On Aug. 1, 1971, one of music’s most storied concerts took place at Madison Square Garden: a benefit for the people of Bangladesh featuring rock’s mightiest stars, including George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan.
Performing right alongside them was Billy Preston, a musician well-known to pop fans for adding pivotal electric piano parts to several Beatles songs, including one in “Get Back” considered so essential, the band gave Preston unprecedented co-billing on the track. Fans knew him, too, for playing keyboards on the Beatles’ final “rooftop concert,” as well as his striking side work with Little Richard and the Rolling Stones. Never, however, had they seen Preston as an artist in his own right — until a showstopping moment at the Garden when he tore through his jet-propelled gospel rocker “That’s the Way God Planned It.”
“That put him into a whole other stratosphere,” said Paris Barclay, the director of a new documentary about Preston titled “That’s The Way God Planned It,” which opens Friday in New York. “He wasn’t just onstage with the greatest stars, he was shining, and the audience ate it up.”
If that moment certified Preston as an upfront star, one potent enough to score a No. 2 hit with his funky instrumental “Outa-Space” four months later, his prominence stood in stark contrast to the stone wall he erected around his personal life.
During his lifetime, which ended in 2006 at age 59 from organ failure exacerbated by years of drug and alcohol abuse, Preston never spoke publicly about his identity as a gay man, let alone one who had experienced abuse at a foundational age. His silence, even to most of the stars who loved him, presented a major challenge to Barclay as a documentarian.
“There was this mystery about his life,” he said. “And the more you got into it, the more mysteries unfolded. We were fearful we wouldn’t be able to get it right.”
To do so, he had to earn the trust of Preston’s closest friends, most of whom came from the gospel world of his youth. “The inner circle all knew what had transpired in his life,” said the singer Merry Clayton, who met Preston when they were children performing at different Baptist churches in Los Angeles. “But it wasn’t our story to tell.”
From age 3, Preston played piano and sang in the church where his mother conducted the choir. “I believe my talent is God given,” Preston told Dick Clark on “American Bandstand” in 1981. “When I touch the piano, I’m giving God the praise.”
As much comfort as Preston drew from his faith, the church he attended condemned homosexuality in no uncertain terms. Complicating matters further was the fact that faith fueled his career. With his mother acting as his manager, he began playing organ behind gospel singers as eminent as Mahalia Jackson at age 10 and, the next year, appeared on the nationally televised “Nat King Cole Show.” Later, he brought the church’s full fervor to secular music while playing with stars like Ray Charles and Little Richard, who hired him for the band he took to Hamburg in 1962, when Preston met the Beatles.
“When George first saw him with Little Richard, Billy was just a kid,” George Harrison’s widow, Olivia Harrison, said in a video interview. “You could barely see his head over the piano.” Regardless, she said, George told her, “whoever Billy played with, he would lift higher.”
That’s why the Beatles hired him in 1969 on sessions for the “Abbey Road” and “Let It Be” albums. “They’d been together day and night, year after year by that time and they were in the doldrums,” Harrison said of the band. “Then a new person comes in and the joy of his performance filled the room and cleared the air. Billy always added something to the music, which is not an easy thing to do with those incredible songs the Beatles wrote.”
Barclay noted that one of Preston’s skills was “perfect anticipation”: “He just knew where a song was going and could add what it needed.”
Preston performed that feat for acts as diverse as the Stones (playing on seven of their albums), Sly Stone, Barbra Streisand and scores more. As a solo star, he earned two No. 1 hits in the ’70s with “Will It Go Round in Circles” and “Nothing From Nothing,” both on Herb Alpert’s label A&M. “He was a human groove machine,” Alpert said by phone. “The music just seemed to come naturally out of his body and into his keyboard with no filter in between. The sound was pure joy.”
It also exuded deep love, epitomized by “You Are So Beautiful,” a ballad he co-wrote that was inspired by his mother, which became a Top 5 smash for Joe Cocker in 1974. Those successes led to an invite to be one of two musical guests featured on the inaugural episode of “Saturday Night Live” in 1975. Ironically, the other was Janis Ian, who is also gay and was also closeted at the time. The difference, Ian said, was that she was out to everyone except the public then, while Preston barely spoke about his personal life to anyone.
“I cannot imagine being somebody like Billy and never being able to relax with that fact,” Ian said by phone. “How could you ever feel like yourself?”
Harrison said she believed Preston used his productivity as a shield. “You always knew something was going on with Billy,” she said, “but he would never show you that side. I think that’s why he kept playing. It kept everyone away.”
While Preston had many dalliances over the years, sometimes with men he introduced as his “cousins” on tour, Barclay knew of no long-term partners. “Billy wanted to have someone with him who truly loved him and the fact that he never did is a tragedy,” he said. “That was probably another part of his spiral down.”
Clayton believes the primary source of Preston’s struggles was the sexual abuse he suffered as a child which, according to several sources in the film, occurred multiple times by a perpetrator unknown to them. “His whole drug situation was because of that,” she said. “When you are abused, there are certain things that transpire in your life and you don’t know where they’re coming from. You’re just acting out.”
Starting in the ’90s, Preston served time in connection with several cocaine-related incidents and, in 1998, was indicted on insurance fraud charges after setting fire to his own house in Los Angeles. Barclay said he felt a special empathy for Preston’s plight as a fellow Black gay man who not only grew up in the church but also experienced abuse there as a child. “The people closest to Billy tried to help him,” Barclay said. “But he didn’t feel that could work for him.”
The director places a key part of the blame for Preston’s abiding shame on the “cavalcade of noise saying that you’re doomed” from the church he attended as a child. “The lure of faith is powerful,” Barclay said, “and the possibility of redemption is mixed in with devotion, so you could believe you’ll be forgiven even if you sin.”
Harrison said she hopes that showing the sadder parts of Preston’s life will help “anyone who’s in trouble reach out for help themselves.” Barclay aimed to balance that by equally emphasizing Preston’s musical brilliance.
“I want people to see this man as a true hero,” he said. “He was someone who managed to get through so much pain and condemnation to perform at the highest level and make music that will last forever.”
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