The number one rule of every single Traveling Wilburys was that everyone had a great time. George Harrison didn’t want to have the same kinds of responsibilities that weighed down every other rock and roll band, and since he was working among other legends, it was better for him to make the record and be done with it rather than worrying about going out on tour or going through the interview junket a thousand times. But even if Jeff Lynne was happy to be there half the time, there were more than a few tunes that drove him up the wall when they first started laying down everything.  Then again, it was going to take a lot of guts for anyone in the band to say that they didn’t like a line that someone had written. No one could look at someone like Bob Dylan with a straight face and say that one of their lyrics sucked, but Lynne wasn’t one to argue over words. What mattered was the melody, and that meant getting everything perfectly right when working on a song like ‘Handle With Care’. The band’s debut certainly has a sheen to it whenever you listen, and that comes from Lynne’s attention to detail. By comparison, Lynne had said numerous times that he didn’t really care that much for their second record, and a lot of that might have come from the fact that it was more indebted to the sounds of garage rock than anything else that they had been working on on the first record. Or maybe it was because someone very important wasn’t around to join the party anymore. Roy Orbison had been one of the best voices on the band’s first album, and while most of the band were worried that he might not have agreed to join the band, the fact that he was welcomed with open arms was the perfect epilogue to his career after he passed away. If Orbuson was going to join the band, though, Lynne was going to make sure that he had a song that the rest of the band could be proud to have played on. But when Lynne first got the demo for ‘Not Alone Any More’, the rest of the band didn’t seem to be taking to it that much. Orbison still sounded absolutely beautiful, soaring above everyone with those fantastic high notes, but since the rest of the music wasn’t doing him justice, Lynne couldn’t bear listening to the song for that long before realising that he needed to change everything about it.  He wasn’t going to be known as the one who failed to make an Orbison classic, and after one too many times of hearing the demo, Lynne changed the chords around to help make the tune iconic, saying, “It only had three chords all the way through. And somehow it wasn’t, I felt… I’d taken a tape home and listened to it. And it was driving me nuts because it wasn’t doing Roy justice. And I thought, we’ll have to change the chords to make a tune– go somewhere.’ And I did. I changed the chords and I changed nearly all the chords in the whole song.” And changing the chords around was half the reason why a lot of Orbison’s songs worked so well. Harrison had even said that it was difficult to find the kind of songs that fit his voice whenever making Wilburys tracks, and even though Orbison slid in perfectly on ‘Handle With Care’, sometimes his voice needed that little push from the rest of the band to sound fantastic over the music. The rest of the Wilburys would have been happy to work on another tune if it meant giving Orbison his shining moment, but nothing was going to stop Lynne from turning in one of the best songs that he knew how. Orbison was one of the great originators of the operatic rock and roll song, and Lynne wasn’t going to rest until he had the kind of tune that could stand alongside tracks like ‘Crying’. ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE The post The 1988 Traveling Wilburys song that drove Jeff Lynne crazy: “It wasn’t doing Roy justice” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.