Why George Harrison was happy for The Traveling Wilburys to sound “wooden”
When George Harrison was in The Beatles, while he would have no doubt enjoyed being in one of the best bands on the planet, he was also creatively stunted. He would write songs frequently, but many were put on the back burner, given they didn’t quite fit in with the established Paul McCartney and John Lennon sound. As such, when they broke up, and Harrison had complete freedom as a solo artist, you would be forgiven for thinking he never wanted to play in a band again, but in the ‘80s, The Traveling Wilburys were formed.
How do the minds of Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan and George Harrison all come together to form a supergroup? Well, as it turns out, entirely by accident. The band got together when Harrison put together a quick team of performers and engineers so he could record one final song for an extended version of his album. His quick team ended up being the people listed above, and the song they recorded was ‘Handle With Care’.
Inspired by a box that Harrison had seen in Bob Dylan’s garage, he immediately knew that it was too good to merely be slapped onto the back of one of his solo records once the song was recorded. Instead, he sat on the song and convinced the members to get together and record an album. The result was The Traveling Wilbury’s, one of the biggest supergroups ever formed.
As Harrison found with the Beatles, too many creative minds can clash, as people want to go in different directions, and it can become a hierarchy. However, this didn’t happen in the Wilburys, and there are likely a few reasons for this. The first is that nobody’s career was riding on The Traveling Wilburys, so people were likely more willing to embrace ideas they wouldn’t normally do. Additionally, they all had similar mindsets, which meant there was little friction with creative ideas.
“There’s tunes that Bob had the most influence on, it sounds like him, and there’s a song which we wrote specifically for Roy, which is very much like an old Roy Orbison song,” said Harrison when discussing the record. “It’s not like we tried to set out to do something that wasn’t like going out and buying an album of mine or ELO or Tom Petty, Bob Dylan or Roy Orbison.”
This led to the album sounding, as George Harrison described it, “Wooden,” which is less a comment on its rigidity and instead a reflection of how unwilling the group was to embrace different forms of technology. There was no clash of minds when it came to recording techniques, which led to a cohesive-sounding record.
“We tried to combine everything, and it’s worked very well. I think it’s basically very up music; it’s very up,” said Harrison, “That is to say; it’s danceable if you like to dance. But it’s fun; it’s really good fun music. It says some funny things. The sound of it, because we all basically tend to dislike computers, and so it’s very wooden.”
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