Billy Preston – Nothing from Nothing

The first song ever played on Saturday Night Live was already a year-old No. 1

On October 11, 1975, NBC put out the first episode of a late-night show nobody had any expectations for. George Carlin hosted. John Belushi opened it mangling English in a classroom sketch. Andy Kaufman stood beside a record player and mimed to the Mighty Mouse theme. Jim Henson brought Muppets that were not for children. And the first piece of music ever performed on Saturday Night Live was Billy Preston playing Nothing from Nothing. That is how most people meet the song. It is also why almost nobody remembers that it had already spent a week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, a full year before that episode aired.

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Preston started it in a dressing room at an Atlanta nightclub, working from a phrase rather than a melody. He wanted a song built on the saying “nothing from nothing,” which he had taken from a line in Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone about having nothing left to lose. He brought the idea to Bruce Fisher, his regular writing partner, who supplied the second verse. What Preston added was the piano: a bright, clattering saloon sound with a horn figure over the top of it and a banjo somewhere in the mix. He said the saloon piano gave it character, and that he expected a hit because people would sing along.

The sideman gets his own number one

A&M released the single on August 5, 1974, pulled from The Kids & Me, Preston’s ninth studio album, recorded across October 1973 at the Record Plant in Los Angeles and at Westlake Audio and A&M in Hollywood. He produced it himself. The record reached number one on the Hot 100 for a week in October 1974 and stayed on the chart four and a half months, giving Preston his second American chart-topper after Will It Go Round in Circles the previous year. It reached number eight on the R&B chart, number five in Canada, sold past a million copies, and earned him a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male.

The scale of that is easier to see against what he had spent the previous fifteen years doing. Preston played organ behind Mahalia Jackson when he was ten years old and appeared on Nat King Cole’s television show a year later. Through the sixties he worked for Little Richard, Sam Cooke and Ray Charles. In January 1969 George Harrison brought him into the Beatles’ Let It Be sessions, where his presence steadied a band coming apart, and the single that came out of it was credited to the Beatles with Billy Preston — a shared billing no other musician received. He played on Abbey Road, on All Things Must Pass, on records by the Rolling Stones and Aretha Franklin. He had made an enormous number of other people’s records better. Nothing from Nothing was his.

Europe, and a Dutch television studio

The Kids & Me arrived after a European tour, and the continent’s television shows were where a lot of that audience actually saw him. The performance here comes from TopPop, the Dutch broadcaster AVRO’s flagship pop programme and one of the most complete visual archives of seventies chart music anywhere. Preston in front of a camera is a different proposition from Preston on a record. The grin does half the work, and the song, which is essentially a piece of comic writing about refusing to be taken advantage of, needs the grin.

The song has kept finding new rooms. General Motors used it across their advertising in 2002. It ran through Be Kind Rewind in 2008. It closed the final episode of The White Lotus in 2025. Jon Batiste played Preston in the 2024 film Saturday Night and performed it in character. James Baldwin mentioned it in a novel. For a record that held number one for exactly seven days, it has had an unusually long second life, and almost all of it traces back to four minutes on a television show that had not yet proved it would last.

Preston was born on September 2, 1946, and died on June 6, 2006, at fifty-nine. The title is a joke about arithmetic and a warning about what people owe each other, delivered by a man who had spent his career being the thing that made other artists add up. That he got a number one out of it, and that the number one is not even the reason the song is remembered, is a fairly precise summary of how Billy Preston’s career worked.