(Credit: Wikimedia)
Sat 23 August 2025 18:30, UK
The number one rule of the Traveling Wilburys was to check everyone’s ego at the door when they first began. No one in the group was owed anything based on name recognition, and since they were all living legends in their own right, the doors were open to do whatever they wanted if they decided to jam together on the live stage.
Then again, what would a Traveling Wilburys even look like? The whole appeal behind the group was about playing together for fun, and while playing onstage would have been a good time for the first few shows, everyone in the group always felt a little resistant to the idea. The last thing they needed was for their friendly collaboration to become a job, and even when they brought up touring, none of them were actually all that serious about it.
Even when people were practically begging them to go on tour, Harrison would always give the most facetious answers he could, usually quipping that they would be going over Niagara Falls in a barrel as one of their shows or playing on a boat with a different company plastered on the side of it called the ‘SponserSHIP’ tour. Dad jokes notwithstanding, the biggest question would be what they would play as well.
There’s no way that fans would be satisfied by hearing a handful of great Wilburys songs and then seeing them walk off, but did anyone think they were going to only play their tunes? These guys all had a catalogue of great music to work from, and there were always bound to be a few things that they could frankenstein into their sound.
According to Harrison, he felt that some of Dylan’s material and even some of his Beatles songs could have fit perfectly into the band’s repertoire, saying, “We could have a great band up there and the four of us could play acoustic if we wanted to. We could all sing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and Bob could sing ‘Something’. Or we could just sing our individual songs and make them Wilbury tunes, as if we’d recorded them that way. Whatever it was, we could do it.”
That’s not even discounting the various covers that the band played during their downtime. There were already the covers made available of tunes like ‘Nobody’s Child’ and Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’ they were playing around that time, but even when they were getting together to jam, they would find themselves throwing in old country songs like ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ as well. But if there was one artist whose sound fit the band the most, it was probably going to be Harrison’s Beatles material.
And it’s not like the band didn’t agree, either. For the most part, Harrison’s tunes were always the ones that stuck out the most on their albums, and even when many of his friends performed at the Concert for George, we got a glimpse of how both Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty would have approached playing those songs with the Wilburys, especially Petty’s beautiful rendition of the song ‘I Need You’ he played before going immediately into ‘Handle With Care’.
All the pressures of the touring lifestyle may have killed all the joy of being in the Wilburys, but it’s nice to hear that Harrison was thinking about the kind of tunes he could have played with his old friends. Because no matter what band played the final version, ‘The Quiet Beatle’ knew that there’s nothing that can take away from a well-written song if it’s being played with the right sets of hands.
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