The Traveling Wilburys were a British and American supergroup formed in Los Angeles in 1988, consisting of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. They were described as "perhaps the biggest supergroup of all time".
Originating from an idea discussed by Harrison and Lynne during the sessions for Harrison's 1987 album Cloud Nine, the band formed in April 1988 after the five members united to record a bonus track for Harrison's next European single. When this collaboration, "Handle with Care", was deemed too good for such a limited release, the group agreed to record a full album, titled Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, released in October 1988. Following Orbison's death in December 1988, the Wilburys continued as a quartet and released a second album, incongruously titled Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, in 1990.
The release of their debut album was much anticipated because of the stature of the participants. The band members adopted tongue-in-cheek pseudonyms as half-brothers from the fictional Wilbury family of travelling musicians. Vol. 1 was a critical and commercial success, helping to revitalise Dylan's career. In 1990, the album won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group.
Although Harrison envisioned a series of Wilburys albums and a film about the band, to be produced through his company HandMade, the group became dormant after 1991 and never officially reunited, though the individual members continued to collaborate on each other's solo projects at various times. Harrison died in 2001, followed by Petty in 2017, leaving Dylan and Lynne as the only surviving members. After being unavailable for several years, the two Wilburys albums were reissued by the Harrison estate in the 2007 box set The Traveling Wilburys Collection.
History
Background
George Harrison first mentioned the Traveling Wilburys publicly during a radio interview with Bob Coburn on the show Rockline in February 1988. When asked how he planned to follow up the success of his Cloud Nine album, Harrison replied: "What I'd really like to do next is ... to do an album with me and some of my mates ... It's this new group I got [in mind]: it's called the Traveling Wilburys, I'd like to do an album with them and then later we can all do our own albums again." According to Jeff Lynne, who co-produced Cloud Nine, Harrison introduced the idea of the two of them starting a band together around two months into the sessions for his album, which began in early January 1987. When discussing who the other members might be, Harrison chose Bob Dylan and Lynne opted for Roy Orbison. The term "Wilbury" also originated during the Cloud Nine sessions. Referring to recording errors created by faulty equipment, Harrison jokingly remarked to Lynne, "We'll bury 'em in the mix." Thereafter, they used the term for any small error in performance. Harrison first suggested "the Trembling Wilburys" as the group's name; at Lynne's suggestion, they amended it to "Traveling Wilburys".
During his Rockline interview, Harrison voiced his support for Dylan, at a time when Dylan was experiencing an artistic and commercial low point in his career. Harrison and Lynne became friends with Tom Petty in October 1987, when Petty and his band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, toured Europe as Dylan's backing group on the Temples in Flames Tour. The friendship continued in Los Angeles later that year. There, Harrison struck up a musical rapport with Petty based on their shared love of 1950s rock 'n' roll, and Lynne began collaborating with Petty on what became Petty's debut solo album, Full Moon Fever, and writing songs with Orbison, Lynne's longtime musical hero, for Orbison's comeback album, Mystery Girl. According to Petty, Harrison's dream for the Wilburys was to handpick the participants and create "the perfect little band", but the criteria for inclusion were governed most by "who you could hang out with". The five musicians also bonded over a shared appreciation of the English comedy troupe Monty Python. Harrison, who had worked with the members of Monty Python on various productions by his company HandMade Films since the late 1970s, particularly appreciated Orbison's gift for impersonation and his ability to recite entire sketches by the troupe.
1988–1991
"Handle with Care" and band formation The band came together in April 1988, when Harrison was in Los Angeles to oversee the filming of his HandMade production Checking Out. At that time, Warner Bros. Records asked Harrison for a new song to serve as the B-side for the European release of his third single from Cloud Nine, "This Is Love". During a meal with Lynne and Orbison, Harrison asked Lynne to help him record the track and invited Orbison to attend the session, which he then arranged to take place at Dylan's garage studio in Malibu since no professional studios were available at such short notice. Petty's involvement came about when Harrison went to retrieve his guitar from Petty's house and invited him to attend also.
Working on a song that Harrison had recently started writing, the ensemble completed the track, which they titled "Handle with Care" after a label on a box in Dylan's garage. When Harrison presented the recording to Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker of Warner Bros., the executives insisted that the song was too good to be used as a B-side. In Petty's recollection, Harrison and Lynne then decided to realise their idea of forming a Wilburys band, and first invited him to join before phoning Dylan, who also agreed to join. That night, Harrison, Lynne and Petty drove to Anaheim to see Orbison perform at the Celebrity Theatre and recruited him for the group shortly before he went on stage. In Petty's description, Orbison performed an "unbelievable show", during which "we'd punch each other and go, 'He's in our band, too.' ... We were all so excited." Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required).
Debut album
The band members decided to create a full album together, Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1. Video footage of the creative process was later edited by Harrison into a promotional film for Warner Bros. staff, titled Whatever Wilbury Wilbury. The album was recorded primarily over a ten-day period in May 1988, to allow for Dylan's limited availability as he prepared for the start of what became known as his Never Ending Tour, event occurs between 2:40 and 3:00. and for Orbison's tour schedule. These sessions were held in the house of Eurythmics member Dave Stewart, in Los Angeles.
The five band members sat in a circle playing acoustic guitars in Stewart's kitchen;, event occurs between 3:40 and 4:08. once each song's basic track had been written and recorded there (with accompaniment from a drum machine), the group recorded their vocals in another room, usually after dinner each night. Petty recalled that, as a friend but also an avowed fan of Dylan's, Harrison felt the need to clear the air on the first day by saying: "We know that you're Bob Dylan and everything, but we're going to just treat you and talk to you like we would anybody else." Dylan replied: "Well, great. Believe it or not, I'm in awe of you guys, and it's the same for me." While most of the songs had a primary composer, all of the band members were creative equals. Petty later described Harrison as the Wilburys' "leader and manager", and credited him with being a bandleader and producer who had a natural instinct for bringing out the best in people and keeping a recording session productive. As the group's producers, Harrison and Lynne directed the sessions, with Harrison often auditioning each member to decide who should sing a particular lead vocal part. The two producers then flew back to England; Lynne recalls that, throughout the flight, he and Harrison enthused about how to turn the sparse, acoustic-based tracks into completed recordings. Harrison described the band's sound as "skiffle for the 1990s"., event occurs between 18:24 and 19:05. Overdubs and further recording took place at Harrison's studio, FPSHOT, with "Sideburys" Jim Keltner (drums), Jim Horn (saxophones) and Ray Cooper (percussion). Keltner replaced the drum machine and was eventually credited as Buster Sidebury in a nod to these studio musicians supplementing Nelson (Harrison), Otis (Lynne), Lucky (Dylan), Lefty (Orbison), and Charlie T. Jr. (Petty) Wilbury but with no real names appearing in liner notes or even the songwriting credits.
The album was released on 18 October 1988. Distributed by Warner Bros., it appeared on the new Wilbury record label rather than on Harrison's Dark Horse label, in the interests of maintaining the group identity. Over the months following the end of recording in the summer, contractual issues had been successfully negotiated between Warner and the record companies representing Dylan, Petty, Lynne and Orbison. As was the case in 1971 when EMI prepared Harrison's multi-artist live album from the Concert for Bangladesh for release, Dylan's label, Columbia, presented the main stumbling block. In the album credits, the "Wilburys" joke was extended further, with the band members listed under the various pseudonyms pretending to be half-brothers – sons of a fictional Charles Truscott Wilbury Sr. During promotion for the album, Orbison played along with the mock history, saying: "Some people say Daddy was a cad and a bounder, but I remember him as a Baptist minister."
Vol. 1 was a critical and commercial success, and revitalised the careers of Dylan, Orbison and Petty. As Harrison had intended, the album defied contemporary musical trends such as hip hop, acid house and synthesised pop; author Alan Clayson likens its release to "a Viking longship docking in a hovercraft terminal". The album produced two successful singles and went on to achieve triple-platinum certification for sales in the United States. It was nominated for several awards and won the 1990 Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group. Liner notes on the album cover were written by Monty Python's Michael Palin under a pseudonym. Palin's essay was based on an idea by Derek Taylor, who wrote an extensive fictional history of the Wilburys family that otherwise went unused. Harrison planned a feature film about the band, to be produced by HandMade and directed by David Leland, but contractual problems ended the project.
Orbison's death, "Nobody's Child" and Vol. 3 Roy Orbison died of a heart attack on 6 December 1988. In tribute to him, the music video for the band's second single, "End of the Line", shows a black-and-white framed photo of Orbison, and his guitar is shown, rocking in a chair, whenever his vocals are heard. Lynne recalled that Orbison's death in the wake of Vol. 1s success was "the most sickening thing to me". He added: "I was devastated for ages ... Me and Roy had had plans to do much more together, and his voice was in really good shape. It was just so sad for that to happen." Although there was speculation in the press that Del Shannon or Roger McGuinn might join the Wilburys, the remaining members never considered replacing Orbison. Lynne later said: "We'd become this unit, we were all good pals … We always knew we were going to do another one, and now it's just the four of us."
Harrison was the most active in promoting the Wilburys, carrying out interviews well into 1989. He said he was "wait[ing] for all the other Wilburys to finish being solo artists" so that they could renew the collaboration. By contrast, according to author Clinton Heylin, Dylan appeared to give the band little attention as he focused on re-establishing himself as a live performer before recording his 1989 album Oh Mercy.