Let Thy Wilbury Done
Looking back at the Traveling Wilburys

I was 15 years old in 1988. And you know, it would be so easy to claim that I was down with the cool stuff, that I bought Daydream Nation, Franks Wild Years and Tender Prey the day they were released, not to mention the pilgrimage I made across the pond to see Dylan in Concord...

…except it would be a lie. In the mid-to-late 80s I was listening to a lot of pretty sissy music. Don’t we all at that age? When I look through the albums I bought back then they’re called Diesel And Dust, The Joshua Tree, Solitude Standing… not necessarily bad albums, but nothing everyone else wasn’t listening to. (At least no one can prove I ever owned a Samantha Fox record. Thank God for used record stores.) I did listen to some of my parents’ records - Beatles, Stones and other stuff like that - though mostly in secret; it was a bit embarassing for a 15-year-old to admit that that music made more sense to me than anything I was hearing on the top 10 chart. Bob Dylan? A fleeting acquaintance from my mother’s very scratchy Greatest Hits. I suppose I must have thought he sounded a bit like Mark Knopfler.

So sometime in late ’87 or early ’88, my father came home with a new record - a remarkable event, as he’s never been one to buy more than half a dozen records per year. It was George Harrison’s comeback album Cloud 9, and as the closet Beatles fan that I was, I listened to that album a lot. So when I heard a new single on the radio that summer with Harrison singing I knew it wasn’t on the album… and who were those other guys singing with him? Of course, it turned out to be ‘Handle With Care’ by the Traveling Wilburys. And I loved that song right from the get-go. Not just because it solved my problem of what to get Dad for his birthday. I mean, Harrison, Dylan, Orbison and the ELO guy on the same record? Oh, and some youngster named Tom Petty. The old man would love it, and I could listen to it when he wasn’t home.

So I ended up buying the single for Dad, and eventually the LP for myself. And for a while, I played the hell out of it, much like I did with the follow-up two years later. And even if my tastes have drifted in different directions since then, the Wilburys records are still very much a precious part of my record collection (by some cruel twist of fate, they sit right in between Transvision Vamp’s Pop Art and U2’s The Unforgettable Fire).
Now that we hear rumours that the Wilburys albums will finally be re-released, I think it is interesting to examine the songs Dylan wrote for the Wilburys.

They’re Planting Stories in the Press:
Ripples & Reverberations from a 1991
Bob Dylan ‘Interview’

In the summertime of 1991, after a mini tour of North America, Bob Dylan took a breather before heading down to South America for more concerts: three in Argentina, one in Uruguay, and five in Brazil. 

On August 8, opening night in Buenos Aires, Dylan treated his audience to Curtis Mayfield’s gospel song, ‘People Get Ready.’ If the lyrics of Mayfield’s composition represented the cliched ‘gospel truth,’ then what happened off the stage, days later, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, represented its polar opposite.

‘What is truth?’ asked Governor Pontius Pilate, many moons ago, before giving the green light to execute a certain thirty-three-year-old Jew who had caused no small stir in the religious community.

Nearly two thousand years later, another Jew - who has made his mark on the world of music - was about to play for an enthusiastic audience. The stakes were not, arguably, as high as they were back in ancient Palestine, but truth, in a way, was on the line. Why? Because certainly some of Bob Dylan’s fans, who descended upon the venue at Gigantinho in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in August 1991, had recently read the interview in their local newspaper …the interview in Zero Hora which featured the same man whose music they would soon be enjoying (an interview reportedly conducted some two months earlier, in Budapest, Hungary). 

One of those fans happened to be Eduardo Bueno, who soon realized, much to his dismay, that the interview was attributed to him! He had never interviewed Bob Dylan. Bueno duly paid a visit to Jose Jardim (the newspaper’s chief editor) and revealed that the interview was, in fact, a fraud. ‘I subsequently wrote for Zero Hora a review of the wonderful concert Dylan gave in Porto Alegre,’ Bueno remarked, ‘in which I had the opportunity to tell the readers that the ‘Budapest interview’ had never taken place.’

But who would concoct such a fraud, and for what reason? And why was Eduardo Bueno put in the mix?

Lies That Truth Is Black And White 

The idea for this article did not start with Dylan alone, instead it was films that raised questions in my mind, and those questions were to do with historical accuracy (or inaccuracies) and whether or not these are important in entertainment or art. The real reason for writing the article is that although the questions kept presenting themselves, I was not sure of the answers. By writing this article, I am trying to find out. I first covered this area at the fourth annual John Green Memorial day when I read out my notes for this article. I would like to thank those present for their feedback on the day and since and hope that they feel - as I do - that they have sharpened it.

My starting point is the film Braveheart which - despite having much to recommend it - was spoiled for me by disquieting changes to history. I am referring to such things as the introduction of the ‘pregnancy’ and other fabrications just for the sake of Hollywood and its low expectations of its audiences1. It is not as if the story were not stirring enough, nor that the film had failed to captivate while sticking close enough to historical fact (there is still a great deal of leeway for ‘invention’ that cannot be disproved after all). There was no need for the deliberate fabrication in what was supposedly a historical epic.

Mel Gibson directed and starred in Braveheart and then went on to make a film called The Patriot. I have never watched this late film as, having already been disturbed by how history was falsified in Braveheart, I heard that in The Patriot, it was distorted again. This ‘gut reaction’ on my part alerted me to the fact that historical inaccuracies in entertainment do bother me at some level. How deeply though, I needed to find out.

Mel Gibson said about the misrepresentation of history in the film, in his charming manner: ‘I don’t know what the Brits are worried about, it’s only a film’. That is the statement that started me thinking and worrying. ‘It’s only a film’, but if it is a film that is staging a historical event or a series of historical events - is it important if you twist history or not?

Naturally, I immediately started thinking about Dylan; but, just before we go on to how the above questions affect his songs, a few more words on films. There are too many examples of my theme even to merely list without ending up with a book length publication. Nonetheless I would like to note, in passing, that this kind of thing goes from wild invention and deliberate distortion to relatively minor lies. The reasons for this range from political propaganda to lazy incompetence and include dubious theories on ‘giving the audience what it wants’.