On Oct. 18, 1988, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, and Jeff Lynne put out an album as a band called the Traveling Wilburys. Six months earlier, the band didn’t exist.
Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 went to No. 3 on the Billboard 200, went triple platinum in the U.S., and won a Grammy, according to the album’s history. It all started because Harrison needed one extra song.
Harrison Needed a B-Side
In April 1988, Warner Bros. asked Harrison for a new B-side for the European release of his single “This Is Love,” according to the band’s history. He was in Los Angeles at the time, so he called Lynne, who had co-produced his 1987 album Cloud Nine, per the Beatles Bible. Orbison came along too.
They couldn’t book a professional studio on short notice, so they used Dylan’s home studio. Harrison had left a guitar at Petty’s house and went to pick it up. He asked Petty to come to the session while he was there.
“I’d been wondering what I was going to do the next day, so I said, ‘Sure, I’ll be there,’” Petty told BAM in 1989, as quoted by American Songwriter.
The song they recorded got its name from a label on a box in Dylan’s garage: “Handle With Care,” according to the song’s history. When Warner’s executives heard it, they thought it was too good to use as a B-side.
So the five of them decided to make a full album.
An Album Made in a Kitchen
They recorded most of Vol. 1 in about 10 days in May 1988 at the Los Angeles home of Dave Stewart of Eurythmics. They had to fit it in before Dylan went back on tour, and around Orbison’s own concert dates.
The five sat in a circle in Stewart’s kitchen with acoustic guitars and wrote the songs together.
“We just put like five chairs around the kitchen and put the microphones up, and that’s it,” Harrison said in a 1988 MTV interview, as reported by Showbiz Cheat Sheet. “It’s the first band that I can think of that’s got five rhythm guitar players,” he added.
They didn’t use their real names on the record. Each one played a fictional Wilbury brother: Harrison was Nelson, Lynne was Otis, Dylan was Lucky, Orbison was Lefty and Petty was Charlie T. Jr.
A Grammy and a Loss
“Handle With Care” went to No. 2 on Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart. Rolling Stone ranked the album No. 67 on its list of the 100 best albums of the 1980s. In 1990, it won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group With Vocal and was nominated for Album of the Year, which went to Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time.
Orbison died of a heart attack on Dec. 6, 1988, seven weeks after the album came out. The other four never replaced him. They released one more album, Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, in October 1990.
The band never officially got back together. Harrison died in 2001, and Petty died in 2017. When the box set The Traveling Wilburys Collection came out in 2007, it debuted at No. 1 in the U.K. and sold 500,000 copies around the world in its first three weeks.