Classic Tracks: The Traveling Wilbury's "Handle With Care"

The Traveling Wilburys were perhaps popular music's most unusual “supergroup.” George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison wrote all the material together, worked up arrangements on the spot and made two fine, light-hearted albums that captured the personalities and eccentricities of it members. They never toured, and their vibe was casual in the extreme. Still, they produced a number of excellent songs, including the infectious radio hit “Handle With Care.”

It was during the recording of Harrison's 1987 LP, Cloud Nine, co-produced with Lynne, that the former Beatle first got the idea. “At the end of the day, we'd be listening back, and he'd say, ‘Oh, I wish we could have a group,’” Lynne says. “George could always get what he wanted.” The two kidded around with names for such a dream band of “over-40s,” jokingly referring to them as possibly The Tremblers, Lynne tossing in “Wilburys,” a name akin to a Willoughby Street in his native Birmingham, engineer Richard Dodd recalls. The name eventually evolved into Traveling Wilburys, the two offering up their picks for “if-only” bandmembers, including Dylan, Orbison and Eric Clapton.

The idea for the band resurfaced in the fall of 1987 when Harrison, Lynne and engineer Bill Bottrell were at the Village Recorder in Los Angeles creating an extended mix for a 12-inch single of Harrison's “Got My Mind Set on You.” “We were sitting around, and George said, ‘Yeah, I guess we're gonna have a group or something,’” Bottrell, who had worked with Lynne since the early 1980s, recalls. “Then he handed me a Traveling Wilburys guitar pick.”

A few months later, in April, another B-side was in order for Harrison, so he finagled his producer, Lynne, who was working with Orbison, away from the singer's sessions — with Orbison in tow. The three were joined by another collaborator, Petty, with whom Lynne had been recording Full Moon Fever. “We were getting close to being a band by the time we got out to Bob's that day,” Petty recalls.

Needing a place to record that was under the radar, Harrison called Dylan to find out if the garage studio at his Malibu home was available. Lynne and Bottrell had been to Dylan's home a few months earlier. “We did a little song with Bob, just on our own — ‘I'm in the Mood for Love,’” Lynne explains. But in April, Harrison arrived with his friends and the beginnings of a new song, which he used to lure Dylan into participating in the group. “George told me the way he hooked Bob into the idea was to ask if they could use Bob's studio,” Dodd recalls. “Bob was saying, ‘Well, I don't know if it works,’ and George told him, ‘Well, we'll get someone to make it work.’”

Dylan wondered what Harrison had in mind, and George explained, “We're just going to sit down, write a song and record it.” When Dylan inquired how such a thing could be done so easily, Harrison looked around and, spotting an Ampex 2-reel tape box, noted a legend on the side of the carton — “Handle With Care.” “And George just broke into this previously written song,” Dodd says.

Dylan's studio was indeed hardly in “record-ready” mode. “He had a pile of equipment Dave Stewart had sold him, and it looked to me like it hadn't really ever been used,” Bottrell says. “It was semi-connected, but it wasn't working very well so I had to sort of make it work.” As for a “studio,” he says, “There was a booth of some sort. But the garage door was still just the garage door.”

The studio had a 2-inch, 24-track ACES tape machine and an ACES console. “I remember the tape machine was skewing, so we had to baby it along a little bit,” Bottrell says. “I was worried it would be heavily out of alignment — there was nothing there for me to use to align it.” In fact, later during overdubbing at Westlake Audio, Bottrell had to set up the machine by ear when playing back the tapes to set it in alignment with the recordings made at Dylan's.

Once the bandmembers arrived, Lynne and Bottrell laid down a drum machine click track to record to. “The next thing I remember,” Bottrell says, “was all the guys sitting in a circle, each with an acoustic guitar, and I scrambled to find enough mics to record them.” Adds Lynne, “It was just five microphones, five strumming guitars in a semicircle — some 6s, some 12s — double-tracked. So you'd end up with 10 guitars. A really beautiful, shimmery, thick sound, like a thick skiffle.”