The Band / Awards & Legacy

The Traveling Wilburys' Awards and Legacy

Judged purely by the numbers, the Traveling Wilburys were a genuine commercial and critical juggernaut: a supergroup that, unusually, actually outperformed the sum of its already-massive parts. Judged by institutional recognition, they're the answer to one of rock's stranger trivia questions: how does a band win a Grammy, sell millions of records, and still never make it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?

The Numbers

Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 reached number 3 on the US charts and number 16 in the UK on release in October 1988, going on to sell over 5 million copies worldwide and earning triple-platinum certification from the RIAA. It spent more than 50 weeks on the US charts. At the 1990 Grammy Awards, it won Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal and was nominated for Album of the Year, ultimately losing to Bonnie Raitt's Nick of Time.

Vol. 3, recorded in 1990 without Roy Orbison, performed more modestly but still respectably: number 11 in the US (certified platinum) and number 14 in the UK, with "She's My Baby" and "Inside Out" both becoming genuine rock radio hits.

The 2007 reissue, The Traveling Wilburys Collection, arguably outdid them both in one specific way: it debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and number nine on the US Billboard 200, at the time the highest chart debut ever recorded for a box set, edging out even Nirvana's With the Lights Out (which, notably, still sold more total copies). The reissue has sold well over a million copies worldwide since.

What the Critics Said, Then and Since

Vol. 1 was greeted, largely, with the kind of delighted disbelief that follows a genuinely improbable pairing of talent. Rolling Stone included it on its list of the 100 Best Albums of the 1980s, at number 67. The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll went further, calling the band "the ultimate supergroup" and noting a lineup containing "three indisputable gods" in Dylan, Harrison, and Orbison. Colin Larkin's Encyclopedia of Popular Music described the Wilburys as "the last of the great supergroups." AllMusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine made the more technical point that it's genuinely difficult to call the Wilburys a true supergroup in the classic sense at all, given how much later they arrived than the Creams and Blind Faiths of the world, though nobody seemed to hold that against them.

Vol. 3 fared less rapturously, generally read as a game, likeable, slightly less magical sequel: the sound of four men trying to recapture something that had partly depended on a fifth. Later reassessments have been kinder: writing in Rolling Stone in 2002, Greg Kot pointed to the record's "ingratiating goofiness" as a feature rather than a flaw, and several retrospectives have singled out "Inside Out" and "She's My Baby" as genuine highlights that hold up regardless of the album's reputation next to its predecessor.

The Rock Hall's Blind Spot

Here's the strange part: every single Traveling Wilbury has been individually inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Harrison went in as a member of the Beatles, and again, posthumously, as a solo artist. Dylan and Orbison were both inducted as solo artists. Petty went in as the frontman of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Lynne is in as a member of Electric Light Orchestra. Every member, covered from multiple angles, and the band itself, as a unit, has never been inducted at all. It's the kind of oversight that generates its own minor cottage industry of "shouldn't the Wilburys be in the Hall of Fame?" think pieces every few years, without ever quite resulting in an actual induction.

The Bands the Wilburys Made Possible

The Wilburys' chart numbers are one thing. The template they left behind might matter more. Before 1988, "supergroup" mostly meant young, ambitious musicians combining forces at the height of their combined hunger: Cream, Blind Faith, Crosby Stills & Nash. The Wilburys proved a different model worked just as well: veteran musicians, well past needing to prove anything, getting together purely because it was fun.

That model got copied almost immediately. Warner Bros. executive Lenny Waronker, having watched what the Wilburys experience did for Tom Petty and Roy Orbison's careers, directly encouraged guitarist Ry Cooder to assemble a similar low-key supergroup of his own: Little Village, featuring Cooder, Jim Keltner, John Hiatt, and Nick Lowe, released in 1992. Critics drew the same comparison to Mark Knopfler's side project the Notting Hillbillies, whose 1990 album was described in the Chicago Tribune as a "Traveling Wilburys-type side project." Music historian Patrick Humphries went as far as crediting the band with sparking a minor revival of Lonnie Donegan-style British skiffle music, specifically through the Wilburys' own contemporary skiffle influences and the Notting Hillbillies' follow-up.

Whether any of that adds up to a legacy is a matter of taste. What's not really in dispute is the model it left behind: old friends, a rented kitchen, no rehearsal schedule, and the paperwork sorted out afterward.

See how each member's individual Hall of Fame induction fits into their own career on their member pages, or read the complete band history for the full story behind the numbers.