The one musician who “100% improved” The Beatles: “Everybody was happier”
The ending days of The Beatles tended to be a lot more strenuous for George Harrison than for anyone else.
It’s one thing for the band not to be on the same page when they were making their final records, but during the Get Back sessions, no one could blame Harrison for wanting to walk out on the group after the band never took some of his ideas seriously. He knew that what he was making was good, and he wasn’t going to stay here when there were a billion other musicians who were willing to work with him.
And it’s not like Harrison didn’t have his circle of friends outside the Fab Four. Ravi Shankar was already the one showing him what music could be outside of rock and roll, and despite spending years upon years playing sitar, he knew that he was going to find his own sense of salvation through his guitar rather than Eastern instruments. But if he was going to stay in The Beatles, he was going to need a little bit of a buffer if it meant getting a lot of his songs across the finish line.
That’s what happened with Eric Clapton joining on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, but the Get Back project was going to be a little bit different. He had spent years getting shot down time and time again before he eventually came to the band with a great song, so if John Lennon could bring in Yoko Ono to work on tunes and comment on how progress was going, Harrison wasn’t going to come back unless he had someone like Billy Preston coming in to oversee everything.
The band were already on their own, and George Martin was practically a musical advisor at this point, but Preston was a calming presence for everyone involved. Everyone in the group had already known him from the days when he played with Little Richard, and when you look at the kind of songs that they were making around that time, half of the greatest melodic flourishes were coming from Preston.
He’s still the only person who was billed as an official feature on a Beatles album, and when you listen to ‘I’ve Got A Feeling’, his fingerprints are all over the important sections of the tune. It was one thing to have ‘Slowhand’ in the group for a second as a collaborator, but Harrison remembered that everyone seemed to be in good spirits the minute that Preston walked in the door and started jamming.
Harrison already had his work cut out for him getting his songs across the finish line, but even when he wasn’t working on his own tunes, Preston’s presence felt like a breath of fresh air for everyone, saying, “I put a message out to find out if Billy was in town and told him to come into Savile Row, which he did straight away. [It] just became a 100% improvement in the vibe in the room, and everybody else was happier to have somebody else playing in the band.”
And while everyone has their own opinion on who should have been the ‘Fifth Beatle’, Preston can’t really be ignored in that conversation. Martin deserved a shout, and Brian Epstein was the one responsible for turning them into massive superstars, but Preston was the one person who made John Lennon start discussing with the rest of the band what they could sound like if they brought him into the group.
Harrison may have gone a little bit overboard when he claimed to want all of their friends, like Bob Dylan, to join the group, but given the fractured state they were in most of the time, Preston was like that little bit of glue that held them together at the end. They were on the brink of collapse, but sometimes all a band needs is one other person in the room to start putting things into perspective a little more.
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