![]() Raised by his mother, Robbie Lee Williams, by age 10 he was playing with professional gospel singers in the churches of Los Angeles. You are the keyboard player with the Rolling Stones.”Ĭome the end of the tour – a campaign from which saxophonist Bobby Keys was fired for attempting to fill a hotel bathtub with Dom Perignon – Billy Preston surely had cause to consider the distance he’d travelled as a self-taught musician. If you don’t turn that f_ thing down right now, you’re going to feel it.’ It’s not Billy Preston and the Rolling Stones. ‘You know what this is, Bill? Dear William. “I took him backstage and showed him the blade. “There was one time in Glasgow when he was playing so loud he was drowning out the rest of the band,” Richards recalled in his autobiography, Life, from 2010. 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. He co-wrote the Joe Cocker classic You Are So Beautiful and appeared on Exile On Main Street, the Rolling Stones’ one true masterpiece. He had such a spiritual touch to his technique it made him completely unique.”Īlongside 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. “You can spot his playing a mile off, whether it’s the Hammond organ, the Fender Rhodes or the piano. “Every keyboard player I know loves Billy Preston,” said Rick Wakeman in the 2010 Radio 4 documentary That’s The Way. Not for nothing was the single release of Get Back and Don’t Let Me Down credited to The Beatles with Billy Preston. 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 12 th and final studio album, leaves viewers in no doubt as to the contribution of William Everett Preston. ![]() By the end of the decade, however, he would be known as “the Fifth Beatle”.Īs well as much else, this week The Beatles: Get Back has helped restore a measure of lustre to this faded soubriquet. Age 16, he was so young that entry into Britain had been contingent on Richard becoming his legal guardian. ![]() In 1962, Billy Preston was a keyboardist on his first tour as a rock’n’roll musician. 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. When McCartney met John Lennon for the first time the following year, the two boys bonded over a love of the film. 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. For The Beatles, a slot on the same bill as Little Richard at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton on Octowas a dream made real. ![]()
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