The Traveling Wilburys

Essential Albums

  • The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1 (Remastered 2016)
    The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1 (Remastered 2016)
    The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1 (Remastered 2016)

    One of the joys of being a fan of The Traveling Wilburys—the short-lived supergroup featuring Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne—was just how ridiculous the whole thing seemed to everyone involved. These were high-wattage guys with reputations to protect and legacies to uphold. Yet the members of the Wilburys treated their 1988 debut album as little more than an affectionate joke. And by this point in their respective careers, these dudes deserved a little fun. Even Petty, the youngest of the bunch—and arguably the one with the most left to prove—was by then a multiplatinum rock star with greater claim to the legacy of Dylan and the Beatles than most of his peers. Why shouldn’t he relieve himself of his artistic imperative, and goof around for once? More than a band, though, the Wilburys were friends. And like any group of friends, they didn’t have a leader, so much as they had a dynamic—a group chemistry that stemmed from each individual’s musical character, which they express throughout Vol. 1. Lynne’s pop pastiche on “Margarita”; Orbison’s operatic spotlight on “Not Alone Anymore”; Dylan’s cranky lamentation on “Congratulations”: You can hear each member playing around with the trademark sounds that had made people love them in the first place. And you can tell that, to these guys, having fun was a crucial a part of the creative process (especially for Dylan, who didn’t do a lot of smiling in the 1980s, yet who seems to be having a blast on Vol. 1). Even the album’s songs about aging and mortality—“Handle With Care,” “Heading For the Light,” “End of the Line”—feel light, more celebrations of the present than preparations for the future. It was a future that came faster than the band members might have expected: Vol. 1 was released in mid-October; by year’s end, Oribison would be dead at the age of 52. Petty remembers getting a call from him a few days beforehand, to talk about how great it was that they’d gone platinum—a bittersweet moment, but a fitting one. They’d earned these golf carts, and they’d be damned if they weren’t gonna take them for a spin.

Albums

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Compilations

About The Traveling Wilburys

A chart-topping supergroup that included George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty, and Jeff Lynne, The Traveling Wilburys brought together some of the most storied figures in rock history. ∙ Conceived by Harrison while he was recording his 1987 LP, Cloud Nine, the band initially came together to help him record a one-off B-side for his single “This Is Love.” ∙ Petty wasn’t originally slated to participate, but he received a last-minute invitation from Harrison when the former Beatle had to pick up a guitar from the Heartbreakers frontman’s house. ∙ Recorded in Dylan’s garage, “Handle with Care”—which Harrison’s label declared too good to be a B-side—was the group’s debut single, reaching No. 2 on Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart. ∙ The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1, the group’s triple-Platinum 1988 debut LP, earned two Grammy nominations—winning for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. ∙ Monty Python alumni Michael Palin and Eric Idle wrote the liner notes for the band’s two albums, and comedians John Candy and Whoopi Goldberg appeared in their 1991 video for “Wilbury Twist.” ∙ A purposely mistitled LP that the band recorded as a quartet following Orbison’s 1988 death, The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 3 went Platinum within a few months of its release. ∙ The Traveling Wilburys Collection, a 2007 retrospective that put their out-of-print material back into circulation, debuted at No. 1 in the UK and reached the Top 10 of the Billboard 200.

ORIGIN
Los Angeles, CA, United States
FORMED
1988
GENRE
Rock

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