(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Fri 17 April 2026 21:45, UK
The idea of being a member of the Traveling Wilburys isn’t something to take lightly.
The entire point of being in a supergroup is having everyone playing off each other and contributing something legendary to every track, but when those people are musicians like George Harrison and Bob Dylan, it’s hard to really live up to that kind of mantle when you don’t have any hits to your name. Then again, there were people who were invited to join the party who never seemed all that comfortable being in the room with everyone.
But the whole point was about everyone in the band having fun from the minute that they started playing. If any ego had become a part of the sessions, chances are they would have turned into an absolute mess, and Harrison knew that everyone would need to check themselves at the door before anything started. If Tom Petty was the new boy, though, Mike Campbell seemed to be on the junior team.
Campbell was already the second in command for the Heartbreakers when they first started, and while he did help make great tunes with Petty, Lynne, and Roy Orbison, there was no way he was ready to enter the conversation of joining the group. Even when he had the idea of coming down to the studio to watch them record ‘Handle With Care’, Campbell insisted that he was never going to be able to play anything that Harrison couldn’t do a million times better on his own.
He was still willing to hang out, but his bluesy leads never sat well with him for the song, saying, “I did my best version of trying to play in that mould, but I knew it wasn’t my best stuff. I felt really bad because Tom was really trying to involve me in the whole thing. I wanted the heat off me. I had the sound up in my guitar, so I just handed it to George and he pulled out a slide… the rest is history.”
Then again, it’s not exactly easy for someone to play in front of Harrison, either. Even Gary Moore probably would have had some trouble if he were trying to do the same thing on ‘She’s My Baby’, but there was always the silent musician in the back of the group whenever they had an idea. Despite the band being the only supergroup with five rhythm guitarists, Jim Keltner was really the heartbeat of the band in many respects when he started working on the different percussion on ‘End of the Line’ and ‘Handle With Care’.
Anyone else would have been thrilled to be in that company, but Petty remembered that Keltner liked the idea of hanging in the background as well, saying, “[George] used to say, ‘Jim, you’re a Wilbury’ and he’d say, ‘No, I’m a Sidebury’. All of us would have been content to have Jim as a Wilbury but he didn’t want to be. He just felt like ‘My job is to play the drums. That’s my area.’” If you look at his credits, though, Keltner had more than enough classics under his belt for him to qualify as a real Wilbury.
Some of the best songs that Harrison ever made had Keltner’s heartbeat behind them, and when he wasn’t working with members of The Beatles, his work in the background of ‘Refugee’ by Petty and getting to work with a group like Steely Dan was as good a sign as any that he had the right credentials. He was definitely good enough to be in the band, but he simply chose not to be most of the time.
The rest of the band didn’t really think the band needed to be so confined, but when looking at the kinds of pressure that Campbell and Keltner were up against, it’s not hard to see why they couldn’t make it work. A band of that calibre needs to be packed full of legends, and that word might have been too heavy a burden for them to carry.
