The chemistry between every member of the Traveling Wilburys couldn’t really be duplicated anywhere else.
Most people would have been happy to see a couple of legends make something competent together, but when all of them fit right in when working on ‘Handle With Care’, it felt like everyone had finally found their home away from home in many respects. But even if everyone was handpicked by George Harrison, there was always room for other people in the band if they had the right idea.
Out of all the Wilburys, though, Harrison was by far the one most excited about the idea. He had spent years trying to get out of The Beatles’ shadow, and when he had people like Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison beside him, he was more than happy to be another member of the band and let them carry the load for a little bit whenever they sang. But that kind of idea doesn’t automatically happen overnight, either.
There was no need for Harrison to force it by any stretch, but when first working on Cloud Nine with Jeff Lynne, the wheels had already begun turning for a Wilburys album. Lynne loved the idea of this imaginary band getting together, and Elton John had even floated the idea to Harrison about having one big supergroup together, but Harrison was more interested in the kind of people that he could hang out with rather than everyone being able to make the best music.
Which probably explains why the group ended up having five different rhythm guitarists. Harrison did help every song come to life when he broke out the slide guitar or played the odd lead lick, but if he really wanted the chance to get a rock and roll tune off the ground, there was a high likelihood that Eric Clapton could have been involved in the first incarnation of the group.
After all, ‘Slowhand’ had been among Harrison’s best friends for years before even thinking about the Wilburys. Derek and the Dominos practically grew out of Clapton working with Harrison on All Things Must Pass, and while there were many times when things got rocky during the Dark Horse era of Harrison’s career, it takes a friendship as strong as steel to be able to make up with his buddy after he ended up getting together with his wife, Patti, while they were still married.
Before Harrison officially spilled the beans on anything even related to the Wilburys, he had said that Clapton could have been in the group in their earliest incarnation, saying, “I’d like to do something, not just a solo album for myself, I’d like to try and get involved with maybe Jeff Lynne and maybe Eric Clapton and do something together new like that, just a one-off. The Traveling Wilburys. Don’t tell anybody.”
This was months before ‘Handle With Care’ was even supposed to exist, but if Clapton were to have joined the Wilburys, would that have worked? He certainly had the chops to pull it off, but given his history of working with the blues, there might not have been as much room for him to show off his skills in the same way that everyone else in the band was when working on tunes like ‘Heading for the Light’.
Clapton had an impressive resume already under his belt, but judging by what he had done on his own, he may have been a little bit too left-of-centre when it came to the Wilburys. He was always going to be the blues translator until the day he died, and while adding the odd guitar part could have been fun, the language of every singer-songwriter was never going to work by adding in a newcomer.
