As far as supergroup lineups go, you can’t really get any more impressive than Traveling Wilburys. Comprising Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne, this was a group with talent bursting at the seams, and the best part? They were well aware of that. The moment the idea of forming such an alliance came to Harrison, he was all in.
Harrison first suggested the idea of forming a new rock band to Lynne during the sessions for Cloud Nine. “Wilbury” actually came from an amusing inside joke between the pair after any mistakes they made during recording, to which Harrison suggested, “We’ll bury ’em in the mix.” Thereafter, the pair sought out each of their musical heroes, Harrison with Dylan and Lynne with Orbison.
They had already become close with Petty in 1987 when he toured Europe as Dylan’s backing group. Therefore, their formation felt relatively natural, particularly as Harrison had already gotten under Dylan’s skin much earlier when he was a member of The Beatles. According to Petty, this was something he had grown incredibly adept at, mostly because he treated stars like people.
“I think George frightened Bob,” Petty once reflected during an interview with Rolling Stone. “When the Wilburys started, George was so reverent of Bob. At the end of the first say, he said, ‘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.’ And Bob went, ‘Well great. Believe it or not, I’m in awe of you guys, and it’s the same for me.’ I said to George, ‘That is really amazing, how you said that to Bob.’ George goes, ‘I can say those sort of things. But you can’t.’”
He continued: “George adored Bob Dylan, like ‘Dylan makes Shakespeare look like Billy Joel’. And George absolutely adored the Wilburys. That was his baby from the beginning, and he went at it with such great enthusiasm. The rest of his life, he considered himself a Wilbury.”
Despite accruing a reputation within The Beatles as “the quiet one”, Harrison was anything but, according to his closest friends. He may not have been as loud or overbearing as Paul McCartney and John Lennon could be, but when he had an opinion on something, he voiced it. According to Petty, Harrison was inspiring in a different way, mostly because he was relatively unapologetic, down-to-earth, and someone who “crammed in a lot of living and didn’t waste his time”.
For this reason, it’s difficult to imagine any other Beatle joining his well-protected bubble within the Wilburys, especially because McCartney and Lennon wanted nothing more than to explore their separate musical realms and have nothing to do with each other except when they engaged in public feuding. Still, there’s one member Harrison could envision becoming a member of his supergroup more than the others, and that was Lennon.
Each member formed their own opinion of The Beatles, but Harrison seemed perhaps the most sceptical as time passed. As Petty put it, Harrison would often say things like, “The Beatles, they weren’t all that they were cracked up to be”. He did love the band, though, even if things ended sourly.
“He loved The Beatles,” Petty affirmed. While he would “bitch” about the members who “got on his nerves”, Lennon was someone “he looked up to”.
“[George] said, ‘Oh, John would be a Wilbury in a second’,” Petty said. While he respected the others, Lennon likely seemed more aligned with Harrison’s personal and musical position, making it easy to imagine him slotting into the Wilburys’ dynamic without much trouble. However, while it’s always fun to speculate about what an alternative version of the band might have looked and sounded like, they already formed a perfect version of exactly what they were.
