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Fact #162846

When:

Short story:

Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne gather together at Dylan’s home in Malibu, California, USA, to start work on the first Traveling Wilburys album.

Full article:

THE MAKING OF THE FIRST TRAVELING WILBURY’S ALBUM

The Traveling Wilburys were the ultimate supergroup. Their line-up comprised five of the most successful and influential rock stars of all time - ex-Beatle George Harrison, spokesman of his generation Bob Dylan, Roy ‘The Big O’ Orbison, ELO’s Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty, leader of The Heartbreakers. But how had it all come together?
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Jeff Lynne : It was Trembling Wilburys at one point. Me and George were doing George’s album, Cloud Nine. We had this sort of fictitious group that we might have one day, called the Trembling Wilburys - just like you do in the studio at four o’clock in the morning.

George Harrison : At that point it was just a drunken thought in the back of the head.

Roy Orbison : Jeff Lynne and I were writing songs at Jeff’s house and George came in. We went out for dinner and George said he needed to write and record a third song for a European single and we all agreed to do it.

Tom Petty : George was in L.A. and he was hanging around and, one day, Jeff called up and said, ‘Hey, Roy Orbison’s here…’ Roy Orbison was his hero, him and Del Shannon - ‘and we’re working on a song and we’re a little bit stuck on some lyrics. Maybe you could come over and help us. I said, ‘Well, I don’t know how much help I’ll be but I’m gonna come over.’

So I went and we wrote this song, You Got It. Roy was just great. It was thrill to hear him sing, even on the sofa.

George Harrison: The way the actual record came about was that I had to do this song, because Warners needed a third song to put on a twelve inch single. I didn’t have another song, so I just said to Jeff - I was in Los Angeles and he was producing Roy Orbison - we were having dinner one night, and I said, ‘I’m just going to have to write a song tomorrow and just do it’. And I said, ‘Where can we get a studio?’ And he said, ‘Well, maybe Bob, cause he’s got this little studio in his garage.’ And it was that instant, you know? We just phoned up Bob and he said, ‘Sure, come on over.’ Tom Petty had my guitar and I went to pick it up.

Tom Petty : George called me from the restaurant, ‘cause he’d left his guitar at my house, and he said, ‘I’ve got to come by and get my guitar ‘cause I’ve got a session tomorrow at Bob Dylan’s house. I’ve got to put a b-side on this single that’s coming out and we don’t have anything, so I’m just gonna make something up. Would you like to play on the session?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t have anything else to do…’ I said it somewhat cynically because of course I’d love to play on a George Harrison recording session, but I think he took me kind of literally.

Anyway, the following morning he picked me up and we drove out to Bob’s house. George had a chord pattern but not much else…

HANDLE WITH CARE
Tom Petty : We had one roadie and five Wilburys and that was it. The funniest thing was, I remember the first track we did, out in Bob Dylan’s garage, and we didn’t have a roadie …and you could see us all digging through boxes to find a cable and a cord. ‘Well, there used to be one over there. Goddamn, I need new batteries for this.’ It was refreshing.

George Harrison : We started to write this tune, just the tune. And then, as we were doing that, I thought, ‘Let’s just stick a bit in here for Roy. Roy can sing some of it.’

Roy Orbison : We sat in the garden and had a little barbecue and wrote a song called Handle With Care and went into the garage to record it and finished it the next night.

Jeff Lynne : Yeah, it was great. Just on the lawn in Bob’s back garden, all strumming away and saying, ‘Let’s get a bit for Roy.’ And then Roy tries it out and it’s perfect for him. And it all came together like that.

Tom Petty : …and we sat around for a while and gradually wrote the lyrics. The song was Handle With Care…

George Harrison : We got the tune and put it down - all the rhythm guitars with a little click track, and then we needed the words. And I was walking around with a bit of paper and a pencil, trying to think of a title, and I was saying, ‘Come on, give us some lyrics then.’ And there was Bob saying, ‘Well, what’s it about? What’s it called?’ And I was looking round in Dylan’s garage, and behind the garage door there was this big cardboard box that said ‘Handle With Care’. I said, ‘It’s called Handle With Care.’ And he said, ’Oh, that’s good. I like that.’ And that was it. Once we’d got the title, it just went off. We could have had 29 verses to that tune.

Roy Orbison : We needed a couple of lines and Bob and Tom wandered in and just threw in the lines we needed.

Tom Petty : When we cut Handle With Care and Roy started singing that little break he sings, we all just couldn’t believe it. No-one could ever make a sound like that. We went leaping around the control room, and we’ve all seen a few records made.

George Harrison : I thought, it’s a little bit daft having all these people around and then I end up singing it - just get them to sing it. And, when they were actually doing the vocals, at one point I just said to Jeff, ’Hey, Jeff, this is it … the Traveling Wilburys. I mean, it was like magic.

Tom Petty : We had a lot of fun doing it and completely finished the track by about four o’clock that morning.

George Harrison : It just happened. You could never have planned it. If you’d have tried to phone everybody up you would have got all these record companies and managers and it would have been impossible. But it was so spontaneous, we were doing it before we realised.

Jeff Lynne : So this song was delivered for the C-side of a German twelve inch but, when they heard it, they said, ‘Oh, you can’t put it on that - it’s such a waste of a track.’

Tom Petty : The next thing I know, maybe two days later, George came over again and said, ‘This is really good. I don’t think this is a George Harrison record though. I think it’s the Traveling Wilburys’. That was the name of some joke band that him and Jeff always referred to. He said, ‘Why don’t we make nine more and have a group? We could have an album.’

I said, ‘Well, that sounds intriguing.’ So George and Jeff and I drove to Anaheim, where Roy Orbison was playing, and we went into his dressing room and we asked him to be in the band. he said, ‘OK. We were elated. We drove home thinking, ‘We’ve got Roy Orbison in our band.’

Roy Orbison : George suggested we make an album, so we looked at each other and said, ‘Okay’. But we didn’t ask any of the record companies or managers or attorneys or anybody. We just went ahead and did it and no one knew about it.

Tom Petty : Then George called Bob and so Bob was in too, and we went right to work.

George Harrison : It was just a question of timing, cause Bob had to go on the road at the end of May, and this is early April when we did Handle With Care, so he said, ‘Well, I got a bit of time at the beginning of May.’ So we just said, ‘OK, we’ll meet on the seventh of May,’ or something, and we had nine or ten days that we knew we could get Bob for, and everybody else was relatively free, so we just said, ‘Let’s do it. We’ll write a tune a day and do it that way. And that’s what happened. it was very exciting, and nerve-wracking…

Tom Petty : We went to Dave Stewart’s house and used his studio. It didn’t take very long to write the songs and cut the tracks. Then we went to England to finish the album. It turned out to be quite a big success, much to our surprise. We were very pleased, though.

We definitely didn’t want to treat this like a supergroup. I don’t even like the term all that much. But we were aware that it would be viewed as such.

Roy Orbison : I hadn’t played with Bob Dylan before. I knew Bob before that for a few years. We weren’t really close, but I’d been invited to his 25th anniversary party and we talked, and then he came to the studio once to say hello, but we hadn’t worked together. Bob was just a prince. I still think of him as the greatest poet of our age.

George Harrison : The album’s got to be a bit raggedy because we’d just written the songs and done ‘em. We’d write one tune and walk up the garden to the tiny studio - it was more of a control room with a vocal booth, so we didn’t have any space to play the guitars. So we set up in a kitchen - it wasn’t soundproofed or anything - and we put five chairs around the kitchen, squoze them all in, and put the microphones up and … that’s it.

Jeff Lynne : We would arrive about twelve or one o’clock and have some coffee. Somebody would say ‘What about this?’ and start on a riff. Then we’d all join in, and it’d turn into something. We’d finish around midnight and just sit for a bit while Roy would tell us fabulous stories about Sun Records or hanging out with Elvis. Then we’d come back the next day to work on another one.

Roy Orbison : Some days we’d finish just one song, sometimes two or three. We put down all of the tracks, writing and singing and everything, in about ten or twelve days.

Jeff Lynne : That’s why the songs are so good and fresh - because they hadn’t been second-guessed and dissected and replaced. It’s so tempting to add stuff to a song, when you’ve got unlimited time.


DIRTY WORLD
George Harrison : The second song was Dirty World. Bob’s very funny. I mean, a lot of people take him seriously and yet if you know Dylan and his songs, he’s such a joker really. And Jeff just sat down and said, ‘OK, what are we gonna do?’ And Bob said, ‘Let’s do one like Prince.’ And he just started banging away - ‘Love your sexy body! Oooh-oooh-oooh-oooh bay-bee!’ And it just turned into that tune.

Jeff Lynne : It was nothing like Prince really.

George Harrison : Nothing like Prince! Nothing like him. But I love that track, it’s just so funny. We decided to do this thing about, ‘He loves your … he loves your….’ And then we wrote lists. Even that was funny. I don’t know how other people write songs, but I just picked up a bunch of magazines - Roy Oribison had Vogue, I had some copies of Autosport which I gave to Bob Dylan, and then we just started reading out little things like ‘five-speed gearbox’ and stuff like that, wrote down a big list of things, and then we reduced it to about twelve that sounded interesting. And then we just did the take, with the list on the microphone, and whoever sang first sang the first one on the list, and we sang round the group until we’d done ‘em all…

Jeff Lynne : … and every time it came round to Roy Orbison, he always got the ‘Trembling Wilbury’ line. It was the funniest thing. Roy, with the operatic voice, singing ‘Trembling Wilbury’. We all just collapsed every time. And, no matter how we re-arranged it, he always ended up with ‘Trembling Wilbury’.

RATTLED
George Harrison : The drummer on Rattled, he’s playing on the refridgerator with these funny little sticks. It had to be a bit rough, but that was the fun of it. We wanted the record to sound good and be like a proper record, but at the same time to have a bit of a rough edge…

NOT ALONE ANY MORE
Jeff Lynne : One of the hardest things was to try and make it sound like a Roy Orbison record, because Roy has got the best voice ever in pop music, so it’s really tricky to make him fit in…

George Harrison : … and to have a song that’s got a good tune to it, ‘cos all of Roy’s big hits through the 60s, they were great tunes with nice hooks and different little bits … and it was hard to get a song for Roy. Roy was a special case. That song, when we first wrote it, wasn’t very good, and Jeff went home and did a bit of homework on it.

Jeff Lynne : I broke into the studio one morning, came in real early before anybody else got there to try this alternative chord pattern, with the same tune. I put this Telecaster on, playing these other chords, and pulled out all the other stuff. Everyone else arrived and heard it as this new thing and they all loved it. Roy thought it was lovely like that. I just changed the chords.

LAST NIGHT
Roy Orbison : I tried singing al of Last Night but it didn’t really work, but the bridge did, so I sang that.

END OF THE LINE
Tom Petty : When we did the video for End Of the Line, it was very odd not to have Roy there, because we had become a group, and probably still are. Just suddenly, someone’s not there. But I think he was there, in a lot of senses, that we could feel him there.

It was a little sad because his funeral was only about a day before the video, but we just tried to go on and hope that we did him justice. And it turned out to be a curious song for the next single, End Of The Line. It’s funny how events come down and, later on, when you hear the song, it can mean so much more than it did when you were writing it.

CONGRATULATIONS
Jeff Lynne : Bob was the only one who had a clear-cut tune one day, when he came in and said, ‘What do you think of this one?’ It was Congratulations, and it was almost complete. Those are mostly Bob Dylan’s lyrics, but we needed to do sort of like the bridge and a chorus or something…

Geogre Harrison : I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan and I’ve got all his records and I’ve always liked him and I’ll like him and go on liking him regardless of how bad his records are, but I was pleased that he was so into the mood. He really got into it and was comic - even Congratulations has got some comical things in there.

TWEETER AND THE MONKEY MAN
George Harrison : Tweeter And The Monkey Man was Bob Dylan and Tom Petty sitting in the kitchen. Jeff and I were there too, but they were talking about all this stuff which didn’t make sense to me - Americana kind of stuff. And then we got a tape cassette and put it on and transcribed everything they were saying and wrote it down. And then Bob sort of changed it anyway. That for me was just amazing to watch, cause I had very little to do with writing that tune at all, except Jeff and I remembered a little bit that he did that he’d forgotten, which became that chorus part. It was just fantastic watching him do it because he sang … he had one take warming himself up and then he did it for real on take two, right through. It’s just unbelieveable seeing how he does it.

Jeff Lynne : … seeing it from the inception, from the first moment he had the idea of going rambling with all these funny Tweeter And The Monkey Man words, to seeing him put the finished vocal on, and producing it as well. It was quite a privilege to watch that.

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Bob Dylan : It wasn’t that difficult to make that record. There weren’t really a lot of heavy decisions that went into it. Co-operation is great on something like that because you never get stuck.

Roy Orbison : We just kept it a secret until the writing and singing was done and then we mentioned it to the record companies - to CBS, Warner, Virgin and MCA - who all said ‘No problem’ which was great.

George Harrison : And Bob, from what I’ve heard, since the Wilbury’s record, is really writing some fantastic tunes, and his next album he’s going to get a producer, and I’ve no doubt that he’ll make a great album. So if that’s all the Wilburys did, was help get Bob enthusiastic again, that’s something.