibe of Los Angeles had undergone a drastic makeover since all of them started.
Even if Petty stood for everything that California rock and roll was supposed to be back in the day, he wasn’t exactly going to put on a pair of leather pants and start trying to compete with Whitesnake or anything. He was not that kind of artist, but things were at least looking up once a band like Guns N’ Roses started rising to prominence. In a sea of pretty boys, they were the kind of street gang that happened to play instruments.
And it’s not like they didn’t have a healthy respect for people like the Wilburys. Slash was never going to be playing slide guitar in the same way Harrison did, but there was that same lyrical approach to his solos that made them impossible to resist whenever they came on. But from Axl Rose’s perspective, the real magic behind a band like the Wilburys came from working with Jeff Lynne, and he knew that he wanted to get his hands on that kind of production style.
Appetite for Destruction was already a fantastic street-level rock and roll record, but Lynne’s way with layering instruments on top of each other is what made all of his production jobs so magical, whether that was working with the Wilburys, Harrison, or producing Petty’s later records like Full Moon Fever.
Not all of that felt like a one-to-one match with Guns N’ Roses, but Lynne said that he got numerous calls from Rose during his Wilburys days, saying, “Axl phoned me one day and asked me if I would like to help out with something, but I’ve never heard from him since. [When I work with an artist] they get a true reproduction of themselves, without any kind of glitter or tinsel on it.” But looking at where Guns would be going later, it felt like Rose didn’t want to avoid that production gloss altogether.
Use Your Illusion was meant to be a larger-than-life album, and even if it didn’t have the same magic touch that Lynne brought to ‘Mr Blue Sky’, it did have its fair share of over-the-top moments like ‘November Rain’. Then again, had Lynne been there to get everything back to basics, perhaps the band would have stayed the course for a bit longer and not been caught up in Rose’s antics every single time he performed.
That didn’t mean that the band didn’t get to work with other people of Lynne’s ilk, whether that was jamming with Petty at the odd award show, drafting in Don Henley for a show, or Slash working with Bob Dylan on one of his post-Wilbury solo albums. It may have been a bit too early for Guns N’ Roses to be calling their shot among the greats, but it’s not like they didn’t have the tunes to back them up.
