The Traveling Wilburys: Who Was Actually in the Band?

Five men, ten pseudonyms, one supposedly shared bloodline. If you've ever tried to explain the Traveling Wilburys to someone who wasn't around in 1988, you've probably watched their eyes glaze over somewhere around the phrase "they pretended to be brothers." It sounds like a bit that should have died in the writer's room. Instead, five people with absolutely nothing left to prove decided they also had nothing to lose by being silly, and kept the joke running for two entire albums.

Here's the roster, minus the theatrics: George Harrison, formerly of a reasonably successful Liverpool quartet. Bob Dylan, whose lyric sheets have been picked over by more graduate students than the Dead Sea Scrolls. Tom Petty, the youngest Wilbury by a comfortable margin and the only one still building toward his commercial peak rather than looking back at it. Roy Orbison, whose voice made grown rock critics reach for words like "operatic" without embarrassment. And Jeff Lynne, the man behind Electric Light Orchestra, who'd spent the better part of two decades trying to sound like the Beatles and finally got to just stand next to one.

The lineup, real names and fake ones

Each member picked a new alias for Vol. 1 in 1988, then picked a different new alias for Vol. 3 in 1990, because reusing the same joke twice would have been beneath them, apparently. Here's the full decoder ring.

A few honorary Wilburys also earned themselves fake names without ever officially joining the family, drummer Jim Keltner ("Buster Sidebury") chief among them. Meet the honorary Wilburys here.

If you're wondering why exactly they bothered with the pseudonym bit at all, or how "we'll bury it in the mix" turned into an entire fictional family tree headed by one Charles Truscott Wilbury Sr., we've unpacked the whole bit of theater in its own article. Short version: it let five men who were each, individually, treated as a Big Deal, stop being a Big Deal for a few weeks and just be a garage band with excellent session players.

Why this lineup, and not some other one

It's worth remembering that this wasn't a lineup assembled by a record executive with a spreadsheet of available legends. Harrison and Lynne picked Dylan and Orbison mostly because they wanted to. Petty got in because he'd left a guitar at Harrison's house and Harrison went to retrieve it. That's the entire vetting process. Tom Petty once summed up the group's actual hierarchy when asked, decades later, who the "alpha Wilbury" really was: "Definitely George," he said. "It was his idea, his vision… he was the best bandleader I ever saw." When Petty relayed the observation to Dylan, Dylan reportedly just nodded: "George is really smart. He was in the Beatles, you know."

That's the tone of the whole enterprise, really: five titanic egos, mutually disarmed, taking the mickey out of each other and themselves in roughly equal measure.

Start with a member, or start with the mythology

Each Wilbury gets a full page here: their life before the band, what they specifically brought to those sessions, and what happened to them after. If you already know who your favorite is, jump straight in:

• George Harrison: the band's founder, chief instigator, and the only Wilbury who'd been in a band even remotely as famous as this one before.
• Bob Dylan: reluctant, then not, then genuinely delighted to be somebody else's sideman for a change.
• Tom Petty: the kid brother who somehow held his own next to three of his own musical heroes.
• Roy Orbison: the voice, and the most bittersweet story in the band by a wide margin.
• Jeff Lynne: the guy holding the whole thing together in the control room, and the least recognized face on the album cover.

Or start with the full band history if you want the story from the top: a spare B-side, a barbecue, and a box marked "Handle With Care."