The Traveling Wilburys song Tom Petty “couldn’t have dreamed” of writing
All supergroups like the Traveling Wilburys are working with a little bit of magic before they even pick up their instruments.
It’s one thing to get a magical sense of chemistry between your average rock and roll band, but when a handful of the greatest songwriters of all time get along so well, they’re bound to come through with something spectacular after a while. But even with the amount of star power in the room, Tom Petty felt that a handful of tunes went well beyond anything he could have imagined.
But Petty was already the new boy in the group in many respects. All of them were hovering around each other’s sessions for the longest time, but compared to the legendary status that George Harrison and Bob Dylan had around the same time, Petty was a new arrival to having classic tunes. When he started performing with them, he fit in just as well as Jeff Lynne did behind the board.
Because, beyond being good friends with every member of the group, all of them knew each other’s tastes in music like the back of their hand. If Harrison was referencing a certain Del Shannon record or Buddy Holly B-side that he loved, Petty would have listened to every single thing and knew exactly what he was going for when working on getting a harmony just right or dialling in the perfect old-school guitar tone.
Still, it was going to be anyone’s guess whether the magic struck when they all started playing together. They all began writing songs in completely different ways, but as soon as Harrison came up with the main idea for ‘Handle With Care’, Petty was dumbfounded, seeing legends like the former Beatle, Dylan and Orbison trading lines back and forth.
Compared to every other session he worked on, Petty said he could have never come up with the final take of the song on his own, saying, “I couldn’t have dreamed that one up. It was so crazy. George was so good in the studio, he really knew how to make a record. It was kind of like a production line. George has some chords, let’s play those and find a melody. We need some words, quick, grab a title, call out a lyric, and everyone would go, ‘No!,’ and then you’d find a line you like, and everyone would go ‘Yeah, that’s not bad.’”
It was a bit unconventional compared to what Petty was used to, but compared to Harrison’s history of fighting to get every piece of one of his Beatles songs right, it was easy to shoot the breeze with a bunch of his friends and come up with a couple of decent lines on the spot as they fiddled around in the studio.
Since the whole thing was meant to be a B-side, it’s not like everyone was sweating it trying to get the entire record finished, but when they were convinced to turn the whole thing into an album of material, you can feel that same freewheeling feeling Petty talked about on every track. They had an insanely tight window to get everything exactly right, but looking at songs like ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ and ‘Not Alone Any More’, it sounded like they were knocking them out one by one without a care in the world.
It may take a lot of skill to make playing music look easy, but The Wilburys’ greatest superpower was being able to rely on everyone else to find that one perfect line that could tie an entire song up. This wasn’t exactly common for Petty, but for Harrison, this is the kind of collaborative spirit that he had always hoped that his time with the Fab Four could have been.
