Traveling Willburys
End of the Line might have been an anthem at one time. With the refrain, ‘it’s all right’, it’s become one for me, but too many Wilburys have traveled on. A pun but the truth. And I’ll still turn up the volume when I hear it. Can’t be none their fault, but still…
I have to believe George came up with the name — Wilburys is that very silly humor he and his three chaps used to enjoy.
I wasn’t a Tom Petty fan when he was first the rage, but eventually I got wise.
As a kid, I was Roy Orbison’s when Pretty Woman was making it all over the airwaves — AM because they hadn’t developed commercial FM yet. In those days nobody did that kind of reverse lyric, ‘yeah, she’s walking back to me.’ I just never would switch off the radio until after he’d stuck the landing. Classic.
You switched off radios back then.
Though if I had Roy’s chords, I’d be somewhere else — like in the R&R pantheon. Roy Orbison fell off the stage ages before he was recruited into the Traveling Wilburys by Jeff Lynne, a student of the art.
Fame is fleeting? Hell, life is fleeting and fame doesn’t last even that long. It’s one of those things fools looking for shortcuts chase while the gas is leaking from the balloon. The real folks just keep strumming chords.
I wanted to cry when Harrison died. We’d lost Lennon to the Dakota years before his assassination, leaving McCartney to fall into silly love songs, so George became the last adult standing. Peter Jackson’s upcoming documentary sounds tempting to an ex-Beatles fan.
Starting out (again as a kid) I wasn’t enamored of She Loves You Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, certainly not like my sister was. Though by the time they’d reached Rubber Soul and Revolver, the Beatles were moving toward something — Day In The Life — and I had no idea what I was heading for. Today, even Help reminds me that Lennon had some chords of his own. Forgive them for Roll Over Beethoven which was lame enough when Chuck wrote it, even if it made the record company some good bucks for the residuals. Please forgive them; they were impressionably young.
But this little ditty is dedicated to Tom because he delivers the stanzas: End of the Line. The lyrics aren’t youthful, more the wishful scheming by people coming to terms — seeing the end point but remaining optimistic, buying as much time as they can. Grateful Dead’s Touch of Gray is more explicit — the video’s corny but the music isn’t; not serious like Nietzsche but ‘it’s all right.’
‘My sister’s ex-husband can’t get no lovin’ walks around dog-faced and hurt.’ There you have Tom at the top of his game. Yer so Bad is the genuine sardonic rock song, and he sang it to inspire the laggards.
From bad roots and good, rock grew up — from that early Who song boasting they weren’t dying before they got old and Mick writing about being horny. Back in the early days, they were all raging, but today? You can’t be a sex pistol all your life. Or as Phil Silvers explained: “you want to be a eunuch all your life?”
Or even better the Punch cartoon by Peter Birkett. And given the context, I don’t think Birkett will be traveling to the Middle East in this incarnation.
Dylan was earnest from the start. I heard Like a Rolling Stone in 1965 when they were playing it on the radio, feeling it needed to be taken seriously, whining vocals, vitriol and all. Dylan was the outsider at the window staring at the feast, and boy, was he pissed.
Up ’til then, I’d never had done much petting, let alone ‘IT.” Listening to Dylan, it seemed living with the opposite sex might be a challenge.
But Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks stayed with me. Shelter from the Storm, Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts — Tangled up in Blue is the one I learned to play best. You can’t find a single track on that album swear to god that’s not moving. Dylan still had a voice then. Though he never seemed concerned about learning to play his instrument, he had the sense to put musicians around him who could. And Jimi showed us the anthem that lay inside All Along the Watchtower — that opening riff justifies the lyrics.
Dylan’s still writing into the new millennium.
From a rockabilly start, jamming in a blues lick or two, rock introduced an unbelievable flood of lyrical artists in the 60s and 70s, and the music industry has been gnawing on that corpus ever since — that and the survivors who are still standing.
The thing about rock & roll is you only have so many syllables to the line, and they have to be simple for the audience, AM, FM, Internet, it’s an audience needing distractions and not wanting to be thinking while they’re at it. No rambling allowed. “Best thing I ever had” — is there a better way to conjugate that verb? Tom was a master at those, to the point that the mischief he was making could get lost.
Roy’s been gone. George and Tom too.
George wanted to translate the universe. He got real close. Dylan’s still touring, god bless, and Tom took a pill too many. Does that make any of them less? Traveling musicians and gypsies, and who could tell the difference? Lot’s of modern lyrics, and no one wants to take their headphones seriously.
Lynn’s still around. Maybe he can ‘splain it better.
The gods of mirth and music looked down on me, and the vote was ‘no way, no way’ and so I gave up that ambition.
I’ll be damned; Time to Move On is playing; god bless Tom wherever he might be smoking.
Credits and thanks to Bob Dylan, George Harrison and his son, Dhani, Jim Keltner, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty.
