(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Fri 24 October 2025 17:45, UK
The more successful a musician gets, the more excessive you would imagine their studio set-up to become. Gone are the days of scratching around for money to pay for a brief session, now the sort of mega stars who make up the Travelling Wilburys have the greatest spaces all over the world at their beck and call.
But despite that, the band cheerfully stepped into the opposite. Having experienced the heights of musical fame, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty banded together in a Los Angeles home – granted, that bit doesn’t sound so humble – to make a record that celebrated the simple idea of sharing musical ideas with friends.
It was a joint pursuit to regain that essence of motivation that got them into music in the very first place, and so stripping back the studio set-up of all bells and whistles helped them do that. But the lengths they went to were even somewhat of a surprise to them. Their third track from their debut album, The Traveling Wilburys Vol 1, actually showcased a percussive section that was centred around a fridge shelf.
Buoyed by the DIY spirit of the session, the drummer who featured on the bands records Jim Keltner recalled, “I opened the fridge, which I’m usually told not to do at other people’s homesI have a tendency to do that and I saw all this stuff in there, and I thought, ‘Oh, good, we’re going to eat well this afternoon!’ And I happen to have my drumsticks, so I started running them across the grate, the spacers that hold the eggs and things.”
He continued, “Any time I see something like that, being a drummer, I always have to run my fingernail across it or something. It created a great sound, so I started playing a groove on it, and I noticed that if I moved the eggs back a little, moved the enchiladas over to the side a bit, it tuned those little things! Somebody said, ‘Well, let’s overdub it!’ So became a part of ‘Rattled’.”
While the band were clearly loose in their approach, they were unaware of just how integral a part the domestic item would play in terms of nailing that sound they were after. The tune, in essence, is a simple Rockabilly tune, and so the stripped-back profile of the percussion only enhanced that feel.
“That track, the sound, I think, is just so close to a good old rock ‘n’ roll thing from the late 1950s,” George Harrison recalled. “The guitars, acoustics and the refrigerator. The fridge: I tell you, it’s the great new sound, folks, that’s happening.”
Harrison was no stranger to innovation, having been at the heart of it with The Beatles in the 1960s, but on ‘Rattled’ it took on an entirely new form. It was innovation through stripped back regression and in a sense, that epitomised the atmosphere of the entire recording, which saw five of music’s greatest names, all bundled together in a Californian kitchen.
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