(Credits: Far Out / The Travelling Wilburys)
Sun 18 January 2026 16:57, UK
It’s hard to think of anyone like George Harrison to be insecure whenever he walked into a room of musicians.
When anyone has joined a band as iconic as The Beatles, there tends to be a point where everyone goes numb to the kind of adulation that people have for celebrities whenever they sit down to make a record or put on a show. At the end of the day, they were just people in Harrison’s eyes, but for being ‘The Quiet Beatle’, there were more than a few moments where he could look back in awe at what some of his bandmates could do in the Traveling Wilburys.
After all, Harrison set out to make the Wilburys one of the best bands that he had ever seen, and given how many people were in the group, it’s not like he didn’t deliver on that promise. No one could have imagined a better singer than Roy Orbison, nor a better lyricist than Bob Dylan, and even when looking at the new kids in the band like Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne, each of them did their part to make that first album as perfect as it could be.
But for a record that features some of the greatest celebrities in rock history in the same room, it’s actually a lot more freewheeling than a lot of people think. The whole point of the band making that first album was to get a few tunes in the can before Dylan went back out on tour, and you can feel that kind of energy in the room as they make every track. They were doing a song a day half the time, and they would do anything they had at their disposal, whether it was Dylan’s home studio for ‘Handle With Care’ or Dave Stewart’s kitchen for the percussion on ‘Rattled’.
When taken as a whole, though, the entire record feels like a love letter to the kind of music that Harrison loved when he was a kid. He had graduated to listening to everything from Ravi Shankar to some of the best soul singers of all time, but this was the equivalent of listening to a classic from the early 1960s that never officially got recorded until the late 1980s. It had brilliant pop songs, rave up tunes, and at the very end of the record, ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ gave the band their one lonesome ballad.
Which is strange considering how little they worried about taking themselves seriously. A lot of Dylan’s lyrics across the album are about making straight rock and roll tunes, but when he teamed up with Petty to help write the lyrics to this Western-style tale, Harrison knew that he was out of his depth when looking at the brilliant turns of phrase that they were coming up with on the fly.
This was pure American storytelling, and it was enough to go over the Liverpudlian’s head, saying, “‘Tweeter And The Monkey Man’ was really Tom Petty and Bob – we were just sitting ’round in the kitchen, really. [They were] talking about all this stuff which didn’t make much sense to me. I think it was that, you know, that Americana kind of stuff. And we got a tape cassette and put it on and then transcribed everything they were saying and wrote it down. And then Bob sort of changed it anyway.”
It makes sense that Dylan would be able to write such a song, but Petty had recently graduated to making those kinds of left turns as well. He wasn’t exactly on the level to record with Johnny Cash yet, but hearing a song like ‘Something Big’ or the cheap shots at badasses on ‘Spike’ really prepared him to be able to work off of Dylan perfectly.
That kind of music was always familiar to Harrison from the time he started to hear the sounds of Carl Perkins when he was a kid, but this was far from the suburbs that he started in. Dylan and Petty had seen a lot of the darkness firsthand when they were first brought up, and they were going to have a much greater impact than Harrison could have ever tried if he wanted to make a cowboy song.
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