No musician can claim to be perfect. Even if you put in all the hours required to become one of the best in your field, there will always be those few times when the music might get the better of you, either onstage or in the studio. Although The Beatles may have existed on a different creative level than their peers, Ringo Starr felt this musician never made any mistakes throughout his career.
Ever since the band started, though, Starr was always looking from afar at what the group could do. Forming as the result of schoolmates John Lennon and Paul McCartney getting together, McCartney would draft in George Harrison on guitar before going through many different drummers.
By the time the band were playing various club gigs alongside Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Starr had started to sit in with the group on occasion, having a much better sense of swing than Pete Best. For all of the chemistry that the band had once Starr entered the fold, it was only a few years before they began to get fed up with each other.
Becoming a studio-only for the second half of the 1960s, the band would use Abbey Road Studios as an instrument, creating various tape loops and backwards music on albums like Sgt Peppers and Revolver. After finding their independent creative voices, the Beatles would start to attack each other when working on The White Album, leading to an absolute disaster when crafting the follow-up album, tentatively titled Get Back.
While the sessions would see Harrison quit the band for a while, it wouldn’t be until Billy Preston came down that everything fell into place. Giving a lift to the sessions, Preston would be one of the only people to be credited alongside the other Beatles on a track, playing keyboards on ‘Don’t Let Me Down’ and contributing to the album track ‘I’ve Got a Feeling’.
Although the band would only last a few more years, Starr would have fond memories whenever Preston joined them. When working on the John Lennon album Plastic Ono Band, Starr thought that Preston was on a different level playing the song ‘God’, saying, “Billy Preston – he’s one of the few musicians that never put his hands in the wrong place. Never. I’ve known him since he was sixteen. He came in on Let It Be and then was on this. It was always a joy when Billy played because he was just so great”.
Preston didn’t get to that level of musicianship by accident, either. After spending his first years playing piano in church, Preston first got to know The Beatles when working as a sideman for Little Richard, often giving the charismatic frontman a run for his money whenever he stepped behind the keyboard.
The rest of the band would continue to be friendly with Preston, often appearing on George Harrison’s solo albums and turning in one of the best performances in The Concert for Bangladesh during the song ‘That’s the Way God Planned It’. It’s hard to think about competing with the likes of The Beatles, but Preston was always looking to serve the song rather than test out his skills.
