Maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about. There’s this moment in the new documentary on the Beatles, the one by Peter Jackson, Get Back when Billy Preston shows up and suddenly everything gels. It is a startling moment, a transformative moment, a thing of beauty. You should watch it more than once and it wouldn’t hurt if you watched it with a glass of whiskey in your hand.
Because until that moment, the Beatles are dying.
And look, maybe the Beatles aren’t in your musical wheelhouse. That’s understandable. So much amazing music has been recorded since (and prior to) the Beatles, it’s easy to see how they might fade into the backtracks of your playlist. I’m not here to preach about their historic importance or their sonic signature. Better writers than me have driven that headspace into the grave. I’m here to talk about art. About the strange and thrilling moment when beauty emerges from garbage. The moment when noise becomes music.
Which is visible when Preston walks into the room
Even before he lays his fingers on the keyboard, the spirit in the room is revitalized. For the first episode and most of the second episode, the Fab Four are diddling around, sick of each other but too in love—even now, even after Yoko, even at the obvious funeral of their enterprise—to give up. There’s still a mine full of music. They still love to work together, or so they believe. They are invested. They are married to each other, to the band, to the entity they comprise, the Beatles. But you don’t have to be a doctor to diagnose the room: they’re terminal. The Beatles sing the lyrics for every song on Let It Be with their last breaths.
But right before they die, like all terminal patients, there’s this moment of life
Preston and the Beatles were friends. Colleagues. They admired each other’s work and when Preston walks in, all four of them light up. The color comes back into their cheeks. They’ve been grinding nauseously on this project, camped out in a vast, cold warehouse with high ceilings and terrible acoustics. Then in the basement of Apple studios, cramped and close, filled with stale cigarette smoke and stale effort. The light of their eyes had gone out. You can hear the bones of the songs rattling around. The sound is familiar but muted and dull like you’re dragging your feet in a graveyard. And they need a keyboard player. Even though every member of the band can play piano, they can’t bang out a guitar riff while they’re doing it and Let It Be is going to tape straight, no dubs. Preston agrees to hang out a little bit and help them. Everyone is smiling, the tension in the room is pierced and deflating, then Preston plays.
And magic happens.
In an instant, every single member of the band shifts from fucking around to focus. Preston doesn’t just drop in a riff, he resurrects the ghost of the group. Suddenly song bones grow flesh. Suddenly the song is there, you recognize it. And you realize all these years it isn’t just the Beatles you love in “Get Back”. It’s goddam Billy Preston.
But rewatch that scene. Rewatch the rest of that episode as the songs come alive
There is a lesson there, and it’s not just for artists. We see it through the lens of art, but the curriculum is clear: beauty is born out of chaos. Because we’re all the Beatles. We find ourselves locked in the basement of a project, of a job, of a genuine FUBAR. Hope’s an exsanguinated old sack of skin and bones. We’re just going through the motion. It happens to me when I’m writing when I’m 20 thousand words into a book and it’s like I walked through a portal into another world that held the energy and the clarity of my story. Now I’m lost. I’m just typing. Hoping something will happen. Hoping for an ornithological Billy Preston to explode into the room in a sluice of bourbon and tobacco and I’ll suddenly find the rhythm section of the story.
Billy Preston is hope.
And so are the Beatles, banging away on their instruments in the face of death. They knew they were dying, they knew it. They knew this was their last breath. They knew it but they had faith in their talent. And then that fat electronic piano set the room on fire with hope. It is the lesson a writer needs. It’s the lesson a distiller bears in her breast every time she lights the fire under a mash. There will be moments when your spirit wanes; when it sags; when your muse quits the band. Just remember the Beatles and keep going. Just remember to hope.
Which whiskey should you drink when Billy Preston walks into the room?
I can’t tell you. Maybe Ringo knows.
