Notes

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The Traveling Wilburys' second album, incongruously titled Vol. 3, sounds for all the world like a dead-ringer for their debut, but the feel is considerably different. It isn't that Roy Orbison sadly died shortly after the release of Vol. 1 (which does make a slight difference), it's that the guys are sounding like they're trying very, very hard to have fun — how else to explain the exhortation to dance around with underwear on your head on "Wilbury Dance." No matter how silly the first Wilburys record got, it was frequently clever and never self-conscious — the polar opposite of its sequel, actually. Occasionally, these guys do get off a couple of good tunes — they're seasoned professionals, after all, and they can make a throwaway like "She's My Baby" infectious — but they don't do it a whole lot, and the rest of the record is padded out with songs that try hard to be fun, but never are. It's unfair to lay the blame on the absence of Orbison, since if he was around, the results would likely to have been the same. After all, it's nearly impossible to capture lightning in a bottle once, and it's a fool's game to try to do it twice.