Members / George Harrison

George Harrison: Nelson Wilbury, and the Man Who Actually Started This Whole Thing

Wilbury aliases: Nelson Wilbury (Vol. 1, 1988), Spike Wilbury (Vol. 3, 1990) Role: Guitar, slide guitar, lead and backing vocals, co-producer, ringleader

If the Traveling Wilburys had an org chart (and God help us, they very much did not), George Harrison would sit at the top of it, despite spending most of his adult life trying to convince people he didn't want the job. He'd earned the nickname "the quiet Beatle" back in Liverpool, a label that stuck for decades and that Tom Petty, for one, thought was nonsense. "He never shut up," Petty said fondly. "He was the best hang you could imagine." Quiet was never really the point. Harrison just preferred not to be the point, which after a decade of being the third-most-photographed man in the Beatles was a fairly reasonable ambition.

The Economy-Class Beatle Who Wouldn't Stay in His Lane

Harrison was the youngest Beatle, the bus driver's son who got into the group because Paul McCartney vouched for him ("he's a bit young, but he's good") and who spent years being treated, in his own words, as "an economy-class Beatle." He didn't take that lying down. By the back half of the 1960s he was writing "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun," songs that stand comfortably beside anything Lennon or McCartney produced, and by 1970 he'd released All Things Must Pass, a sprawling triple album that remains the best solo record any former Beatle ever made. He followed it with the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, the first-ever benefit concert of its kind, something only a former Beatle with a genuine conscience and an address book full of legends could have pulled off.

None of that fame sat comfortably on him. Harrison spent much of the 1970s and '80s pursuing things that had nothing to do with being an ex-Beatle: gardening at Friar Park, his Victorian Gothic estate in Henley-on-Thames, where he'd disappear for twelve-hour stretches planting trees; producing films through his company HandMade, including Monty Python's Life of Brian, which existed at all because Harrison personally mortgaged part of his house to fund it after EMI got cold feet; and, more surprisingly, Formula 1 racing, which he loved not for the danger but because it was one of the only places on Earth where nobody bothered him. As his friend, driver Jackie Stewart, once put it, motorsport let Harrison "get around without being mobbed all the time." Every now and then, someone would squint at him and say, boy, that guy looks like George Harrison. That was as close to fame as he wanted it.

Cloud Nine, and the Itch to Be in a Band Again

By the mid-1980s, Harrison's own recording career had gone quiet enough that even he seemed embarrassed by 1982's Gone Troppo. The turnaround came in 1987 with Cloud Nine, produced with Jeff Lynne, which restored him to the charts with "Got My Mind Set on You" and reintroduced him to something he'd apparently been missing without quite admitting it: the experience of being in a band. Not a solo artist backed by session players: an actual band, with actual mates, arguing over actual songs.

He told the radio show Rockline as much in February 1988, months before the Wilburys existed in any real form: what he wanted to do next, he said, was "an album with me and some of my mates… it's called the Traveling Wilburys." At that point it was barely more than a name he liked the sound of. Lynne would later describe the actual founding moment with disarming simplicity: over a joint and a drink one night, Harrison turned to him and said, "You and I should have a group." Lynne said sure. Harrison suggested Bob Dylan. Lynne suggested Roy Orbison. Neither expected any of it to actually happen.

It did, of course, and the full story of how a spare B-side for "This Is Love" turned into an entire supergroup is told in detail on our band history page, including the barbecue, the box in Dylan's garage, and the guitar Harrison left at Tom Petty's house that accidentally recruited an entire Heartbreaker.

"It Was Always George's Band"

Every account of the Wilburys sessions arrives at the same conclusion, usually in almost identical words: this was Harrison's operation, full stop. Producer Mo Ostin called it "George's band" outright. Music journalist Neil Staunton described Harrison as "the de facto chief Wilbury." And when Tom Petty was asked, decades later, who the real "alpha Wilbury" had been in a lineup stuffed with alpha personalities, his answer came without hesitation: "Definitely George. It was his idea, his vision… he was the best bandleader I ever saw. He was really good at organizing things, at knowing who was best at what."

Bob Dylan, a man not known for handing out compliments freely, apparently agreed. When Petty later marveled to him about the impact the band had made, Dylan reportedly just shrugged: "Well, George is really smart. He was in the Beatles, you know." Which is either the world's driest joke or a genuinely earnest tribute. With Dylan, it's honestly hard to tell, and that's sort of the point.

On the recordings themselves, Harrison handled guitar and slide guitar (his signature Rickenbacker 12-string slide part anchors "Handle With Care") while sharing production duties with Lynne throughout both albums. His son Dhani, then a young boy, remembers hanging around the sessions for Vol. 3 years later, playing Nintendo's Duck Hunt with Jakob Dylan while their famous fathers worked downstairs, a small detail that does more to humanize the whole enterprise than any chart statistic could.

The Ginger Root Incident

Harrison's fingerprints show up all over his bandmates' solo work from this period too, usually in the form of blunt, well-timed editorial notes. Working with Tom Petty on Full Moon Fever, Harrison heard an early draft line in what would become "I Won't Back Down" and stopped the session cold, telling Petty flatly it wasn't good enough and there had to be something stronger. Petty rewrote the line on the spot, and what he came up with made the final cut. On the same sessions, Harrison also nursed Petty through a bad cold with a homemade ginger root remedy, which is either extremely on-brand for a man obsessed with Eastern medicine and meditation, or just what a good friend does when someone's losing their voice mid-session. Possibly both.

After the Wilburys: Back to the Garden

Following Vol. 3 in 1990 and a brief 1991 tour of Japan with Eric Clapton, Harrison largely withdrew from public life, not out of any falling-out, but because he genuinely preferred his garden to a stage. "I've just let go of all of that," he said later. "I don't care about records, about films, about being on television, or all that stuff." He kept recording quietly at home and stayed close with Lynne, who would go on to produce the Beatles' Anthology reunion tracks "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love" in the mid-1990s, largely at Harrison's insistence.

In 1997, Harrison was diagnosed with throat cancer. Two years later, he survived a horrific knife attack after an intruder broke into Friar Park. He died of cancer on November 29, 2001, at age 58. Jeff Lynne returned to the studio afterward to help complete Harrison's unfinished final album, Brainwashed, released posthumously in 2002.

Harrison has since been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice over (once as a Beatle, once as a solo artist), though, like every other member, never specifically as a Wilbury. It's a strange omission for the man everyone, including his own bandmates, agrees was the reason the whole thing existed in the first place.

Curious what the pseudonym bit was actually about? Read the full story behind the Wilbury family mythology, or check out George Harrison's essential solo albums if you want to hear where his own songwriting stood apart from the Wilburys.