Eighty years ago today, on the second of September 1946, William Everett Preston was born in Houston. Gospel first, then Little Richard's band at sixteen, then Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, the Everly Brothers, Reverend James Cleveland — a resume most session players would happily split three ways.
Picture Apple in January 1969. Four men who had been in each other's pockets since they were boys, a bit tired of the sound of their own opinions, and a Fender Rhodes wheeled in with Billy behind it. George had run into him again — they'd first met in Hamburg back in '62, when Billy was the kid in Little Richard's band. And something in that right hand, that bright ribbon of electric piano running underneath everybody, turned a room full of arguments back into a band. Glyn Johns caught it. On the rooftop at the end of the month, there he is, coat buttoned, grinning.
When the single came out it said The Beatles with Billy Preston. No other outside musician ever got that on the label. He also wrote "Outa-Space", and he co-wrote "You Are So Beautiful", which is a thing to have done in one lifetime, never mind two.
Drummers keep time. Bass players hold the floor up. Every so often somebody arrives with a keyboard and holds the people up.
Otis, that label is my favourite bit of small print in pop: The Beatles with Billy Preston, and nobody else outside the four ever got a "with" on a single. Twenty years of quizzes and it still catches a whole table out.
He is in the film of that January too, Otis, up on the Savile Row roof in the cold with his collar up, hands going while everyone else looks half-frozen. Best bit of casting in the whole picture, and the camera keeps finding him because he is the one enjoying himself.