Written by Nate Jackson"Billy Preston 1901720021" by Heinrich Klaffs is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Billy Preston in Hamburg, Germany
On Nov. 21, 2005, the man known as "The Fifth Beatle" lay on a hospital bed, dressed in street clothes, thrashing and gasping for air. Billy Preston had just arrived at the Intensive Care Unit at Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital in Marina del Rey, Calif., rushed there from the Canyon, a nearby drug-rehab center. A large, frustrated nurse wrestled with the legendary, 59-year-old organ player (and native Houstonian), struggling to fit a black oxygen mask over his face. Eyes wide with fear, Preston dodged his head back and forth, unable to breathe.
Holding his hand at his bedside was Preston's manager, Joyce Moore. She tried in vain to calm him down.
"I gripped him tight and said, 'Boo, you gotta relax,'" Moore says. "I thought he was having a panic attack. I kept saying, 'Breathe with me...breathe with me.'"
But it wasn't a panic attack or the pangs of crack withdrawal. Years of drug abuse had culminated in malignant hypertension and pericarditis, the internal drowning of the area around Preston's heart. He mustered the strength to push the mask away, look up at Moore and painfully utter his last words: "I...can't!"
Suddenly Preston's eyes rolled back, and his grip loosened. The monitors flatlined. Even after doctors drained the fluid around his heart, he didn't wake up. He lay in a coma for nearly six months before dying on June 6, 2006. The loss is a nightmare that Moore's mind refuses to erase.
"I feel like Billy's sitting here. It's weird...He never leaves," says the spindly, silver-haired 69-year-old. "It's not a physical presence, more like a conscience thing."
Producing a string of acclaimed albums and hits through the 1960s and '70s, Preston's talent is knitted into the fabric of rock and roll, soul, gospel and funk. In life, his talent defied gravity. The same goes for the financial mess that has followed his death.
On a recent Tuesday night, Moore, dressed in a black-and-white-striped cardigan, sat in an empty restaurant inside a Costa Mesa hotel. There was barely room for food on the table, which was covered in court documents, the earthly remnants of Preston's ghost. They're pieces of the musician's tangled, now-long-posthumous bankruptcy case, originally filed in 2005. For nearly a decade, Moore has waged a quixotic battle with bankruptcy trustee lawyers in Santa Ana's Ronald Reagan Federal Building and Courthouse.
Besides settling what the bankruptcy trustee believes to be Preston's $4 million debt, there's the fight over money gained from Preston's intellectual property and royalties from Preston Music Group Inc. (PMGI), of which Moore is the CEO. Decades later, Preston's soulful classics - including "Nothing From Nothing," "Will It Go Round in Circles" and "That's the Way God Planned It"-- sadly describe the legal battle that has followed his death.
Accusations of misconduct have been leveled by both sides of the case. The bankruptcy trustee's lawyers accuse Moore of using Preston's royalties for her own financial gain, not paying his debts and refusing to disclose the financial records of PMGI. In the media, she's been accused of isolating Preston from his family in life and hoarding his money in death.
Moore insists the bankruptcy trustee has no right to go after intellectual property as part of the delinquency of Preston's estate and that the entire case itself is a fraud. The war has put a hold on concerts, tours and projects done in the artist's memory -- in other words, it kills any and all projects that might create revenue to pay off his creditors.
And Moore believes she is the only person alive who has the right to determine Preston's legacy. "Here's a man who was a genius, literally, who trusted me with his life and his legacy," she says. "Walk away from that? Maybe most people would. I can't."
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