It would have been impossible to dream up a better supergroup than The Traveling Wilburys. Each member of the band was a master of their craft in their own way, and yet hearing them play off each other sounds like some of the greatest artists in the world having some fun at a jam session. Their voices seemed to blend perfectly together, but George Harrison thought that some of the members shone brighter than anybody else once they had their bearings in the studio.
But the fact that they got together at all may as well have been a complete accident. The whole process of getting the band together felt like a strange case of coincidental meetings, but when they finally got together for ‘Handle With Care’, you could tell from the video that their chemistry was electric. Roy Orbison sounded perfect on his vocals, Harrison looked thrilled to be in a band of mates again, and even though Bob Dylan scowled through the whole video, there was probably a little bit of pride in being able to play next to his fellow legends.
Coming from their own solo acts, though, it’s insane to see them working through their lyrics together. The whole point of everyone’s individual careers was about telling a story in song, but the footage of them working out songs over dinner had the same tone that you’d get from a bunch of dads setting up a deck in their backyard. They happened to have guitars instead of construction tools, but the results were absolutely spectacular.
Harrison did walk away with some of the greatest tunes from the album, like ‘Heading For the Light’, but no one was looking to half-ass anything, either. Tom Petty’s ‘Last Nite’ was a welcome change of pace from the rest of the album, but songs like ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ had the kind of lyric sheet no one saw coming. This was Dylan in rare form, and Harrison was honoured to be lending his voice to a record that had lyrics that strong.
“The way he writes the words down, [it’s] very tiny like a spider.”George Harrison
Despite Orbison being called the living legend of the group during the first album, Harrison remembered being blown away at how well Dylan got the words down for his material, saying, “The way he writes the words down, [it’s] very tiny like a spider. You can hardly read it. That’s the amazing thing. It’s just unbelievable seeing how he did it. That was amazing, because I had very little to do with writing that tune.”
Out of all the members of the Wilburys, though, Harrison was the real Dylan fanatic during that time. He had already had a passion for him during The Beatles days, but even in the documentaries made when he was making the album Brainwashed, you can hear him quote songs like ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ in the same way that most spiritual people quote wise proverbs.
But that’s because Dylan’s lyrics did have that certain magic behind them before anyone had even heard them. ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ might be as close to a western wise tale as he would ever come, but his brilliant turns of phrase on every line are what put him in a different league compared to the traditional love song angle that everyone else was working with.
It was understood that most people in the Wilburys left their egos at the door whenever they got to the studio, but that also gave Harrison permission to be a little bit of a fanboy. He had been admiring Dylan from afar for years, but after performing with him at The Concert for Bangladesh, having the opportunity to be in a band with the guy was his version of stepping into a piece of American folklore.
