(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Thu 8 January 2026 22:30, UK
It’s a shame that fans only got to hear a small glimpse of what the Traveling Wilburys could have been.
They were all the greatest in their field and could have easily kept playing until they were well into their 80s, but after Roy Orbison passed away, all they had left was one more album before they all retreated back to their solo careers. But it turns out that Tom Petty had an unofficial Wilburys album hiding in plain sight to round out the 1980s.
Then again, Petty was always going to be the least iconic of the band members when he joined. Since he was a good seven years younger than most of his bandmates, he was practically the little brother of the band, always listening to what they were doing and suggesting a line here and there. But the one thing that endeared him to George Harrison right from the start was how honest he was. He was the one star from that time that wasn’t full of shit, so it was easy for him to slide into his role on bass with ease half the time.
But around the time Petty joined the supergroup, he already needed a break from his old band. Mike Campbell was still his right-hand man in nearly everything he did, but the rest of the Heartbreakers had been spinning their wheels ever since they hit the road with Bob Dylan in the mid-1980s. So when Petty left the first sessions with the Wilburys, he wasn’t about to walk away without sharing a few song ideas with Jeff Lynne.
Lynne had already produced records for both Roy Orbison and George Harrison, so working that same magic for Petty was a match made in heaven. The heartland rocker had never worked with an outside writer aside from working on Campbell’s riffs, so having Lynne in the studio to flesh out tunes like ‘Yer So Bad’ was the kind of Lennon-McCartney partnership that he had been waiting for.
It’s one thing to have the two junior Wilburys together on a track, but Harrison also remained a constant in the studio. Maybe it was to make sure that his musical little brother was kept in check, but his contributions to the album is the reason why we have the version of ‘I Won’t Back Down’ that we know today. Harrison could see through any filler lines that Petty had, and after helping Petty through a cold in the studio, they laid down one of the best tunes of his career.
And while Orbison already got some help from both Petty and Lynne when working on his final album, Mystery Girl, he returned the favour on the final track ‘Zombie Zoo’. It may be one of the silliest tunes on the album and could have easily been cut from the record had they needed to lose a track, but it does get four out of the five Wilburys together on a single album for the only time outside of their proper studio albums.
Dylan may have been conspicuously absent, but it turns out that collaboration actually happened one album before. The folk icon still had the utmost respect for Petty, but considering the song ‘Jammin Me’ wasn’t necessarily the smash that either of them had hoped for, it made sense for Dylan to start moving onto better things once he reached the 1990s.
Having all these legends on one album may have been a little disconcerting for the rest of the Heartbreakers, but could you really blame Petty for having this much fun? The Wilburys were already one of the greatest experiences of every member’s life, so it makes sense that no one wanted those good times to end so quickly.
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