‘I just had to rejoice’: the brilliance and tragedy of ‘fifth Beatle’ Billy Preston | Pop and rock

iIn the 1960s and 1970s, Billy Preston was a musician’s musician. A self-taught prodigy who grew up playing the organ at his Los Angeles church, he accompanied Mahalia Jackson and appeared on The Nat King Cole Show before he was 11. In high school, he traveled with Little Richard on his European tour, standing on stage every night to watch the Beatles’ support band.

Until 1969 he was called “the fifth Beatle” (he was co-credited on the song Get Back) and became one of George Harrison’s right-hand men after the guitarist went solo. “Billy never puts his hands in the wrong place,” says Ringo Starr. “He was so great.”

Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand and Elton John all hired him; he released solo records and wrote hits for others, including Joe Cocker’s You Are So Beautiful. But he struggled with addiction and was jailed after violent drug-related incidents. He died aged 59 in 2006.

Now, in the documentary Billy Preston: That’s the Way God Planned It, directed by American TV veteran Paris Barclay, friends and colleagues including Eric Clapton, Olivia Harrison (George’s widow) and the late gospel singer Sandra Crouch tell his story.

The film opens with Preston’s talent on full display: a 24-year-old virtuoso performing in 1971. George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh. Harrison announces his band – Starr, Clapton, Leon RussellBob Dylan and Ravi Shankar, all performing Preston’s That’s the Way God Planned It. At one point, Preston slips out from behind the keys to take center stage in a joyful dance of praise. “I just couldn’t help myself,” he says in a voiceover. “The band was blasting and pumping, the people were with us and I just had to be happy.”

With his gap-toothed grin and infectious energy, Preston’s performance style was as informed by the gospel choirs he grew up with as it was Little Richard and his later mentor Ray Charles. The church gave him a place for his talents to flourish. But as a black gay man, he struggled to reconcile his sexuality with his Christianity—a fact compounded by sexual abuse he suffered in the church as a youth.

Like Preston, Barkley is black, gay and also grew up in the church playing the organ and piano – “It’s nowhere near Billy Preston’s level, but it’s what I wanted to do,” he says. Both Preston and Barkley lost brothers in fatal accidents, “and like Preston, I had some really unpleasant sexual experiences that shaped me and the way I saw the world.”

Preston was notoriously tight-lipped on subjects other than music, and his homosexuality was hidden from plain sight. Although he didn’t call himself gay until later in life, he often brought partners on tour or to recording sessions, passing them off as friends or cousins. Barclay was able to find some of Preston’s former lovers, but none wanted to appear in the film. “I wish we could have caught them on camera,” Barkley said. “But they validated and allowed us to feel comfortable publishing their stories.”

Preston tried to escape his troubled personal life by throwing himself into his work. He was a regular guest on the television variety show Shindig! and the lead character in the 1978 musical film flop. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He had hits including 1972’s Will It Go Round in Circles. and his 1979 duet with Motown singer Syreeta Wright, With You I’m Born Again, written by Carol Connors and David Shire. “He was a moving target,” says Harrison. “Billy just kept moving, playing, dancing, singing — and how could you get to that guy and sit him down and say, ‘Hey man, what’s up?'”

Professionally, “I’d say he had more good judgment than bad,” says friend and former Motown executive Tony Jones. “I think the bad judgment came when the career started to fall apart.”

With a stagnant career and time on his hands, Preston’s addiction to cocaine, alcohol and later crack became too much to resist. He was plagued by legal troubles in the 1990s, with charges of probation violation, insurance fraud and assault. Bernard J. Cummins, the judge who presided over several of Preston’s criminal cases and eventually sentenced him to prison in 1997, gives his first interview in the film.

“Although [the sentence] it was about assault, I put conditions on drugs because there was no way this guy would assault somebody if he wasn’t so heavily addicted,” Cummins says in the film. Preston later wrote to thank him, even though he would not be able to stay sober for long after serving 18 months of a four-year sentence. (While inside, he led religious services and a choir.) Despite some brief successful stints in rehab, in 2005 Preston, who had a history of kidney disease, contracted pericarditis, fell into a prolonged coma, and died in june 2006 from kidney failure.

Documentaries sometimes miss darker details, but what makes this film powerful and “human,” as Harrison says, is that it doesn’t shy away from them—something she also experienced while working with Martin Scorsese on the documentary 2011 movie George Harrison: Living in a Material World. On that film, Harrison says, “There were things where I was like, ‘Oh, no, no, don’t – that wasn’t his best time!’ He was struggling!” And actually my son said, “You can’t sanctify, Mom. You have to have the darkness and the light.”

But earlier this year, a lawsuit stymied the Preston movie just before it premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Texas. Preston’s former manager Joyce Moore, her musician husband Sam and musician Kenny Burke argued that the documentary was “about advancing the personal agendas of the director and producers and financial gain, not the tribute to Billy Preston that was sold to the plaintiffs”. The suit was eventually scrapped after some further edits were made, says producer Nigel Sinclair: “We made changes in about a few minutes – repetitive stuff that might have overdone the pudding.

“There’s a lot of emotion involved in situations like this,” Sinclair says, adding that discussions between plaintiffs and defendants have made them realize “how much they have in common. how [Joyce Moore] we worked so hard for billy and we worked so hard to make this movie. It was also an emotional decision.”

Those involved in This Is The Way God Planned It hope the film will raise important questions about how loved ones can support people with drug problems like Billy Preston – or indeed Liam Payne, says Barclay , speaking shortly after the first The death of the One Direction star.

“If I had done this before, I probably would have been fine Cory Monteith much different,” Barkley says of the actor, who directed a brief stint on Glee , who died of a heroin and alcohol overdose in 2013. “I knew he was in trouble – I was a recovering alcoholic. I had a few conversations with him, but I kind of thought, “I’m just a guest director here. It’s none of my business. If I had made this film before [I did Glee]I would cross that line and go to [Monteith]. I would try to help him cross the bridge to sobriety.

As a portrait of an artist, This Is the Way God Planned It is a story about addiction and the love and patience that people like Preston need. Tony Jones says he thinks his friend would have liked to be shown for who he is, “to be recognized and appreciated and to express his sincere feelings about his plight in life. If he could see that, he would feel understood and know that he really matters.”

Billy Preston: That’s the way God planned it can be streamed in the US via Doc NYC until December 1st