Credits: Far Out / Sony Music UK / The Traveling Wilburys)
Mon 22 December 2025 18:30, UK
The Traveling Wilburys was a supergroup with so much power that it almost feels like a dream. Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty all in one band? It feels like a rock and roll fan’s wet dream.
But it was a reality. The five musicians were all already friends and had all already collaborated on different projects as a tangled web of mutual admirers, so the idea of working on something all together made sense.
“What I’d really like to do next is … to do an album with me and some of my mates,” George Harrison said in an interview back in 1988 as the first revelation of the superground, “It’s this new group I got [in mind]: it’s called the Traveling Wilburys, I’d like to do an album with them and then later we can all do our own albums again.”
Later that year, their debut single ‘Handle With Care’ came out with exactly the level of buzz and attention that a track made by those looming names would foster.
However, at the end of that opening year, when all the members were excited about the band, Roy Orbison died. Suffering a sudden and shocking heart attack at the age of 52. Unexpectedly, the band were a member down.
Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, George Harrison, Roy Orbison. (Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
This is where a supergroup differs from a normal group. It’s not like he could be replaced with anybody at all. Orbison’s name was a vital pillar of the band, not just because of the corner of their sound he formed, but because it was built on the combined power of all five huge names. If they were going to replace him with anyone, they knew they needed to replace him with someone huge – and seemingly no one alive could compete.
“Nobody can replace Roy as Roy,” Harrison said in 1990, “But maybe we should have some other person. Then, we thought of Elvis.”
With no one in the living realm able to compare, they looked in the land of the dead and decided upon ‘The King’. They were serious about it, too, as Harrison said, “Somebody had talked to the Elvis estate, and they loved the idea of Elvis being in the Wilburys.”
It all seemed locked in and planned. Elvis Presley, who was already a decade dead, would join the outfit as the group were granted permission to take an Elvis tune, fully rework it and release it. “Change the chords, change the tune, whatever. Even the lyrics. And we’ll all then sing this song, and then when it comes to the chorus, we bring up the other fader, and there’s Elvis,” Harrison explained as the plan to allow the late star’s voice to join with the living.
They even had his name picked out and ready. Elvis would be “Aaron Wilbury”, joining alongside Harrison as Nelson Wilbury, Dylan as Lucky Wilbury, Petty as Charlie T Wilbury Jr, Lynne as Otis Wilbury, while the late Orbison was Lefty Wilbury.
In the end, though, they simply didn’t do it. “At that point, I thought it seemed a bit too gimmicky,” Harrison said as despite riding for the idea originally, by the time it actually came down to making it work, he changed his tune on the living dead lineup.
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