Tom Petty would have turned 76 on Tuesday, October 20. Born in Gainesville, Florida, in 1950, he spent four decades fronting the Heartbreakers, but one of the most charmed stretches of his career lasted less than three years and came with a fake name: Charlie T. Wilbury Jr.
The Traveling Wilburys, the supergroup Petty formed with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Roy Orbison, went from a throwaway B-side to a triple-platinum album in a matter of months. Here is how fast it moved, and how the records performed.
From a garage session to a band
The idea started with Harrison and Lynne during the 1987 sessions for Harrison’s album Cloud Nine. Talking through a dream lineup, Harrison picked Dylan and Lynne picked Orbison. Petty came into the circle in October 1987, when the Heartbreakers were touring Europe as Dylan’s backing band and struck up a friendship with Harrison and Lynne that carried on in Los Angeles.
Petty always credited Harrison with the vision. “It was George’s band – it was always George’s band and it was a dream he had for a long time,” he said in the 2007 documentary The True History of the Traveling Wilburys.
The timeline, month by month
- February 1988: Harrison names the Traveling Wilburys on air during a radio interview, two months before the band actually existed.
- April 1988: Asked by his label for a European B-side, Harrison books Dylan’s garage studio in Malibu. Petty joins after Harrison stops by his house to pick up a guitar. The song becomes “Handle with Care,” named after a label on a box in the garage. Label executives decide it is too good to bury on a flip side.
- May 1988: The five record the bulk of Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1 in about ten days, sitting in a circle with acoustic guitars in a kitchen in Los Angeles, squeezed around Dylan’s and Orbison’s tour dates.
- October 18, 1988: Vol. 1 is released in the US on the new Wilbury label.
- December 6, 1988: Orbison dies of a heart attack. The remaining four never replace him.
- March 1990: The quartet regroups for a second album, deliberately numbered Vol. 3, which arrives on October 29, 1990, dedicated to “Lefty Wilbury.”
- February 28, 1991: The video for “Wilbury Twist,” the last single, wraps in Los Angeles. The group goes dormant.
Counting from the release of Vol. 1 to Orbison’s death gives just 49 days (13 left in October, 30 in November, 6 in December). The finished band, with all five members, existed for barely eight months.
The chart numbers
Vol. 1 peaked at No. 3 on the US albums chart and No. 1 in both Canada and Australia, where it eventually went six times platinum. In the US it reached triple-platinum status, and in 1990 it took the Grammy for best rock performance by a duo or group, the first Grammy of Petty’s career. “Handle with Care” climbed to No. 2 on the US mainstream rock chart, even though it stalled at No. 45 on the main US singles chart. “End of the Line” followed the same path, No. 2 on rock radio and No. 63 on the singles list.
Vol. 3 did less business, peaking at No. 11 in the US and selling platinum there. Its afterlife came later. After years out of print, both records returned in June 2007 as The Traveling Wilburys Collection, which debuted at No. 1 in the UK and reached No. 9 in the US.
What it did for Petty
The Wilbury sessions overlapped with Petty’s own first solo album, Full Moon Fever, which Lynne co-produced and which came out in April 1989. It reached No. 3 and gave him “Free Fallin’,” his only solo top 10 single in the US. In other words, the same small circle of friends shaped his two biggest late-1980s records within roughly a year.
Petty was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Heartbreakers in 2002 and died in 2017, a week after the end of the band’s 40th anniversary tour. Of the five Wilburys, only Dylan and Lynne are still living.
Further reading
Image: Takahiro Kyono from Tokyo, Japan, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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