(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Fri 3 April 2026 0:30, UK
As profound and explosive a convergence as that between George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Bob Dylan was and continues to be to the everyday music lover, it was a formation that occurred fairly casually, when Harrison floated the idea to Lynne, who was producing his record Cloud Nine at the time.
Over the previous years, Harrison had become increasingly focused on doing what he did best: creating good music and following any musical direction he wanted. He’d even once said, “I just want to play and make records and work on musical ideas,” an attitude that no doubt led him to ELO’s very own maestro himself, as well as records that defined his entire artistry, like his cover of Rudy Clark’s ‘Got My Mind Set on You’.
However, Harrison felt a different kind of spark when the two of them got together, the same kind that he likely thought had been long left to collect dust following the murky disbandment of his previous band. Working with Lynne, however, Harrison regained his appetite for a bigger group collaboration and felt compelled to tell his musical comrade to tell him as much.
From there, the pair sought to collect the very best of the best, joining forces with Tom Petty and heading down to a Roy Orbison concert in Anaheim with a cunning plan to get his approval. According to Petty, their defining moment came after the show, when they “kicked everybody out of his dressing room”, including his band and his wife, and said, “Look, we’re going to have this group called the Wilburys. Would you like to be in it?”
As fate would have it, Orbison agreed, much to their complete and utter surprise. The pair had long been fans of Orbison, and so they couldn’t quite believe their luck whenever they thought about working with Orbison or the idea of setting foot in the same studio. As Petty later recalled, “Every time we’d start thinking about [the album], we thought, ‘Wow, Roy Orbison’s in the band!’”
In fact, according to Orbison’s son, Roy Jr, Harrison all but begged his father to be in the band, a move that felt as poignant as it sounds, because the former Beatle famously never made such an overtly desperate gesture for anybody. Orbison, however, was the exception, and what ensued after wasn’t just a musical celebration of history’s greatest legends – it was also a refresh for many of them to refine their own musical identity in the current landscape.
It was also a dream come true for someone like Lynne, who already flourished in forward-thinking, group settings, and was able to bring to the table both his meticulous approach to producing and knack for blending familiar musical tropes with fresh, almost futuristic ideas. And even in a room full of big names, he wasn’t afraid to push them to reach a higher level of excellence.
And when Orbison died just after Traveling Wilburys Vol 1, neither Lynne nor Harrison thought for one second that anyone would be a worthy replacement, especially since they’d become the kind of “unit” that still felt Orbison’s presence even after he passed. And on top of that, their ethos was never about quick wins or commercial success, but about giving the world something it never knew it needed.
As Pretty recalled, the Wilburys were about “making something good” in a world that seemed to be getting “uglier and uglier”, and if they managed to bring “a little sunshine” into that world, they succeeded. And this was no doubt bolstered by Orbison himself, even if his time in the supergroup was tragically cut short.
