BILLY PRESTON: THE BEATLES, THE CHURCH AND THE CLOSET

Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It, a powerful new feature documentary that made its world debut at this year’s South by Southwest festival, offers the first in-depth exploration of the complex life of one of the few pop musicians for whom the word “genius” is not hyperbole. The film sensitively depicts the sharp contrast between Preston’s exuberant public persona and the painful secrecy of his private life as a deeply closeted gay man.

Preston credited his astonishing musical abilities to God, whom he praised through-out his life for giving him his preternatural talent. From the age of three, when he first played the organ with his church choir, Preston could sit down at any keyboard and seemingly channel the music through his fingertips. As his friend Eric Clapton says lovingly of him in the film, “All he had to do was put his hands on the keys and let it go. You’d end up listening to him on the record. He’d steal the record without you even knowing.”

Through the generosity of the film’s producers, Nigel Sinclair, Jeanne Elfant Festa, Stephanie Allain and Cheo Hodari Coker, HITS got a sneak peek of the film and an exclusive interview with its award-winning director, Paris Barclay, through which we learned what drew him to Preston as the subject of his first documentary film.

Preston’s journey resonated strongly with Barclay’s own lived experience. “Our stories have many similarities,” he says, “but the decade that separates us made all the difference. We both grew up in the church (Baptist for Billy, Catholic for me), struggled with alcoholism and addiction and dealt with sexual experiences at a very young age that resulted in great trauma. But the difference in those 10 years changed the course of my life because people intervened and encouraged me to get treatment. The times, the addiction and the closet made that impossible for Billy.”

Barclay deftly chronicles Preston’s musical rise from church prodigy (at the age of seven he conducted a 75-member Baptist choir, standing atop a step stool so his tiny hands were visible to the adults) to studio collaborations with The Beatles and multiple world tours with The Rolling Stones. As a solo artist, Preston had #1 hits with “Will It Go Round in Circles” and “Nothing From Nothing” (both co-written with Bruce Fisher), as well as “Outa-Space,” which scored Preston a Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance. Joe Cocker’s cover of Preston’s “You Are So Beautiful” (also co-written with Fisher) was a Top 5 pop hit.

Tragically, Preston was never able to see the beauty within himself. Even as he sang the Lord’s praises on Sundays, he heard his pastor invoke that same Lord to condemn homosexuality—and therefore Preston—as “wicked” and “unnatural.” This cognitive dissonance was a painful circle Preston spent most of his life unable to square.

“We discovered,” says Barclay, “that he was heavily influenced by the Black church, for both good and bad. Heavily influenced musically as an organist and an accompanist. He could just go behind Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin or Little Richard. But the church scarred him because he was gay, and he was never able to deal with it in any kind of constructive way. He didn’t just wake up and go to therapy and say, ‘I need to talk to somebody about this.’ He had a hidden life that ate away at him. It became a really interesting story to try and dig through to parse the church’s impact on him and other people like him, and how that may have affected his trajectory as a star.”

When he was 11, little “Bill Preston,” dressed in a suit and tie, played piano and sang Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” in a televised duet with Nat King Cole. When they finished, Cole said, “Thank you, Bill. I know that you have a very excellent career ahead of you.”

Over the next five decades, Cole’s prediction would be borne out beyond anyone’s imagination. The list of artists with whom Preston recorded and performed spans generations and genres. The range of his collaborations strains credulity; they include, in roughly chronological order: Mahalia Jackson, Nat King Cole, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, The Beatles, The Stones, Sly and the Family Stone, Aretha, Barbra Streisand, Peter Frampton, Whitney Houston, Patti LaBelle, The Band, Clapton, Cocker, Luther Vandross, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Elton John and Johnny Cash.

In January 1969, George Harrison, with whom Preston would forge a lifelong friendship, was delighted to see his old friend drop by Apple Corps studios in London for what would turn out to be The Beatles’ final recording sessions (observed in fly-on-the-wall detail in Peter Jackson’s Emmy-winning 2021 documentary series, The Beatles: Get Back).

At 24, Preston was younger than any of the Fab Four. He’d actually met them seven years earlier during their first big gig, a two-week stint opening for Little Richard at Hamburg’s Star-Club (15-year-old Preston was his accompanist). This teenager, who himself had never been out of the United States, was the first American the Liverpool lads had ever met, and they were keen to learn about life in the States. Years later, Preston recalled, “They had a look that was kind of odd. They were nice guys, so I’d always stand in the wings and watch them… They’d come to me and ask questions, so we’d hang out. I remember getting them free steaks and free Cokes.”

Almost immediately after Preston entered the studio that day in 1969, John Lennon invited the always-upbeat keyboardist to “sit in” for the day. He never left. Preston’s infectious spirit infused new musical energy into what had been, before his arrival, largely contentious, unproductive sessions. George, who was so frustrated he’d briefly quit the band, later said Preston’s presence saved the sessions. “He got on the electric piano and straight away there was 100% improvement in the vibe in the room,” he recalled. Preston’s contributions were so essential that John talked to George (as captured in The Beatles: Get Back) about offering him a permanent spot in the group. “I mean, I’d just like him in our band, actually.” George nodded eagerly. “I’d like a fifth Beatle.”

The results were Abbey Road and Let It Be, The Beatles’ last two albums, both of which went to #1. But as it turned out, the public only got to see the “Fab Five” play together once: on a rooftop in London for The Beatles’ final live performance.

Preston was officially the fifth Beatle only on vinyl, when “Get Back” was released as a single (B-side: “Don’t Let Me Down”). The green Apple label was pressed with a name that was not John, Paul, George or Ringo. It reads, “The Beatles with Billy Preston.”

Preston went to agonizing (and sometimes angry) lengths to hide his sexuality from the world, even going so far as to stash away his boyfriend in a hotel during the Let It Be sessions so The Beatles wouldn’t suspect he was a “poofter.”

As is so often the case with the closet, the charade fooled no one, except perhaps Preston. In That’s the Way God Planned It, George Harrison’s widow, Olivia (one of the film’s executive producers), says that when Preston toured with her husband on his 45-city solo tour in 1974, “Billy always seemed to have some nice guy with him. We all assumed they were his friends—his gay friends. Nobody ever talked about it. Nobody ever cared. It was, ‘This is my cousin so-and-so’ or ‘This is my nephew.’ But everyone sort of knew that these were not Billy’s cousins or his nephews.”

Boisterous and kind in his professional relationships, Preston could become angry, even abusive, once he started drinking. The tragedy of the closet is the internalized self-loathing that so often leads to self-medication as a way to cope with soul-wrenching pain.

In his autobiography, Life, Keith Richards describes both Prestons: “I think he’d been in the game too long; he’d started very young. And he was gay at a time when nobody could be openly gay, which added difficulties to his life. Billy could be, most of the time, a bundle of fun. [But] I had to stop him beating up his boyfriend in an elevator once. ‘Billy, hold it right there or I’ll tear your wig off.’”

Preston’s downward spiral in the last two decades of his life is depicted without judgment in the film. The facts are not spared: charges of sexual assault and offering cocaine to a 16-year-old boy, which Preston did not contest; receiving a nine-month sentence to drug rehab; three years in prison for cocaine possession; and, while still in prison, an indictment for $1 million of insurance fraud after he set fire to his own house to pay his bills.

Director Barclay displays a gift for eliciting deeply personal stories from those who loved Preston the most but who were helpless to prevent his self-destruction. One of those was Clapton, who chokes up describing how he tried and failed to help his friend stay sober.

On June 6, 2006, Preston died from complications of kidney failure and pericarditis. He was just 59 years old.

Just days before he lapsed into the six-month coma from which he never recovered, Preston said, “I’m gay,” in a group therapy session. By all accounts, it was the first time he had ever spoken those words aloud to strangers.

No one can ever know if that brief moment of honesty finally allowed Preston to feel pride in himself—not just in his sexuality, but in the extraordinary music he left the world in his too-short life.

Says Barclay, “Billy’s story may be heartbreaking, but the lesson it leaves behind is inspirational. We’ve got to be there for the next Billy Preston: ready to accept all of who he or she is, ready to help them when they need us and ready to give them all the flowers their talent deserves.”

Billy Preston was exactly the way God planned him.