Credit: Far Out / The Travelling Wilburys
Sat 22 August 2026 19:00, UK
George Harrison wasn’t looking for the greatest musicians in the world when putting together the Traveling Wilburys.
He had already been in a band that had its fair share of egos every now and again, but when you look at the kind of pedigree that he had with his circle of friends, it’s not like he didn’t surround himself with people who excelled at their craft. Harrison did like to surround himself with people who were great at their job, but if you ask someone like Tom Petty, being able to hang out with a musician was just as important for the most reserved member of The Beatles half the time.
Because as much as he loved playing the occasional guitar part, Harrison never loved the idea of being in the limelight. Here was someone who was interested in being respected rather than adored, and a lot of the time it looked like he was trying to limit his amount of time in the spotlight. So in theory, the Wilburys were the closest thing that Harrison had to having any sort of musical camouflage.
Sure, he could be singled out as the one who put everything together whenever they started working on ‘Handle With Care’, but no one really needed to focus solely on Harrison when there were people like Roy Orbison standing right next to him. Everywhere you looked, there was a legend, but Harrison always tended to have a bit more affection for what Bob Dylan was doing before The Wilburys started.
Granted, the fact that Dylan was able to join the band at all was a miracle. The wordsmith was none for a lot of things, but being a team player wasn’t always one of them, and given the fact that he was scowling throughout most of their videos, he was clearly more comfortable in the studio jamming with his buddies than he was in front of the camera. That didn’t stop Harrison from filming him left and right during the making of the album.
Make no mistake, Harrison was a peer of Dylan’s and considered him a friend, but he was also a bit of a superfan as well. Plenty of ink has been spilt over the relationship between Dylan and John Lennon, but you’d swear that Harrison had a shrine of Dylan in his house based on how much he followed him around, to the point where he was quoting his lyrics as if they were some divine proverb.
And while Harrison was the first one to say that he had no idea what Dylan was going for when writing ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’, he was amazed watching the song come to life in the studio, saying, “Bob sort of changed it anyway. We wrote it all on a bit of paper, and then he changed it. I mean, that, to me, was just amazing watching it.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Adding, “‘Cause I had very little to do with writing that tune at all, except Jeff and I, we remembered a bit he did which he’d forgotten, which became that chorus part. But it was just fantastic watching him do it because he sang – he had like one take warming himself up – and he did it for real on take two.”
Dylan was probably the last in line when it came to great singers in the Wilburys, but he was the only person who could have delivered the song as well. There have been rumblings that the tune was all about Bruce Springsteen songs, but when you listen to Dylan sing those words, it’s like some strange Americana folk tale that didn’t happen to be recorded until he and PEtty finished the tune off.
This was the kind of songwriting that Harrison had only heard about when he was putting together his first tunes in Liverpool, but he knew that Dylan was already on another planet to everyone else. Anybody can make tunes that come from the heart, but Dylan was making his songs sound like they had been etched into American history for years before he put them to tape.
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