(Credit: Wikimedia)
Mon 8 September 2025 18:30, UK
The Traveling Wilburys was never a band that George Harrison thought about too much.
Had they been known for going over every meticulous detail of their career, the whole thing would have collapsed, and the last thing ‘The Quiet Beatle’ wanted to ruin was playing music with his friends. Everything needed to come naturally, but he did admit his plans for getting one of the reigning kings of rock and roll in on the action after Roy Orbison passed away.
Because, really, no one was going to properly fill Orbison’s shoes. His voice was such a central part of that original record that any idea of his bandmates trying to recreate that magic would have been too much to handle. That didn’t mean that they couldn’t still have fun while the moment lasted, and Vol. 3 did see them bring in a bunch of their old friends from the first record as well.
Jim Keltner was already on hand to play drums and getting Gary Moore to play the guitar solo on ‘She’s My Baby’ gave the album a garage rock feel from the outset, but there would always be that elephant in the room as well. So if there was no way to bring back Orbison, Harrison felt that the next best thing would be to see if he could aim higher. Surely Chuck Berry wouldn’t join, and they already had the best wordsmith that could ask for in Bob Dylan, but what about Elvis Presley?
Well, the first order of the business was trying to bring back someone from the dead, but that was hardly an issue for Harrison. The band were already going to work on another album, and while they had enough material for a record, the plan was for Harrison to get ahold of Presley’s estate and see if they could transform one of his songs into a Wilburys track by isolating his voice.
Although all the pieces were there to make a great record, Harrison felt that going through with it didn’t feel exactly right, saying, “[We] talked to his estate, They loved the idea of Elvis being in the Wilburys, so they gave us the rights to a song. The idea was to put Elvis onto a multitrack machine and take away the backing. We’d all sing this song and when it came to the chorus, we’d bring up the voice of ‘Aaron Wilbury.’ We were going to do that, but we never did because at that point I thought it seemed a bit too gimmicky.”
And judging by how the whole thing unfolded, it’s not like he’s wrong. At least Orbison was around to record the song ‘End of the Line’ before they paid tribute to him in the music video, but it was going to be a slippery slope if they kept picking their favourite artists. Because if they went through with using Presley, what was stopping them from using Buddy Holly’s voice, Del Shannon’s voice, or any of the thousands of other artists with unfinished demos?
Even if it didn’t work for that occasion it did give Harrison one idea to reconnect with old mates. The Wilburys were a group effort, but since The Beatles had been a part of each other’s lives for so long, the idea of doing the same thing with John Lennon’s voice made all the sense in the world when they began working on the Anthology, especially after Yoko Ono gave her approval of using it as a sort-of swan song for the band’s career.
Although Elvis Presley “joining” a band with Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, and George Harrison would have been unthinkable, the idea wasn’t a lost cause if it meant giving the band closure on their final years. They never got to properly say goodbye to their old mate, so this helped put a neat bow on the band’s career rather than become a gimmick.
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