(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Mon 1 December 2025 17:00, UK
No one gets into the Traveling Wilburys by accident.Â
It was a stroke of luck that all of them were able to get together for a single album at all, let alone have a decent career for a few years before they all retreated back to their solo careers. But if you look at the people around them, there was still room to add some more Wilburys into the mix that hadn’t quite been able to make the cut the first time around.
Then again, there’s a certain golden sheen that’s going to be around the core five members until the end of time. No one could have scripted a better goddamn band if they had tried, and yet with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne, every single one of them was a virtuoso at what they did before they had even stepped into the room to play with all their friends. So when the time came to write a song, none of them needed to worry about egos getting in the way.
Think about it. Even if you were George Harrison, were you going to be the one to look at a Bob Dylan lyric and say that it was bloody godawful? Everyone was completely focused on making the best record they could, and you can hear that on the tape. On the other hand, was anyone really going to get in the way of Harrison when it came time for a guitar solo?
That would be a daunting task, but it’s not like Harrison was up on his high horse every time he took a solo. If someone had a better idea, he was more than willing to throw it off to them, but even when Mike Campbell sprinkled in blues licks on top of ‘Handle With Care’, he even stepped aside so that he wouldn’t be the guy that took away from that fantastic slide guitar Harrison was so good at.
Even though there’s a bit of a bittersweet feeling on the second Wilburys record after Orbison’s passing, it’s easy to hear that freewheeling spirit going on throughout the entire thing. From the opening song ‘She’s My Baby’, everything fell into place perfectly, but you couldn’t have a garage-rock barnburner like this without getting the perfect guitar solo to go along with it, and Gary Moore was just the guy for the job.
Granted, Moore isn’t really the first person that fans go to when thinking about the Wilburys, but he lays down the perfect solo for a tune like this. There were never too many flashy moments when the supergroup worked together, but in this one instance, their willingness to let Moore shred and do whatever the hell he wanted made for the kind of rock and roll solo that most would have wondered whether the rest of the band even had in them anymore.
It’s not like Harrison ever fell out of love with this kind of tune, either. Even when Petty ended up going back to the Heartbreakers and cutting Into the Great Wide Open, Harrison was the first to point out his love for a tune like ‘Makin’ Some Noise’, which actually manages to rock just as hard as the Wilburys tune, only combined with the kind of strut and swagger that would have come out of a punk-rock version of The Rolling Stones.
While Moore might be a footnote in the story of the Wilburys, the fact that Harrison saw something in him to get him on the record spoke volumes compared to his predecessors. Not everyone can manage to go into a studio with those legends and hold their own, but Moore managed to make the whole thing look easy while tearing through one riff after the next.
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