After the tour, Petty returned to L.A. to work on his album and rebuild his life (his family’s home had burned down earlier that year), while George worked on promoting his album and Jeff worked on a few new singles with the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. In 1988, while having lunch with his daughter Adria, Petty ran into Lynne and Harrison in L.A. They made plans to “jam together” at Petty’s home in Bel Aire and later their families spent Christmas together – with Petty’s daughter Adria and George’s son Dhani becomming fast friends like their fathers. At this time, Lynne was also helping Petty produce his first solo album Full Moon Fever. Lynne was simultaneously working on some new material with Roy Orbison, who was in town at the time. While Lynne and Harrison were searching for a B-side for the next single from Cloud Nine, George realized that he had left his acoustic guitar at Petty’s home. Lynne and Harrison headed over and picked up the guitar and Petty himself, who agreed to help with the single. Harrison then made a quick call to Bob Dylan, who had a studio in his home in Malibu that they were hoping to use. The ever-elusive Dylan, strangely enough, answered on the first ring and instructed the gang to head on over.

Once they arrived, George played them all a chord progression he had been working on, collaborating with the others on lyrics. Jeff Lynne thought of writing a part in the song for Roy Orbison’s voice, not wanting to waste his friend’s considerable talent. So, the group called Orbison over to work with them on the single. Soon, Orbison, Lynne, Petty and Harrison were gathered on Dylan’s front lawn while Dylan himself began barbequing. (I’m not kidding. Robert “The Voice of His Generation” Zimmerman also barbeques.) They all started throwing out lines: “Been beat up and battered around,” Harrison sang; “I’m so tired of being lonely,” Orbison crooned; “In daycare centers and night schools,” quipped Dylan. As the song began to take shape, Dylan told Harrison that it was all well and good, but what was it? Harrison glanced in Dylan’s garage and saw a box labeled “Handle With Care”, and there it was. They had their single. They recorded it in Dylan’s studio the next day, alternating lead singers and playing five acoustic guitars. Later, Harrison took it to the studio executives who all agreed the tune was too brilliant to be stuck on the B-side of some twelve-inch single. They wanted to hear more.

When Harrison realized what success “Handle With Care” could have, he felt his dream slowly falling into place.  As his friend Klaus Voorman later remembered, “For those who knew him, his musicianship was always inextricably linked to his loyalty to his friends.” He had spoken with Jeff Lynne about forming a group of fellow musicians and producing new music in a new environment. George and Jeff joked about how their band would have pseudonyms like the Beatles had with Sgt. Pepper. Harrison, strangely enough, did not ever have any concrete plans to form this group and the Wilburys were only conceived after all the pieces had already fallen into place.

“He was really excited. Just jumping up and down excited. ‘We’ve got a band! We’ve got to be in a band!’” Petty remembered. With Petty and Lynne on board, George placed a call to Bob Dylan and recruited him for the group. The only member left to ask was Roy Orbison, who was playing a show in Anaheim. Lynne, Petty, and Harrison packed in a rented car with their wives and made the drive to Anaheim to ambush Orbison backstage. To their delight (and our good fortune) Orbison said yes.

From the beginning, the Wilburys belonged to Harrison. But, though there was a clear leader and a power dynamic that was present as relative new comers like Petty worked with legends like Dylan and Harrison, the group was a complete care-free democracy. “We didn’t question each other,” Orbison said. “We just went right ahead.” They enjoyed each others company and creativity flowed freely. Each artist, no matter where they had been in their careers and personal lives, now had somewhere they belonged. Dylan, who was the busiest of all the Wilburys, later lamented, “I think my least favorite thing was having to go on tour when all the albums were getting started. I was just dying to get back.” (Poignant, considering Dylan’s post 1978 schedule has been crowned “The Never Ending Tour”).  Indeed, all of the Wilburys were quite busy with their own projects. Petty was finishing up Full Moon Fever and attempting to smooth tensions with his band The Heartbreakers, who weren’t giant fans of the whole “solo album” idea. Harrison was promoting Cloud Nine and Dylan was constantly touring while working on his next album Under the Red Sky. Lynne was producing the majority of these albums while also writing his first solo album, and Roy was putting together a few new singles and playing local shows. However, the group found time for their favorite project and completed the entire album in just ten days.

The first Traveling Wilburys album was entitled Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 and consisted of ten tracks (two bonus tracks were later added when the album was reissued in 2007), all of which told a story. The first tune was the Harrison orchestrated “Handle With Care” and the other songs followed the same nonsensical, rockabilly style. The track “Dirty World” was mostly orchestrated by Dylan whose idea was, “Let’s do a song like Prince! He loves your body, ooh ooh baby!” “Not Alone Anymore” was a track written by Lynne for Orbison’s legendary voice. Petty contributed the nonsense narratives “Last Night” and “Margarita”. Dylan’s “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” (co-written with Petty) poked fun at Bruce Springsteen with phrases like “out on Thunder Road” and “Jersey line”. The song confused Harrison which he remembered “… didn’t make much sense to me… Americana…” , but it was Dylan’s way of not-so-subtly showing that he was still “the Boss”. Harrison reflected his spirituality and the new peace he felt in “Heading for the Light”. “I see the sun ahead,” he sings. “I ain’t never looking back / All my dreams are coming true as I think of you / Now there’s nothing in the way to stop me / Heading for the light.”

The writing and recording sessions went on for ten days in the kitchen of the group’s friend Dave Stewart. It was a time of camaraderie for the group, who put fun twists on their songs with strange lyrics and even had their drummer Jim Keltner (under the pseudonym Buster Sideburry) bang on the vents and refrigerator shelves for the track “Rattled”. The album was an opportunity to put fun back into the music business. It was all one big joke, and the Wilburys enjoyed being the only ones in on it. For instance, while recording “Dirty World” they all took turns reading phrases out of car catalogues. No matter which way they rearranged it, Roy Orbison always ended up crooning the line “Trembling Wilbury”, which never failed to make the Wilbury brothers erupt into laughter.Their families were constantly in and out of the house, their children and wives becoming friends as well. At night, Harrison would bring ukuleles for every member of the group and they would play into the night as the children fell asleep around them. “The kids would get tired. ’Can we go home now dad?’ ‘Go to sleep son, we’re playing ukuleles now,” Petty explained.(Petty is almost certainly referring to a young Dhani Harrison, as he himself does not in all actuality have a son).

When the recording was finally finished, Lynne and Harrison headed back to England and engineered the finishing touches at George’s home in Friar Park. For all its fun, the album was also a great success – going triple platinum and winning a Grammy award for Best Rock Performance for a Duo or Group. It was hailed by the critics as the best and only album of its kind. For the Traveling Wilburys, it wasn’t about the success. “The doing of the album,” Orbison remembered. “That was my greatest time.”

Tragedy struck the Traveling Wilburys just days before they were to shoot their second music video (for the track “End of the Line”). On December 6, 1988, Orbison passed away from a sudden heart attack. His loss devastated his fellow Wilburys, but they decided to continue with the video – placing Orbison’s guitar in an empty rocking chair as a remembrance. “He was a brilliant singer,” Lynne remembered. “The best singer in rock & roll ever. It’s still hard for me to believe that I got to work with him and have him trust in me.” The group decided to stay together and record another album without Orbison. “Life flows on within you and without you,” Harrison told MTV. “Roy’s around in his astral being. He’ll be cool.” They never replaced their dear friend and continued on as a quartet (despite rumors that Del Shannon would become the fifth Wilbury after helping produce their track “Runaway”).

The second and final Traveling Wilburys album was jokingly named Traveling Wilburys Vol. 3, which continues to torture loyal fans who lurk in the corners of Barnes & Noble, hoping to catch whispers of the lost Volume 2 (the rumor of which my spies have since sourced to a bootleg released in Japan).  It was recorded in a rented mansion in Beverly Hills that the group christened Wilbury Manor. A big flagpole with the Wilbury flag waved in the wind above the Spanish-style mansion in the hills. The second album was released in 1989 and also reached platinum status, featuring silly tracks like “The Wilbury Twist” and “She’s My Baby” alongside critically acclaimed songs like “New Blue Moon”. After the album, the Wilburys thought of touring or collaborating on a new album, but each member had his own career, so neither a tour nor a third album ever came into being. Vol. 3 was the last the world would hear of the Traveling Wilburys, but definitely not the last they would hear of each other.

The true legacy of the Traveling Wilburys lies not in the music they created, but in the friendships the group fostered. The four remaining Wilburys carried the time together with them wherever they went. “Congratulations” featured in many of Dylan’s following tour sets, and Petty continues to play “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” on tour to this very day. Jeff Lynne went on to help George produce his final album Brainwashed and also helped Petty produce later albums such as Wildflowers. Harrison and Petty remained close friends, spending family Christmases and vacations together. When George Harrison was brutally stabbed by a crazed fan in his home in 1999, his only quote to the press was, “Well, he wasn’t auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.” It seemed that the Traveling Wilburys would stick with all of them until the end. For George Harrison, it did.

When Harrison died of throat cancer in 2001, he passed on peacefully. His spirituality and self-awareness made him unafraid of death. But, it was his time with his friends that made him satisfied with his life. In remembrance of his dear friend, Tom Petty wrote a tribute that featured in Rolling Stone in 2002. “I’m just blessed by God to have known him,” Petty wrote. “He had so much love in him. My daughter Adria used to visit him in England. She was telling me the other night that they were walking in the garden and George said, ‘Oh Adria, sometimes I just wish I could turn into a beam of light and go away.” His friends remembered him in death as the peaceful, loving, not-so-quiet Wilbury they had known. In 2002, Eric Clapton organized the Concert for George. Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty played for their friend, performing “Handle With Care” in memory of their time together.

In the end, all the success of the Wilburys didn’t measure up to what the band meant to George Harrison. In the later years of the Beatles, George had felt under-appreciated and distant from his bandmates. The Wilburys gave him the experience of being in a band again. Toward the end of his life his Wilbury friends were never far away. “He was like the sun, the stars, and the moon,” Dylan said. “We will miss him enormously. The world is a profoundly emptier place without him.” His experience as a Wilbury gave him peace in his later life – friends and music to help him as he was “Heading for the Light.” “That was his baby from the beginning,” Petty remembered. “He went at it with such great enthusiasm. The rest of his life, he considered himself a Wilbury.”  :-)

https://theeventsoundslike.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/the-mostly-true...

So, what you said: " I always thought of it as a sort of side project done just for fun by him (George) and some of his famous friends." Is pretty much true!! :-)

I see you had their first album on cassette tape. And I see you had 2 of them, in case one wore out. LOL! :-) That's a good idea you had buying 2 copies of your favorite tapes just to be on the safe side!! :-) Thanks for the Pictures! YES, those were the good old days!! :-)

You're Favorite tracks ARE Great Songs!! I agree the whole album was Great! I see that George's idea about Volume 3 really fooled you!!! LOL!!!! Until you saw That Quote that explained everything!!! LOL!!! ;-) Yes, Very Funny!!!! :-) Yeah, Tom Petty seemed like such a nice guy!!! He Sure will be missed!!!

" But in my ever optimistic way, I try to think of his untimely departure as him just joining a jam session up there with buddies George and Roy! :-)"   I LIKE THAT!!!! :-)

Thanks for the bits of trivia about the fake nicknames!!! That was mentioned in the second paragraph above, that I posted. :-) I didn't know about the nicknames for the Volume 3 album!! Thanks!!! I Agree, One of the greatest supergroups ever formed!!!!! Thanks for posting the Great Pictures!! And Thanks for posting the Video!!! Surely was an Amazing Tribute!!! GREAT!!!!! :-) WOW!!! 90 thousand people all sang along to "I Won't Back Down" in Tom Petty's home state of Florida!!!! Fantastic!!! :-)

Two pages of info here. Hope you enjoyed it!  ;-)

Beatlebob, thanks for sharing all that information and letting me know it was 2 pages long. It took a little while but I really enjoyed reading it all! I even learned a few new things! Thanks again!

Did you hear Tom Petty finally had a funeral? I read it was in the same place George Harrison's service was. Since they were such good friends I thought that was sweet and most likely not just a coincidence! 

The world will never forget Tom Petty. Surrounded by friends and family, the “Free Fallin'” singer was laid to rest on Oct. 16 — exactly two weeks after his sudden passing on Oct. 2. Loved ones gathered at Lakeside Shrine and Meditation Garden for the beautiful ceremony, and even shared some heartwarming pictures from their day. Many of the photo captions were in reference to Tom’s songs and lyrics. “The dark of the sun we will stand together,” one friend wrote, referring to his track “The Dark Of The Sun” with The Heartbreakers. “You belong somewhere you feel free,” another wrote, alluding to “Wildflowers.”

Eventhough it was 2 weeks ago, it still feels so surreal that he's gone! And I'm still just as heartbroken! :-( 

I found this picture of The Traveling Wilburrys as Lego toys that helped lift up the mood though. So cool! Somebody really did a great job on their likeness! 

He had so many great songs but this one was always my favorite:

We really "Got Lucky" to have him! Such a wonderful musician and person! RIP Tom Petty!!

Sadie, you're so welcome for sharing the information and letting you know it was 2 pages long!! ;-) I'm Sure it took a little while, but I'm Glad you enjoyed reading it all!!! I learned some new things too!!! You're So Welcome, My Friend!!! :-)

Yes, I heard about his funeral, that he was laid to rest on October 16th. Yes, "The shrine and meditation garden previously was the site of the funeral for Tom Petty's Traveling Wilburys bandmate George Harrison 16 years ago." I also, thought that was Sweet!! And most likely not just a coincidence, since  they were such good friends!! Thanks for Posting what was said!!! Very Touching!!!! I know what you mean! It Still does feel so Surreal that he's gone!!! Even though it was two weeks ago!! So Sad!!! :-(

WOW!!! Thanks for posting the picture of The Traveling Wilburrys as Lego toys!!! Yes, somebody really did do a great job on their likeness!!! So Cool!!! Glad it lifted your mood up!!! :-) And Thanks for posting the song too!!! YES!!! He had so many Great Songs!!! I see that this one was Always your Favorite!!! I Think it's a Great Song Too!!! I Agree!!! We Really "GOT LUCKY" to have Him!!! He Sure Was such a wonderful musician and person!!!  RIP Tom Petty!!