{"id":812880,"date":"2026-10-24T23:20:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T23:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/812880\/"},"modified":"2026-10-24T23:20:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T23:20:12","slug":"in-1988-the-traveling-wilburys-released-their-debut-album-weeks-later-they-lost-an-irreplaceable-singer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/812880\/","title":{"rendered":"In 1988, the Traveling Wilburys released their debut album. Weeks later, they lost an irreplaceable singer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Traveling<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ The Traveling Wilburys<\/p>\n

October 24th, 2026 \u00b7 9:00pm BST <\/p>\n

The Traveling Wilburys<\/a> needed to be very meticulous when picking out some of their bandmates. <\/p>\n

The whole thing might have started with George Harrison and Jeff Lynne <\/a>going back and forth talking about the people that they wanted to hang out with, but when the whole thing started to become a reality, there was no real way to avoid what they were about to do when \u2018Handle With Care\u2019 came out. This was one of the finest supergroups that the world had ever seen, but everyone understood that there was so much more that the band had to offer than a bunch of cheap rock and roll songs.<\/p>\n

A lot of their material may have been indebted to the kind of rock and roll that lit a fire in Harrison and Lynne when they were kids, but it helps that they had a bunch of people in the band who understood what that music was all about. Tom Petty was already the little kid of the group in many ways, but he had done his fair share of homework in that area, and even though Bob Dylan was a late bloomer <\/a>when it came to rock, he understood what made all of those pre-Beatles songs sound so great.<\/p>\n

This was about taking music back to the days when all that mattered was a decent beat and a good melody, but the right singer was what sealed the deal. Rock and roll songs would have sounded a lot more rudimentary if they weren\u2019t sung by people like Elvis Presley, and there was no doubt in anyone\u2019s mind that Roy Orbison was going to be the star singer of the band when he eventually agreed to join the group.<\/p>\n

No one thought they could have possibly swung that, but Lynne figured that if they were building the perfect little band, they were going to need the perfect singer, too, saying<\/a>, \u201cHe has the greatest voice in pop music, so you can\u2019t get in the way of him. His voice is really big anyway, but it\u2019s really hard to fit in with this great big voice and still have some oomph behind it.\u201d But even if Orbison was in rare form, the whole thing ended up crashing far sooner than anyone would have wanted it to.<\/p>\n

Just as they were about to put the finishing touches on the record, Orbison was gone as a result of a heart attack, and the band were left without one of their greatest friends. They were going to continue on, but all of them understood that there was no good way for anyone to step up to what Orbison could have done whenever he sang \u2018Not Alone Any More\u2019\u00a0or growled through \u2018Rattled\u2019.<\/a><\/p>\n

Harrison was still trying to keep the band going, but Orbison was always going to be in the background of whatever they did, saying<\/a>, \u201cYou can\u2019t replace Roy. There was only one Roy. In fact, that\u2019s what I should have done. I should have said \u2018Dedicated to Lefty Wilbury, who cannot be replaced.\u2019 There\u2019d be a couple nice people to have in, but I think there were enough singers and songwriters, even with Roy gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Further reading: From The Vault<\/p>\n

And while the band\u2019s second album did have some great moments on it, it\u2019s clear that something was missing along the way. Orbison was still there in spirit, of course, but when you listen to Harrison taking the reins for what would have surely been a great Orbison vocal on a tune like \u2018Inside Out\u2019, there\u2019s a little bit of magic that was missing knowing that that masterful vibrato wasn\u2019t there.<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s saying something that even when the band were offered tapes of Elvis Presley to use over some of their songs, they declined. \u2018The King of Rock and Roll\u2019 may have had one of the most identifiable vocals in the business, but nothing really replaces the kind of singer who could make people\u2019s eyes well up with tears from the moment that they started singing some of those classics.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ The Traveling Wilburys October 24th, 2026 \u00b7 9:00pm BST The Traveling Wilburys needed to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":812881,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[30275,210061,96,128,1581,30381,26285,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-812880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-1980s","tag-210061","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-pop","tag-roy-orbison","tag-the-traveling-wilburys","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/812881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}