This Week in Texas Music History, a Houston-born friend of the Beatles comes to us live from New York on a Saturday night.
Episodes written by Jason Mellard, Alan Schaefer, and Avery Armstrong
Billy Preston on first episode of Saturday Night Live
Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University
On October 11, 1975, Houston native Billy Preston performed on the very first episode of Saturday Night Live in a program hosted by comedian George Carlin.
Keyboardist and session musician Preston began his recording career in the early 1960s and worked with a roll call of popular artists, including Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Barbra Streisand. His most celebrated collaboration, though, had some folks calling him the “Fifth Beatle.” Preston first met the Fab Four as early as 1962, prior to the British Invasion, and that relationship developed to the point that Preston joined them in their final recording sessions in 1969. John Lennon proposed that he formally join the band, and, while that didn’t happen, Preston is one of the only artists to share credit on a recorded Beatles song with the late-career single “Get Back.” He even performed alongside them in their last live appearance, the infamous London rooftop concert recently revisited in Peter Jackson’s documentary series.
Preston found solo success, too, with hit singles “Outa-Space,” “Will It Go Round in Circles,” and a cover of the Beatles’ track “Black Bird.” By 1975 Preston had completed work with the Rolling Stones on the album It’s Only Rock and Roll, and he had another successful single with “Nothing from Nothing.”
Preston then received the invitation to serve as a musical guest for a scrappy new comedy program called Saturday Night Live. The show emerged from the comedic trends of the day, echoing the skit-comedy sets popular in Chicago, Toronto, and Los Angeles. Producer Lorne Michaels hired a team of mostly unknown comics including Gilda Radner, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Dan Aykroyd. Accompanying this comic class of 1975 for SNL’s first episode was folksinger Janis Ian and Houston’s Billy Preston, a musician whose work crossed genre lines with priceless funk-pop grooves.
