Members / Honorary Wilburys

The Honorary Wilburys: Everyone Else Who Earned a Fake Name

Membership in the Traveling Wilburys was, technically, limited to five men and a fictional dead father. In practice, the joke proved too much fun to keep to just the headliners, and over the years a handful of session players, family members, and even one Formula 1 driver's namesake ended up with Wilbury aliases of their own, despite never once being credited as an actual member of the band. Consider this the roster of everyone who got the nickname without getting the byline.

Buster Sidebury (Jim Keltner)

If you've listened to either Wilburys album, you've heard Jim Keltner, even if his name has never once appeared on the cover. One of the most in-demand session drummers in rock history (his résumé includes work with John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Neil Young, among roughly everyone else), Keltner played drums and percussion across both Vol. 1 and Vol. 3, replacing the drum machine that had been used on the earliest "Handle With Care" demo. His reward for holding down the actual rhythm section of rock's most star-stuffed studio project was a credit that, true to Wilbury tradition, doubled as a pun: Buster Sidebury, a nod to session musicians "bustering" (or supplementing) the credited Wilbury brothers on the side.

Keltner's fingerprints are on the record in a more literal sense too. Decades later, discussing the band's future after Vol. 3, Keltner recalled that the decision on whether the Wilburys would continue rested entirely with George Harrison. It's a small detail, but it confirms what everyone else in the band's orbit already knew: whatever the Wilburys were going to do next, Harrison was always going to be the one who decided.

Ayrton Wilbury (Dhani Harrison)

George Harrison's son Dhani was a child during the original Wilburys sessions, young enough that his clearest memory of Vol. 3 being recorded is playing Nintendo's Duck Hunt with Jakob Dylan while their famous fathers worked downstairs. He got his own moment in the Wilbury spotlight nearly two decades later, when the band's catalog was remastered and expanded for 2007's The Traveling Wilburys Collection. Dhani contributed backing vocals to "Maxine" and a new lead guitar overdub to the previously unreleased outtake "Like a Ship," earning himself the pseudonym Ayrton Wilbury, a tribute to Formula 1 legend Ayrton Senna, chosen in direct homage to his father's own lifelong love of motor racing. It's a nice, quiet piece of continuity: the son finishing a track his father started, under a name that honors one of his father's actual heroes.

Ken Wilbury (Gary Moore)

Irish blues-rock guitarist Gary Moore, best known for his work with Thin Lizzy and Skid Row (the Irish one, not the American hair-metal act), contributed the lead guitar solo on Vol. 3's "She's My Baby," one of the album's two genuine radio hits, alongside "Wilbury Twist." For his trouble, Moore was credited on the record as Ken Wilbury, folding him into the family joke just long enough to add one blistering solo and disappear again.

Nakihama Wilbury, Pee Wee Wilbury, and the Wilburys Who Were Never Really Wilburys at All

The pseudonym bit escaped the confines of the actual albums almost immediately, because apparently once you start naming people after a fictional dead patriarch, it's hard to stop. On Warner Bros.' 1988 Christmas promotional album Winter Warnerland, Harrison appeared as Nelson Wilbury alongside Pee-wee Herman performer Paul Reubens, credited as Pee Wee Wilbury. During a solo tour of Japan in December 1991, Harrison briefly rebranded himself yet again as Nakihama Wilbury, and the following year, as producer of his own live album Live in Japan, he credited himself as "Spike and Nelson Wilbury" simultaneously, presumably because one alias per credit had stopped feeling sufficiently absurd. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers got in on it too, signing off a 1992 holiday single with a greeting "from Nelson and Pee Wee Wilbury."

Decades later, the joke outlived several of the men who started it: at a 2019 Tom Petty tribute concert, Roy Orbison's own sons were dubbed Lefty Wilbury Jr. (Roy Orbison Jr.) and Ginger Wilbury (Alex Orbison) for the occasion, a fittingly warm way of folding the next generation into a bit that, thirty years on, still refuses to die.

The Non-Wilburys Who Made It All Possible

Not everyone who shaped the sound got a fake name, but a few names are worth knowing anyway. Saxophonist Jim Horn and percussionist Ray Cooper both played on both albums under their own real names, adding texture that's easy to miss on a first listen but that fills out tracks like "Congratulations" and "Rattled" considerably. Eurythmics co-founder Dave Stewart never played a note on either record, but his Encino home, specifically his kitchen, served as the actual recording base for Vol. 1, making him arguably the most important non-performer in the entire Wilburys story.

For the full story of where "Wilbury" came from in the first place, and why five grown men decided the joke needed an entire fictional family tree, read the mythology behind the name, or head back to meet the five official Wilburys.