(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Thu 27 November 2025 16:30, UK
The Travelling Wilburys would have never happened if anyone had forced themselves to join the band.
As much as George Harrison liked the idea of being in a group forever, no one was going to get into the band unless everything felt right when they walked into the studio. But after everyone went their separate ways, there were many pieces left on the cutting room floor that could have made for one of the finest albums of their career.
Then again, continuing on without Roy Orbison was always going to be a bit of a gamble. There was no sense in any of them trying to replace one of the greatest singers of all time, but his absence is also what made Traveling Wilburys Vol. III sound the way it did. The whole thing was a little bit ramshackle, but since the band was put together for a laugh anyway, having a record that was nothing but garage-rock style rockers was the best approach they could have hoped for at the time.
Once things got going with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and Bob Dylan left to continue his never-ending run of recording and touring, Harrison was left to his own devices again. He didn’t feel the need to make a record immediately afterwards by any stretch, but getting back into the swing of things when playing live with Eric Clapton did at least give him a little bit of appreciation for what playing with a band could feel like again.
But as time wore on, every Wilbury seemed to get more distracted by what they were doing. There would be times when they would work together, like when Jeff Lynne oversaw The Beatles Anthology alongside Harrison, but with Petty going through a renaissance with Wildflowers and them bottoming out on Echo, no one was exactly ready for when the chance to get together again was too late.
Harrison may have been focused on making his final album, Brainwashed, before his death, but Petty felt that the rest of the band should have been there for him a little bit more, saying, “[George] talked for the rest of his life about doing it again or maybe taking it on the road. It is one of my great regrets that I wasn’t a little more aggressive about getting that done. I always thought we’d have all the time in the world to do it.”
And it’s not like Harrison didn’t have a few tunes to work with, either. Out of all the material that would turn up on Brainwashed, tunes like ‘Any Road’ and ‘P2 Vatican Blues’ feel like the kind of tunes that would have been perfect for a Wilburys reunion, especially if Petty came in with some of his tunes off The Last DJ or Dylan brought in the outtakes of what could have been Time Out of Mind songs.
But there’s a good chance that fans could have been disappointed as well. The band tended to thrive off of the synergy they all had together, and if they were making an album because they had, that would have made for them growing tired of each other and having a falling-out before they even had time to finish the record.
It’s a shame knowing that Harrison never got to make that final Wilburys album that he wanted to make, but the supergroup seemed to function in the same way that a musical version of The Avengers might have. No one expected them to get together in the first place, but when the world needs to smile a little bit more, ‘Handle With Care’ will always be there to do the trick, even decades after it came out.
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