For The Beatles, a slot on the same bill as Little Richard at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton on October 12 1962 was a dream made real. Six years earlier, in a transformative moment at a cinema in Liverpool, the 14-year old Paul McCartney had watched transfixed as Richard sang the song Ready Teddy in The Girl Can’t Help It. When McCartney met John Lennon for the first time the following year, the two boys bonded over a love of the film.
While The Beatles posed in the wings for photographs they hoped would capture them in the same frame as Little Richard, onstage, playing with the band, sat a key participant in their group’s future. In 1962, Billy Preston was a keyboardist on his first tour as a rock’n’roll musician. Age 16, he was so young that entry into Britain had been contingent on Richard becoming his legal guardian. By the end of the decade, however, he would be known as “the Fifth Beatle”.
As well as much else, this week The Beatles: Get Back has helped restore a measure of lustre to this faded soubriquet. With a running time of 468 minutes – down from a working cut said to be 18 hours long – Peter Jackson’s three part film, covering the making of 1970’s Let It Be, the band’s 12th and final studio album, leaves viewers in no doubt as to the contribution of William Everett Preston. Not for nothing was the single release of Get Back and Don’t Let Me Down credited to The Beatles with Billy Preston.
“Every keyboard player I know loves Billy Preston,” said Rick Wakeman in the 2010 Radio 4 documentary That’s The Way. “You can spot his playing a mile off, whether it’s the Hammond organ, the Fender Rhodes or the piano. He had such a spiritual touch to his technique it made him completely unique.”
Alongside dozens of solo albums, Preston’s distinctive piano and organ style can be heard on singles and LPs by such Hall of Fame artists as Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Sly & The Family Stone, Luther Vandross, and many more. He co-wrote the Joe Cocker classic You Are So Beautiful and appeared on Exile On Main Street, the Rolling Stones’ one true masterpiece. As a member of the Stones’ touring party for much of the seventies, he was so well liked that Keith Richards threatened to put him in hospital only once.
