The Traveling Wilburys – Handle With Care

The biggest supergroup ever formed was named by accident — after a label on a cardboard box George Harrison spotted in Bob Dylan’s garage.

The most consequential cardboard box in rock history sat in Bob Dylan’s garage in Malibu. In early April 1988, George Harrison stood in that garage needing a title for a song he’d just written with four friends, and asked Dylan — who had spent part of the session tending a barbecue in the backyard — to contribute. Give us some lyrics, Harrison teased, you famous lyricist. Dylan asked what the song was called. Harrison looked around, saw a box stamped with a shipping label, and read it aloud: “Handle With Care.” One day of work in a borrowed garage, one accidental title, and the biggest supergroup ever assembled had recorded its first song without quite realizing it was a band yet.

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None of it was planned. Warner Bros. had asked Harrison for a bonus track for the European release of his single “This Is Love,” and Harrison, in Los Angeles with nothing recorded, decided to knock one out the next day. Over dinner he recruited Jeff Lynne, his Cloud Nine co-producer, who was in town producing Roy Orbison’s Mystery Girl — and Orbison, sitting at the same table, said he’d like to come along and watch. No professional studio was available on such short notice, so Harrison phoned Dylan, who offered the garage. The final Wilbury arrived by way of a house call: Harrison’s guitar happened to be at Tom Petty’s place, and when he went to collect it, he invited Petty too. Five of the most storied names in rock, assembled by dinner conversation and a forgotten guitar.

Too Good to Bury on a B-Side

Harrison had the opening line — been beat up and battered around — and a part he heard for Orbison’s voice; the rest came from everyone, passed around the circle of acoustic guitars. What emerged was a middle-aged rock confessional disguised as a singalong: Harrison’s verses full of wry exhaustion, Orbison’s soaring bridge carrying the loneliness he’d sung about for thirty years, Dylan and Petty trading the everyman chorus. When Harrison played the mix for Warner Bros., the executives refused to waste it on a European 12-inch. Harrison later said he carried the tape around in his pocket for ages wondering what to do with it, until the only answer left was the obvious one: get all five back in a room and make a whole album. In May 1988, squeezed between Dylan’s tour preparations and Orbison’s road schedule, the Traveling Wilburys recorded Vol. 1 — five brothers with invented names, Nelson, Otis, Lucky, Lefty, and Charlie T. Jr., leaving their real egos at the door.

“Handle With Care” was released on October 17, 1988, as the debut single and the album’s opening track, with “Margarita” on the B-side. It became the Wilburys’ most successful single: No. 2 on Billboard’s Album Rock Tracks chart, No. 45 on the Hot 100, No. 21 in the UK, and a top-ten hit in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The album went triple Platinum in America and earned a Grammy nomination for Album of the Year — remarkable numbers for a record that existed only because a B-side turned out too good to throw away.

Lefty’s Last Frame

The video, directed by David Leland and filmed in early October 1988 at a former brewery near Union Station in Los Angeles, shows exactly what made the band irresistible: five legends crowded around microphones, grinning like a garage band that couldn’t believe its luck. It carries a weight nobody intended. On December 6, 1988, seven weeks after the single’s release, Roy Orbison died of a heart attack at 52 — and this became the last music video he ever made. The surviving four carried on for one more album, but the original lineup existed on record for barely eight months. Harrison left in 2001, Petty in 2017; only Dylan and Lynne remain.

What survives is the least cynical supergroup record ever made — a song about being handled with care, recorded by five men who did exactly that for each other, in a garage, in a day, under a title borrowed from a cardboard box. Everybody’s got somebody to lean on. For one spring in Malibu, the five biggest names in the room leaned on each other.