(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Sun 7 December 2025 19:00, UK
The Traveling Wilburys track ‘End Of The Line’ is the clearest example of just how well this group did in fact work. Because whenever iconic musicians join together and form what many like to dub a “supergroup”, critics quickly like to exercise scepticism over the prospective balance of these adjoined egos.
Because in the late 1980s, the names didn’t get any goddamn bigger than Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. But that closing song on the Traveling Wilburys’ debut album was a perfect answer to whatever doubts were cast, showcasing just how well these five icons bonded through music.
There was a humility that ran through the entire album. Their DIY recording approach, which primarily took place in Dave Stewart’s kitchen, took these glamorous superstars back to their roots. Sure, once we gloss over the fact that the kitchen was situated in a Hollywood Hills villa, it’s clear to see that there was an earnestness to this entire project that sought to contrast the idea of their collaboration.
Money, opportunities and marketing would have ordinarily been thrown at a project of this magnitude, but instead the Wilburys took matters into their own hands. Banding together around a couple of microphones and a handful of acoustic guitars, they captured the sort of music that launched their career in the very first place.
When it came to penning the second record, there wasn’t a feeling that the humility should be left on ‘End Of The Line’. No, the band wanted to capture that same atmosphere on the follow-up and kept things relatively low-key. The result of their modesty was a song that Tom Petty now remembers as one of his favourites that the band ever laid down.
He explained that while his “favourite Traveling Wilburys song is probably ‘End Of The Line’, there was an obscure one Jeff and I did called ‘Poor House’ on the second record. That was one I wrote about ten minutes after the session had ended and everyone was leaving. The engineer, Richard Dodd, was like, ‘Hey, everybody, wait; we’re gonna do this really quick.’”
Adding, “We laid the track down, and Jeff and I did it all in two-part harmony together on one mic, which people don’t do much anymore. At that time, we sang together quite a bit, and we had gotten pretty good at harmonies. We just thought we’d go for it because there’s no fixing it up on one mic.”
In many ways, it is the complete antithesis of a great Traveling Wilburys song. After all, the whole idea of this band was to combine five of the greatest musical voices into one project and on ‘Poor House’, Petty approached it more like a solo track.
But then again, isn’t that the brilliance of the whole thing? The very fact that Petty could write a track in complete isolation, and record the vocal parts without the help of his superstar bandmates, yet still feel compelled to put it forward as a track for their record.
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