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The Traveling Wilburys: The True Story of Rock's Most Reluctant Supergroup

Every supergroup claims to have formed "naturally," the way every celebrity couple claims to have met "through mutual friends." Usually it's spin. In the case of the Traveling Wilburys, it happens to be true, and the friend in question was a cardboard box in Bob Dylan's garage.

Here is a band that contained a former Beatle, the man Bruce Springsteen called his hero's hero, the reigning king of American jangle-rock, the voice behind "Blowin' in the Wind," and the guy who wrote "Mr. Blue Sky." None of them set out to start a band at all. They were trying to knock out a spare track before dinner. What they ended up with was ten songs that had no business working as well as they did, made by five men who, on paper, had no business getting along, let alone forming a family.

A B-Side That Refused to Behave

By early 1988, George Harrison had the kind of problem most musicians would take in a heartbeat: his comeback record, Cloud Nine, was a hit, and Warner Bros. wanted more of it, fast, in the form of a B-side. Specifically, the label's international arm needed a bonus cut to pad out the European single for "This Is Love," because in 1988 a 12-inch still needed something fans couldn't get anywhere else. It was a chore, not an event. Harrison needed a spare song by the next day.

He had, conveniently, most of a band's worth of friends within arm's reach. Jeff Lynne, who'd produced Cloud Nine and was mid-session on both Roy Orbison's comeback album and Tom Petty's solo debut, was around. So was Orbison, an idol to every man in the room and someone Lynne had been angling to work with for ages. Over dinner, Harrison asked Lynne to help him knock the track out the next morning and invited Orbison along. The only problem was where. No professional studio was free on that kind of notice, so Harrison called Bob Dylan, whose Malibu home had a small studio rigged up in the garage. Dylan said yes.

Tom Petty's involvement was even more incidental. Harrison had left a guitar at Petty's house after a jam a few nights earlier, and swinging by to retrieve it, he figured he might as well ask Petty along too. It would have been strange not to: Petty and the Heartbreakers had just spent the better part of two years backing Dylan on tour, and Harrison and Lynne had gotten friendly with him in London over that same stretch. A guitar pickup turned into a fifth invitation, and Petty said yes.

The next morning, four rock legends and one Wilbury-in-waiting showed up at Dylan's Malibu property, where Dylan, a man who has spent six decades declining to explain himself to anyone, was working a barbecue grill. Harrison had a chord sequence and a half-written opening line but no way to finish it, so he turned to the most scrutinized lyricist in American music and asked him, more or less, to just write something. Dylan obliged. Looking for a title, Harrison noticed a shipping label on a box sitting in the garage. It read "Handle With Care." That became the song.

From Bonus Track to Blank Check

What happened next is the part every supergroup origin story wishes it could claim, and almost none of them can back up: the song was too good to bury on a B-side. Warner Bros. chairman Mo Ostin and A&R chief Lenny Waronker both reportedly stumbled over their own words asking the same question, can't we turn this into an album? Harrison, who hadn't had a band to hide inside since the Beatles split eighteen years earlier, didn't need convincing.

There was still a recruitment scene to play out. That same night, Harrison, Lynne, and Petty drove to Anaheim's Celebrity Theatre to catch Roy Orbison's show and asked him backstage to formally join whatever this was becoming. By Petty's account, the three of them watched Orbison deliver an "unbelievable" set, elbowing each other and grinning: he's in our band too. Some of the most decorated songwriters alive, giddy as teenagers at a concert, because the guy on stage had just said yes to their garage band.

They needed a name that wouldn't sound self-important, and Harrison and Lynne already had a candidate lying around. During the Cloud Nine sessions, the two of them had taken to calling any studio mistake a "wilbury," short for "we'll bury it in the mix." First they tried "the Trembling Wilburys." Lynne swapped the tremble for a road trip, and the name stuck. To sell the joke properly, all five adopted stage names and posed as half-brothers, sons of a fictional patriarch named Charles Truscott Wilbury Sr., a piece of theater that gets its own page here, because the pseudonyms alone are worth unpacking.

Six Days in a Kitchen in Encino

With Dylan and Orbison both due back on the road within days (Dylan was about to launch what became his decades-long Never Ending Tour), there wasn't time to make a record the normal way. The band set up at Eurythmics co-founder Dave Stewart's house in the Encino Hills, where a small studio sat behind the main property. There was no real control room, so they tracked rhythm parts in Stewart's kitchen, gathered around acoustic guitars and a single microphone, the way you'd expect five guys in a bar band to work it out, if the bar band happened to include a Beatle.

The pace was fast and the mood was, by every account, closer to summer camp than a session. Lynne's own description of the routine: arrive around noon, drink coffee, someone floats a riff, and it turns into something by midnight, while Orbison tells stories about Sun Records and running with Elvis in between takes. Olivia Harrison has said she stood in the bushes outside Stewart's house on day one with a camera, filming the band arriving one by one, apparently aware she was watching something that wouldn't repeat. One engineer on the sessions has described a whole sushi restaurant going quiet when Dylan, Harrison, Orbison, Petty, and Lynne walked in together for dinner, which is as good a snapshot as any of what the spring of 1988 was like near this band.

The framework for the record, later titled Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, came together in roughly ten days, with vocals and overdubs finished at Harrison's Friar Park studio in England. It landed in October 1988, credited to five brothers named Nelson, Otis, Lucky, Lefty, and Charlie T. Jr., liner notes courtesy of Monty Python's Michael Palin, writing under his own invented academic alias, because apparently one layer of joke wasn't enough for this band.

Chart Success, Then a Death No One Saw Coming

Vol. 1 went triple platinum in the US, produced two hit singles in "Handle With Care" and "End of the Line," and won the 1990 Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group. For a lineup made up almost entirely of artists past their commercial peak (Dylan hadn't cracked two million copies on an album in years; Orbison hadn't had real chart traction since the mid-'60s), that's not a modest comeback. That's a full resurrection.

Then, on December 6, 1988, less than two months after the record came out, Roy Orbison died of a heart attack at his mother's home in Hendersonville, Tennessee. He was 52. He'd spent that evening flying radio-controlled model airplanes with his son. He lived just long enough to watch "Handle With Care" climb the charts and to hear his own comeback album, Mystery Girl, nearly finished. He never heard it released. More on Orbison's whole, wrenching arc on his own page.

Volume 3: Grief Disguised as a Numbering Joke

Here's the fact that stops most casual fans cold: there is no Traveling Wilburys Vol. 2. The band's second and final record, cut in 1990 as a foursome, was titled Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, a joke Harrison never fully explained on the record, though the leading theory involves a bootleg already circulating under the "Volume 2" name. We've dug into the whole mystery here, since the guessing is more fun than any answer would be.

The chemistry survived the lineup change even if the sound didn't stay identical. The surviving four adopted a new set of pseudonyms (Spike, Clayton, Boo, Muddy) and dedicated the album to "Lefty" in the liner notes. Vol. 3 is rowdier and more polished than the debut, gave the band its silliest single in "Wilbury Twist," and did fine business without ever quite recapturing whatever happened in that Encino kitchen. It's also the last thing the four of them ever recorded together.

The Tour That Never Happened

Despite years of loose talk (Petty has said Harrison would bring up touring "every time" he'd had a joint and a couple of beers), the Wilburys never played a single public show. Not one. Their entire filmed output amounts to a handful of music videos, most memorably the "Wilbury Twist" clip, in which Eric Idle and John Candy attempt to teach America a dance move that never once left the video. We go deeper on why the tour never happened here; the short version is nobody ever fully committed, and by 1991 the window had closed.

After a short 1991 Japan tour Harrison played with Eric Clapton's band, not the Wilburys, close enough that fans hoped it might lead somewhere, Harrison mostly withdrew from public life. His son Dhani has described his father's actual calling as twelve-hour days in the garden at Friar Park. The Wilburys went quiet without ever formally breaking up. Nobody drew a line under it. New work simply stopped happening.

Silence, Then a Comeback Nobody Expected

When Harrison's Warner Bros. distribution deal lapsed in 1995, ownership of both albums reverted to him, and for reasons nobody's ever fully explained, he sat on them. Both records went out of print through the late '90s and into the 2000s, turning into exactly the kind of used-CD-bin trophy fans of a certain age remember hunting for.

Harrison died of cancer in November 2001. It fell to his estate, run by his widow Olivia, to bring the catalog back. In June 2007, both albums resurfaced as The Traveling Wilburys Collection, remastered, padded with bonus cuts, packaged with a DVD documentary built from footage shot during the original sessions. It debuted at number one in the UK and number nine on the Billboard 200, outselling both albums' original chart runs in their first week alone.

A Band Everyone Remembers, That the Hall of Fame Somehow Forgot

Here's the strangest footnote in the whole story: every individual Wilbury has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Harrison went in with the Beatles, then again as a solo artist after his death. Dylan and Orbison both went in as solo artists. Petty went in fronting the Heartbreakers. Lynne is in as a member of ELO. The band itself, as a unit, has never been inducted at all.

Nobody's filed the paperwork, and at this point it's hard to picture anyone bothering.

Quick facts: The Traveling Wilburys at a glance

Want the full family tree? Meet each Wilbury brother individually: real names, fake names, and everything each one brought to the table.