THE TRAVELING WILBURYS COLLECTION

Back in 2007, PopMatters' own Michael Franco gave a glowing review to the then-just rereleased triple-disc set of Traveling Wilburys' material called, rather unimaginatively, The Traveling Wilburys Collection. Here, it contained the two albums released by the supergroup -- consisting of Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, George Harrison, and Roy Orbison -- as well as a short documentary depicting the superstar quintet going to a house and recording what would become the very first Traveling Wilburys album, Volume 1. Never taken as a truly serious project, this meeting of music legends following the commercial success of Harrison's 1987 effort Cloud Nine (produced by Lynne) was very off-the-cuff and ramshackle. Although the song that inspired it all, "Handle With Care", remains a rock-radio staple to this day, the sessions that followed featured the group in a fairly low-fi setup, culling their powers together to write a song a day, using auto magazine snippits to drive home the point of "Dirty World" while letting Dylan do his thing on the fan favorite "Tweeter and the Monkey Man". As Franco noted in his 9/10 review, "the Traveling Wilburys were always the stuff of myth -- of unlikely beginnings and heroes and, yes, even transcending death through creation.  (https://www.popmatters.com).