The 1990 Traveling Wilburys song that became Tom Petty’s ‘Handle With Care’: “There was a box”
The Traveling Wilburys had no interest in turning their little band into a second career.
They wanted to simply have some fun playing together every time they made a record, and the second that it started feeling like work was usually the moment where they realised that they needed to cut their losses and go back to their solo careers. But if ‘Handle With Care’ came together by magic, Tom Petty figured that he could do the same thing when working on some of his songs for the group.
Then again, ‘Handle With Care’ is a strange miracle of a song in lots of ways. The entire point of the track getting put together as a B-side was already one of the greatest happy accidents in music history, and even if George Harrison had everyone else helping him out, the fact that he got the title from a box in the corner of the room when spitballing ideas is the kind of luck that no one could have landed on if they tried.
The same could be said of a lot of the songs on that first record. A lot of the members are playing to their strengths on their respective tunes, and even Petty found ways to shine when he began working with Bob Dylan on ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’. Harrison couldn’t have come up with those kinds of Americanisms on his own, but if the former Beatle could take his inspiration from random shit that they had lying around the studio, who said that Petty couldn’t do the exact same thing?
He had his fair share of inspired moments in the group, and ‘Cool Dry Place’ on their second record was his version of writing ‘Handle With Care’ in many ways, saying, “Actually, there was a box. There was a box, you see, ‘Store it in a cool dry place.’” But whereas Harrison’s song went in a more lovestruck direction, there’s no inkling of any subtext going on in whatever Petty’s going on about.
You’d think that a song like this would have some kind of innuendo about it whenever it comes on, but a lot of Petty’s lyrics on this tune are just naming every single thing that you come across in a recording studio. Harrison could turn the tune into a half-decent metaphor, but all Petty could hope to do was make a laundry list of the kind of stuff that he saw whenever they were jamming with acoustic guitars.
This would typically be one of the most boring songs in history, but Petty actually finds a way to somehow make everything work. The heart of the song doesn’t give everyone that much to work with, but if he could turn a song like ‘Girl on LSD’ into a massive hit, who said that he couldn’t do the same thing with a tune that was all about the studio?
In fact, there’s almost a little piece of this song that feels like it could have been a B-side on Full Moon Fever. Half of the record had pieces of the Wilburys on it anyway, and given that there were more than a few times where he could get a little bit goofy on a song like ‘A Mind With a Heart of Its Own’, this is the kind of lighthearted version of ‘Handle With Care’ that fits well with the dad-rock aesthetic that they were going for.
It’s not the most in-depth song that the Wilburys ever made, and you have to really stretch to try and pull some sort of hidden meaning out of it, but that wasn’t how the Wilburys operated. They were only looking to have some fun, and even if they had a legend like Bob Dylan in their ranks, sometimes a song can benefit from being a little bit dumb.
