Just a handful of minutes of the documentary is enough That's the Way God Planned It to understand that few musicians conveyed a sense of unbridled joy like Billy Preston. In the first scene, taken from the concert for Bangladesh organized by George Harrison in 1971, Preston begins to sing the very charged gospel that gives the documentary its title. Carried away by the music, he leaves the position behind the keyboard to launch into the dance moves he learned in church, taking the show and the song to another level.
In the images of the documentary directed by Paris Barclay, the musician who died in 2006 continually shows off his enormous smile and his diastema while practicing the electric piano part of Don't Let Me Down of the Beatles or dance on stage with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones or play the piano great accompanying Joe Cocker and Patti LaBelle who duet on his You Are So Beautiful. There is not a moment in the performances seen in the film that do not communicate the desire to find happiness through music, and this is also true when Preston was involved in the monstrous flop of the film version of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
However, as Smokey Robinson put it, a clown's tears are only seen when no one is around. The documentary makes it clear that Preston was holding back tears, of course. It is the portrait of a talented musician who deserves to be remembered not only for his cameos on Beatles and Stones records or for certain happy songs (see Will It Go Round in Circles or Outa Space). It is the story of a man who, due to trauma or fear of repercussions in his environment, has always maintained the utmost confidentiality about his private life, so that everything that happened afterwards (drug addiction, scandals and imprisonment) resembles a explosion of anger and frustration.
Preston was a child prodigy who learned about gospel thanks to his mother. He wasn't even a teenager and already mastered the Hammond B3 organ and was appearing on TV, including with Nat “King” Cole as seen in the film. He toured with Little Richard, became passionate about Ray Charles, and recorded several instrumental albums. In the documentary he is said to have influenced Sly Stone. It seems like a stretch until you listen Advicethe collaborative piece with Stone from the album Wildest Organ in Town! of 1966. The friendship with the Beatles born in Hamburg, where the four opened for Little Richard (Preston was in his backing band), led him to play on the album Let It Be and to sign a contract with Apple (thank goodness, he was no longer trying to do his pageboy hair at that point).
In the early '70s Preston relaunched himself as a solo performer, complete with huge wigs, hit singles (including Nothin' From Nothin') and cameos on stage and in the studio with the cream of classic rock. He helped revive Harrison's difficult 1974 solo tour and was the first musical guest on the Saturday Night Live. He seemed to have everything, including the respect of his colleagues: Jagger remembers joking affectionately with him about those wigs and Eric Clapton says that a Preston solo could immediately divert the audience's attention from the headliners: «He stole the show without you would notice.” His records weren't up to par with those of Stevie Wonder or George Clinton of the same period, but some, like I Wrote a Simple Song from 1971, deserve to be re-evaluated for the way they effortlessly mix gospel, clavinet-driven funk and the positive energy of R&B.
In public he was optimistic, but the more you get to know him, the more you get the impression that he was wearing a mask. The problems had started in his youth. He grew up without a father, who apparently abandoned him at an early age, and was exploited by the more seasoned gospel musicians he toured with as a boy. Yet he never or almost never talked about it with the friends, relatives or colleagues who give their testimony in the film. They all say they thought he was gay (or that he was bisexual for a time), even though Preston never came out. One of his band's longtime members says he was even shocked to learn that You Are So Beautiful it had been written for Preston's mother and not for a lover. «He kept many things hidden», adds another friend, and it is a concept that we hear repeated several times in That's the Way God Planned It.
So what went wrong? There have been bad professional choices, like the role in that cinematic disaster that was Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Preston played Pepper and sang a ragged version of Get Back). At a certain point his light funk style went out of fashion and his music disappeared from black music radio despite a clumsy attempt at a foray into disco music. All the people interviewed admit that his alleged history with Syreeta Wright (former partner and collaborator of Stevie Wonder, alongside Preston in his last great success, the ballad With You I'm Born Again) was a ploy to make him seem straight.
Perhaps, because of these problems, Preston has begun to drop his mask. Having become addicted to crack, he found himself broke and became something of a musical pariah, going so far as to ask to be paid in cocaine for a studio session. Without sensationalism, Barclay says that Preston spent nine months in a rehabilitation clinic in 1992 after pleading innocent to charges of cocaine possession, sexual assault of a teenager and pornography. After violating the terms of his probation several times, he was sentenced to three years in prison and was also found guilty of insurance fraud. After his prison stint, Preston picked up 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 mentor Ray Charles left their mark on him, causing him to return to taking crack cocaine. Clapton, obviously shaken, says he waited for his friend to let him know that he wanted to detox, but that signal never came.
A merit of That's the Way God Planned Itwhich premiered at the DOC NYC festival, is that it doesn't shy away from telling the story of Preston's decidedly dark final period. His death, which came from kidney failure in 2006 at the age of 59, seems inevitable in light of what we know today. But because of the part he played in public, his decline was and still is shocking. Writer David Ritz explains that the autobiography project never came to fruition because the musician didn't want to talk about his private life. Billy Preston remains a fascinating mystery.
From Rolling Stone US.
