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29/05/2007

The Traveling Wilburys Revisited – enjoyable hype (which didn’t work)

The Traveling Wilburys Revisited, a one hour broadcast by BBC Radio 2 on Saturday, was a promo for the about-to-be reissued box set. Before hearing the documentary, I was wavering about buying the new product, as I’ve long had the two albums, from 1988 and 1990, on vinyl/tape/CDR.

An hour of music clips and speech by most of the participants included a George Harrison interview, old and new selling by Jeff Lynne and the voices of Tom Petty and Jim Keltner. Collectively, they convinced me not to bother: “mainstream show biz hype”, I concluded and duly recoiled.

I’d much rather listen to Dylan (and Orbison and Petty) on their solo recordings; and neither of the two Brits even remotely floats my boat. The new bonus stuff has minimal Dylan interest: the programme played three of the four new bonus audio tracks, and Dylan was hardly to be heard in the mix.

If I didn’t already own Traveling Wilburys vols 1 and 3, I’d probably buy the new box for the Dylan contributions, notably Congratulations, Dirty World and Tweeter, but the new release has insufficent new Bob appeal to get me to exercise my plastic.

The programme was a fine outline of the Wilbury story, despite presenter Bob Harris’s droning. But when he described the Wilbury material as “wonderful music” (it most certainly ain’t), I decided to keep my wallet in my pocket.



Gerry Smith

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