The Traveling Wilburys trick that made them successful: “It’s impossible”
Let’s be realistic for a second: The Traveling Wilburys were always going to be a success. You can’t put Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison into a band and it not work, or at least, not gain attention. However, that doesn’t make for a good story, so George Harrison aligned it all to this reason instead.
What is the coolest trait of them all? Or at least, what is the trait that’s sold as the epitome of cool, the pinnacle everyone should aim for, the characteristic to try and embody at every turn, no matter how bothersome or stressful? It’s nonchalance. Everyone is aiming for nonchalance, as every movie, song, and nugget of advice has spent forever teaching us that there’s nothing cooler than not caring.
In music, though, things tend to fall into two camps. It is often, actually, very cool to care. Think about the world’s most epic concept albums or artists like Kate Bush, where carefully planned out and choreographed theatricality is everything. Even today, modern artists like The Last Dinner Party or Fontaines DC are both riding high on high-effort eras where it is clear that careful consideration and obvious passion have gone into the making of every video, every song and each bit of artwork.
It is also undeniably cool to be careless. Especially when reflecting on the 1970s and the era of rock and roll just after its giddy, excitable emergence, the hippie culture that took hold is exactly what first made nonchalance so desirable. The artists then were still trying hard, but when Jim Morrison or Robert Plant swaggered onto the stage, their effort looked like the easiest, most natural thing in the world – as if they weren’t trying at all.
However, there is a sour middle ground. The 1980s showed us that, generally, a one-hit-wonder always came along with a kind of desperate effort, as an artist tried too hard to cultivate a vibe or crowd but without the natural charisma care should be matched with.
George Harrison claimed that the Traveling Wilburys succeeded because they knew precisely what camp to land in: nonchalance. “I think people got stuck in a concept of what the record business is, whereas, with the Wilburys, it was just something that was very flippant,” he said, “I think that comes across, just the playfulness of it. We don’t really give a damn kind of attitude.”
To him, that flippancy was the key to it all, and maybe he was right. Back to the initial point, a supergroup of this calibre was always going to work. But really, if the members had been putting in tonnes of effort, all appearing overly enthusiastic and trying to sell, sell, sell their music – would it not have seemed like a desperate or cringeworthy attempt to reinvigorate their careers? Supergroups often form when the individual stars are fading, but by seemingly caring less, the Wilburys avoided that.
Instead, the band appeared exactly as they were: a spontaneous coming together of friends who just happened to be some of music’s most powerful players. “The thing about the Wilburys for me is if we’d have tried to plan that, or if anybody had tried to say, ‘Let’s form this band and get these people in it,’ it would never happen. It’s impossible,” Harrison explained as if the band could only ever have happened by embodying total ease and nonchalance.
“The thing happened completely just by magic, just by circumstances,” he said, accounting their success to another thing too; “Maybe there was a full moon that night or something like that.”
