The Traveling Wilburys song that tried to match Prince: “It sounds nothing like him”
No member of the Traveling Wilburys joined the band trying to outdo the person next to them.
The whole process of recording was a bunch of friends coming together to have a bit of fun, and any listener can feel that sense of fun radiating through every tune on their debut record. They were more or less playing for themselves, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t get a bit cheeky every now and again.
Even if they were a bit older and had settled into content middle age as rock and roll stars, it’s not like they forgot about the last few decades of their career. They were all trying to make each other half the time, and while that did result in a handful of goofy tunes that would turn upon their follow-up record, ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ was the first sign that they were taking a few playful jabs.
Every one of them was a fan of Bruce Springsteen, so sprinkling in a song that contained countless references to New Jersey was their way of tipping their hat to the heartland rock legend. But with ‘Dirty World’, the idea for them to make a song that could toe-to-toe with one of Prince’s best tracks was either going to be cute, cringy, or a bit of both. And while the end result does have a few moments that will induce a few eyerolls, it does fall on the right side of charming for the most part.
At the same time, was anyone really asking for the band to do a piss take tune about ‘The Purple One’? Say what you want about both of them as artists, but looking through their bodies of work, there’s hardly anything in Prince’s catalogue that the Wilburys would have happily written themselves. It’s hard enough to cover Prince’s sound on principle, but Dylan figured that it would be a bit of fun to do a more middle-aged take on his material.
Because if there’s one thing that everyone knew about Prince, it was that his music reeked of sex most of the time. ‘Darling Nikki’ was among the filthiest songs that the PMRC had ever heard when they started their campaign to censor material, but Dylan’s idea of approaching the tune with a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour was the best way that the band could have approached this tune.
And according to George Harrison, never once was Dylan taking an ounce of this seriously, saying, “I mean, a lot of people take him seriously… and if you know Dylan and his songs, he’s such a joker, really. And he just sat down and we said, ‘OK, what we gonna do?’ And Bob said, ‘Let’s do one like Prince!’ And he just started banging away, ‘Love your sexy body. Ooh, baby.’ And it just turned, you know, like into that tune. It sounds nothing like him.”
Although the rest of the band sound equally as awkward trying to channel the same Prince euphemisms, it’s not like pulling from ‘The Purple One’ was out of the question, either. Tom Petty had already tried to match what Prince was doing when making the song ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’, and when they do the round robin verse at the very end using every stupid double entendre in the book, it’s clear that this was never meant to match what Prince did.
This was simply a case of a band having some fun, and judging by how well Roy Orbison’s voice sounded saying the final ‘trembling Wilbury’ line at the end, it truly felt like there wasn’t anything that they couldn’t do. It didn’t sound like Prince, but if their take on the rock and R&B icon worked out this well, chances are they could have put together a traditional bluegrass tune and it still would have sounded perfect coming out of them.
