Billy Preston Was Beloved by the Beatles and Stones. His Fall From Grace Was a Rock Tragedy

Right from the start, Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It, the first-ever documentary on the late pop-R&B singer, songwriter, and organ maestro, makes it clear that few communicated as much unabashed, unapologetic joy onstage as Preston. In its opening scene, from George Harrison’s 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, Preston starts singing the warmly exhorting gospel song that gives the film its name. Overcome by the music, he leaves his seat behind the keys and commands the stage with dance moves he learned in church — elevating the song, the show, and himself.

Throughout the doc, directed by Paris Barclay, Preston is seen continually flashing his outsized, gap-toothed grin as he works out the electric piano part in the Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down,” dances onstage with Mick Jagger when he toured with the Rolling Stones, and plays glistening piano behind Joe Cocker and Patti LaBelle during a duet of “You Are So Beautiful,” which Preston co-wrote before Cocker made it his own. Every second of those and other performance clips in the doc communicate the way Preston was in the pursuit of happiness through music, even when he was playing the title character in the doomed film version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

To quote Smokey Robinson, you can only see the tears of a clown when there’s no one around. But in Preston’s case, That’s the Way God Planned It suggests that its subject was holding in waterfalls. The movie is a portrait of a gifted musician who deserves to be remembered for more than just his cameos on Beatles and Stones records or his own exuberant songs, like “Will It Go Round in Circles” and the mattress-spring bounce of “Outa-Space.” But it’s also a portrait of someone who, out of trauma or fear of repercussions within his industry, kept so much of his private life under wraps that what came later — addiction, scandalous charges, and prison time — feels like an explosion of rage and frustration.

Preston, a child prodigy, was introduced to the church and gospel music by his mother. Before he was even a teenager, he had mastered the Hammond B3 organ and landed TV spots, including one with Nat “King” Cole that’s seen in the film. He toured with Little Richard, was enamored of Ray Charles and made several instrumental albums. The film makes the case that he deeply influenced Sly Stone, which seems like a stretch until you hear the Preston-Stone collaboration “Advice” on Wildest Organ in Town!, Preston’s 1966 album. His friendship with the Beatles, which dated back to meeting them in Hamburg, Germany, when they opened for Little Richard (Preston was in his band), led to his work on the album that became Let It Be and a contract of his own with their Apple label. (Thankfully, he had by then ditched his own version of a mop-top.)

In the early Seventies, Preston was essentially relaunched as an all-out showman, complete with mushroom-cloud wigs, hit singles (also “Nothin’ From Nothin’”), and stage and studio cameos with the upper crust of classic rock. As we see, he helped liven up Harrison’s problematic 1974 solo tour and was the first musical guest on Saturday Night Live. He seemed to have it all, including peer respect: Jagger recalls fondly kidding Preston about those wigs, and Eric Clapton astutely cites the way that a Preston solo could immediately divert attention from the headliners themselves. “He would steal the record without you even knowing,” he says. While his own records weren’t on par with Stevie Wonder’s or George Clinton’s P-Funk era from the same period, some of them, like 1971’s I Wrote a Simple Song, deserve a second look for the way they effortlessly blended gospel, Clavinet-driven funk, and cheery R&B.

All throughout that period, Preston himself was publicly never less than upbeat. But the more we learn about him, the more he seemed to be wearing a particularly well-crafted mask. The damage started in his youth. He grew up without a father, who seems to have skipped out on Preston at an early age, and the very young Preston was, a friend recalls, “taken advantage of” when he was on the road with older musicians on gospel tours. But he rarely if ever spoke of this with any of the friends, relatives, or colleagues seen in the film, who say they assumed he was gay (or was in relationships with both men and women for a while), even though Preston never came out. One of his longtime band members even says he was shocked to learn that “You Are So Beautiful” was supposedly written about Preston’s mother, not a lover. “He kept a lot of things from us,” adds another friend in a sentiment we hear again and again throughout That’s the Way God Planned It.  

What went wrong? As the film reminds us, any number of iffy career choices, like that role in the cinematic disaster that was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. (Preston, who played Pepper himself, is seen in costume, singing that hammy version of “Get Back.”) When his style of agreeable funk fell out of favor, he was rejected by Black radio even after he made a misbegotten foray into disco. Everyone involved pretty much admits that a supposed relationship with Syreeta Wright — the former Stevie Wonder partner and collaborator and Preston’s duet partner on his last major hit, the glossy ballad “With You I’m Born Again” — was a way to make him appear to be straight.  

Likely due to those career woes, Preston began letting down his mask. The film details his subsequent crack addiction and the time he trashed a New York hotel room (rare for him). Soon, he was broke and something of a pariah in the business, asking to be paid for one session with a cocaine bindle. Without sensationalizing it, Barclay documents how Preston spent nine months in rehab in 1992 after pleading no contest to coke possession and sexual assault involving a teenager and pornography. After violating his probation several times, he was ultimately sentenced to three years in prison and also pleaded guilty to insurance fraud. After jail, Preston picked up partly where he left off, playing on records by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johnny Cash, and Neil Diamond. But the deaths of his mother and his mentor Ray Charles hit him hard, and he again reverted to crack; with a very apparent heavy heart, Clapton talks about waiting for his friend to give him the signal that he wanted to clean up — a sign that never came.

To its credit, That’s the Way God Planned It (which premiered at the DOC NYC festival last weekend and will next be screened at the Palm Springs Film Festival) doesn’t shy away from Preston’s later, ruinous side, and his death, from kidney failure in 2009 at age 59, feels inevitable in light of what we know now. But given his public persona, Preston’s decline was, and remains, shocking. In the film, writer David Ritz explains how a planned Preston memoir never came to fruition since Preston simply didn’t want to talk about his private side. In life and his own documentary, Preston remains a beaming mystery.