Traveling Wilburys
Complete Collection! (Tendollar TDR 020/021)

Dismissed as a trifle (though passionately embraced by some) upon release, the first Traveling Wilburys release increasingly seems like a career peak for everyone involved … and that's no small thing considering the Wilburys were actually Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison! Freed from the shackles of being any of their popular personae, these five dudes were able to make some of the most infectious, humorous, and lasting pop songs of their careers.

This is no small achievement. Getting Harrison, Dylan, and Petty to lighten up was no small feat, and getting Orbison and Lynne to behave outside the boundaries of their usual expectations would seem to be impossible. Yet the fact that these five legends managed to occupy equal footing as a band is merely a fraction as exciting as the reality that their recordings were any good at all, much less wonderful all around.

Complete Collection! gathers demos, rough mixes, outtakes, and sundry other recordings from the sessions that produced the two Traveling Wilburys records, including the sadly beautiful tracks featuring Del Shannon, who would have made a suitable replacement for Roy Orbison, but similarly died too soon (Shannon by his own hand, tragically).

The Wilburys' studio records are cool enough, certainly, but these unreleased recordings make a delightful complement to the "real" stuff. It's all as laid-back and entertaining as the finished albums, and perhaps preferable for the lack of studio polish. What you get is not any sense of "classic rock icons collaborating," but rather a great set of friends having fun, with Lynne's idiosyncratic production hand leading the way.

The confluence of these guys would produce not only the two Wilburys records, but also solo material by each of them (including singles by Lynne – "Every Little Thing: – and Orbison – "You Got It"), plus tracks that wound up on a Dylan record ("Born in Time" and "Under the Red Sky," two highlights from his underrated 90s LP titled after the latter tune).

The Del Shannon sessions form by far the most interesting stuff here, since they represent what would be the road left untraveled. A cover of "Runaway" seems obvious, but it's still very cool, and the other three Shannon tracks make one wish that he had stuck around to see Vol. 3 through to the end.

Mostly, though, this set captures the joy of five extremely talented guys with equally weird senses of humor, making stuff sheerly for the fun of it. Seeing as the actual Wilburys albums have fallen out of print, the likelihood of the outtakes coming to light officially is slim, so it's nice that the bootleggers are keeping the flame well lit.

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Review by La Fée