(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Thu 18 December 2025 15:06, UK
They almost seem like a myth, too good to be true. Things on this planet just don’t happen like that. It’s obvious: The Traveling Wilburys never existed. You dreamt them up at a house party.
Or at least if someone were to tell you that now, that you’d made them up in a mad drunken fever dream, you’d probably believe them. How could it be true that an era-spanning clutch of the greatest musicians in history just casually came together and jammed out a slew of classics at some curious juncture in 1988?
Thankfully, for sanity’s sake, they’ve sold around ten million copies of their two albums to prove their lauded existence. While their albums, which charted third and 11th in the US standings, respectively, might not have hit the lofty heights of their members at their best, now the band represent something far beyond that. In the interim years, the brotherhood of the band has embellished the music, the myth, and the legend of friends thrashing out a few tunes has established itself as an endearing window into a different time.
The joviality of the concept extends to the constitution of their history, too. In essence, their formation was akin to George Harrison making a group text with his musical mates. Fated did the rest. As Tom Petty once opined, “None of this would’ve happened without [George Harrison]. It was George’s band—it was always George’s band and it was a dream he had for a long time.” He assorted a few mates to perform on what would be his next single, realised he’d left his guitar at Petty’s house, and then figured they may as well have a jam while they were at it. The stars loved it so much that a band was soon born.
And the band worked! It wasn’t a case of too many cooks. Bob Dylan’s innate sense of melody propped up the tunes, George Harrison threw in his trademark chords, wistful songwriting and upbeat ways, Jeff Lynne offered production and arrangement wizardry, Roy Orbison had pipes from heaven and solid rock ‘n’ roll sensibilities and Tom Petty injected the visceral edge of cool youth. But there is one notable ingrediant missing from that mix: percussion.
George Harrison playing with The Traveling Wilburys. (Credits: Far Out / The Travelling Wilburys)So, who played drums for The Traveling Wilburys?
That honour went to the mythic Buster Sidebury. Within the Wilburys, each of the members had alter egos; George Harrison was known as Nelson Wilbury, Jeffy Lynne went by Otis Wilbury, Roy Orbison took on the moniker of Lefty Wilbury, Tom Petty got fancy and called himself Charlie T Wilbury Jr, while Dylan went with Lucky Wilbury. As for Buster Sidebury’s tax return, you’ll find the birth name of Jim Keltner.
It’s hard to imagine the pressure that Keltner was under as the session musician called in to play drums on their debut. It almost seems like it would pile even more pressure onto Keltner’s shoulders that for them it was all a bit of a laugh. Thankfully, he was already familiar with Dylan (he would drum for the folk star for a whopping 30 years), and, frankly, he had been selected and asked by the group’s leader, in the first place.
“That was George completely,” Keltner recalled of how he became involved. “George became like a brother. He liked having me around all the time for different things. When he was working on something, I’d be [there]. I think it was [Harrison’s album] Cloud 9 that preceded Wilburys. I was at his studio. H.O.T. Studio we called it – Henley-on-Thames – and we were having a ball.”
“Jeff Lynne was working with him on the Cloud 9 record,” he told Ray Padgett. “Jeff and George had very similar senses of humor. The crazy English kind of Monty Python humor. The more beers they had, the sillier they would get. We were sitting around one night. I think we had just cut my favorite song on the record, ‘This Is Love’. They’re being funny and started making up names for a band. They kept going and going. Finally they settled on the Traveling Wilburys. They thought that was just hilarious.”
Keltner laughed along, not thinking much of it. He heard that Harrison was planning to jet off and cut ‘Handle With Care’ with his old pal Dylan, and he keenly awaited the results, like everyone else. The next thing he knew, Harrison and Lynne were returning to England with a prized record from a supergroup asking him to overdub some drums onto the tracks.
How did the Traveling Wilburys write?
Back over in the States, the esteemed clutch had gotten busy in Eurythmics mastermind Dave Stewart’s house. In fact, Stewart says he would’ve been a member of the band, too, had it not been for an impending tour. They’d simply sit around in his kitchen or garden with their acoustics, strum out a new melody, throw around some lyrics – which was easy enough with Dylan present – set off a little drum machine to keep time, and then Harrison, serving as a producer alongside Lynne, would, essentially, audition the members to see whose voice suited the song best.
After that casual cacophony of assorted excellence, they’d crack on with some barbecuing. That, in short, was The Traveling Wilburys. And that is also why Keltner turned down the chance to become an ordained member. “It was natural for me to say no,” he reflected. While he would become firmly involved with everything that followed, he wasn’t around the kitchen table grilling brisket with the musical icons.
“Plus you’ve got five icons,” he also adds. “I may be considered an icon in the drum world, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.” So, he offered up the joke that he was merely a Sidebury, and that stuck. “I’m a Sidebury. George laughed. He loved that. But I had to really convince him a little bit. Then they went for it. I said, ‘I’m a Sidebury cousin, your first cousin’. You know, I was so close with Tom. He liked that I did that. He always made a big deal out of that in interviews. That’s how I became Buster Sidebury,” Keltner concludes.
The powerhouse supergroup. (Credit: Wikimedia)Who else could’ve joined the Traveling Wilburys?
Given that the group was about friendly communion more so than any up-and-comers tied to a contract, desperately trying to make a buck, there are actually plenty of people beyond Stewart and Keltner who claim to have been on the brink of joining the buddies in the band of brothers.
In fact, they were so casual about things that Roger McGuinn seems to think that he turned them down by accident. “I was in LA, busy building tracks from my Back From Rio album. George invited me to come and live at the house where they were all recording, it was around the corner,” the former Byrds man recalled, not knowing that they weren’t simply jamming and joking around (although in a way they were).
“I said, ‘I really can’t, because I’m so busy with this pre-production’. So that was that,” he continued. “You can draw your own conclusions of what might have happened.” As a fellow utility man, he would’ve fit right in. But the fickle fingers of fate played a huge role in the ways of the WIlburys, and just as om Petty ended up joining accidentally, McGuinn fell foul of the inverse.
In the passing of Orbison, it was also hinted that Del Shannon would be a fitting replacement. There were grounds for this claim, given that a) he was one hell of a crooner, hailing from the same rock ‘n’ roll heyday, and b) he had worked with Petty, Lynne, and even had links with Harrison. But his mental health was spiralling by this point, and the Wilburys themselves, evidently, were reluctant to replace someone they felt was irreplaceable.
And with that, the band returned to the pipedream they always were, tracks like ‘Handle With Care’ still springing forth from the ether of some imagined realm merely rupturing into our own reality, but never really there. Surely?
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