Credit: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys
Fri 16 October 2026 20:30, UK
The Traveling Wilburys were always going to have insanely high standards when making their albums.
They weren’t going to reinvent the wheel when making any number of their tunes, but no one starts a band with some of the greatest musicians of their time and expects them to just play the bare minimum every single time they walk into the studio. It was always about trying to find something that they could all have fun playing, but even with how free-wheeling the sessions were, things did get more than a little bit complicated whenever a song needed to be fine-tuned.
Because for as fun as those records were to make, they weren’t going to happen without a little bit of hard work. There were so many opportunities for them to work on something bigger than just casual rock songs, and since ‘Handle With Care’ turned out so well, every single song needed to measure up to those same standards whenever they worked to make the other nine tracks on their debut.
And for the most part, they did manage to pull it off with flying colours. A lot of the songs feel like they were loose jam sessions that got funnelled into a great tune, and while songs like ‘Not Alone Any More’ did have more than their fair share of problems when the band first started working on it, it took Jeff Lynne’s technical prowess to turn it into one of the biggest highlights of the record.
Then again, there are more times when the biggest songs that they wrote came up on the spur of the moment. No one would have imagined that a song like ‘Tweeter and the Monkey Man’ could have been written so fast, but Lynne remembered that Tom Petty and Bob Dylan managed to finish most of the song in a faster time than it took most of them to have dessert when they broke for dinner.
But if that kind of pure magic had some work put into it, ‘Handle With Care’ wasn’t exactly the easiest job, either. The band were more than happy to come together to help fill out what was intended to be a B-side for George Harrison, but since the band was in the spirit of playing with different people, Mike Campbell came dangerously close to making his mark on the band before eventually bowing out.
He was already a guest in their presence, and getting him to perform with the band was something that he didn’t have the right kind of star power for in his mind, saying, “George smiled at me. He told me [my solo] was great. Everybody agreed. I didn’t know how to respond. I thought I should just stay quiet and say thank you. But I couldn’t do it. I had to say something. ‘I’m sorry, George, but I don’t think it is great. I don’t think I’m what the song needs. I think it needs you, George. I think you should play slide on it.’”
Further reading: From The Vault
Campbell always seemed to know what was right for the song, but the one rule of working on projects like this was that there were no takebacks. Everyone would have killed to be in the position that Campbell was in, but even when he gave his all to the recording, the whole point about being in the Wilburys wasn’t about playing to satisfy some ego that any of the members had or anything.
All they wanted was a chance to make some good music, and Campbell wasn’t going to stand in the way of a song becoming one of the biggest things in the world. He had enough classics under his belt, and the last thing he wanted to do was take a potential spotlight away from one of The Beatles.
