Detroit cool

For a couple of hours there, it looked like we lost Lem Barney.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, the NFL Hall of Fame announced Barney’s death at age 80 and published an obituary, only to follow up a few hours later admitting that the news was unconfirmed, a false report.

Lem Barney, 1971

Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1945, Barney was a standout at Jackson State University during a golden age of historically black colleges and universities football programs. Drafted by the Detroit Lions in 1967, his rookie season is still considered one of the best by a defensive back — 10 interceptions and the NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year award. Over his 11-year career, he totaled 56 interceptions, seven defensive touchdowns, seven Pro Bowls, and three All-Pro selections before entering the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1992.

(1967 was a big year for Barney. In the off-season he was married and also served six months of active duty in the Navy).

Barney was also a spectacular kick returner. His 61-yard punt return against Cincinnati in 1970, a display of cunning and confidence, should run on an endless loop in the Football Hall of Fame. A Cincinnati punt hits the ground in front of Barney as three Bengals close in. But they can’t locate the bouncing ball and during the confusion, Barney grabs it off the ground and outraces everyone for a touchdown.

Playing in Detroit had some advantages and in 1968, Barney and teammate Mel Farr became friends with Marvin Gaye, who lived in a toney Detroit suburb. The three bonded over sports and music, playing golf and shooting hoops.

Marvin

When songwriters Obie Benson and Al Cleveland shopped their very un-Motown song about the state of America circa 1970, Gaye agreed to sing What’s Going On but only if Barney and Farr sang background vocals.

They’d been in the studio before as Gaye’s guests, but they were now behind microphones contributing to the background singing and the soul-brother speak that fades in and out of the mix: ‘Hey, brother, what’s happening?! Solid! Right on!”

At a time when there was zero crossover between sports and popular music – these were the days when Anita Bryant and Al Hirt provided the halftime entertainment at Super Bowls – Barney and Farr became athletic avatars of cool.

Yet just as Barney and Farr were hanging their gold record plaques, Gaye had another request: he wanted to try out, at age 31 and with no experience, for the Lions.

He moved his Rolls Royce out of his garage, turned it into a gym and began an impressive training regimen, running 4-5 miles per day and lifting weights, bulking up nearly 30 pounds.

The Lions organization agreed to give Gaye a tryout; after all, this was the team that once allowed George Plimpton to attend training camp and play quarterback in a preseason game. Gaye looked good, but not good enough to be invited to camp.

Gaye would have one more brush with sports when he sang the national anthem before the 1983 NBA All-Star game, a remarkably cool performance of that awkwardly phrased “song” that had women in the audience swooning.

Barney would get another chance at show biz, starring as one of The Black Six (1974) a biker exploitation flick that included five other NFL bad asses.

Marvin Gaye died on April Fool’s Day, 1984, shot to death by his father. Barney and his wife attended Gaye’s funeral. Farr passed in 2015. As of today, Lem Barney is still alive and hopefully well.

The Compleat Beatles

Rather than sit through the epic that is the 2025 version of The Beatles Anthology, I caught The Compleat Beatles (1982) on the internet recently.

There was a time when The Compleat Beatles was considered the go-to documentary about the band, with lots of archival footage and interviews with Liverpool and Hamburg insiders who knew them when, several current musicians and, the real coup, George Martin.

Once readily available on VHS, Paul McCartney saw it as unauthorized competitor to Anthology and acquired its rights, removing it from circulation (although at one time it was a staple in the VHS bargain bits in department stores). Today, it mostly exists in bootleg copies or on online video sites.

Here are a few random thoughts and observations.

Ringo’s aspiration of someday getting into hairdressing takes on a new meaning in light of Spinal Tap. “I fancied (owning) a string of ladies hairdresser salons,” he says in archival footage, then imagines a possible conversation with a matronly client: “Hello, would you like a cup of tea, ma’am?” a flashback to Nigel Tufnel talking about a future working in a chapeau shop: “Yes, what size do you wear? We don’t have that size.”

Cigarettes are the band’s constant companions. Does Anthology include footage of the boys smoking? Considering George’s fate, it wouldn’t be surprising if not.

When the Beatles play the Coliseum in Washington D.C., how does the makeshift drum riser not collapse? It’s barely secured and it shakes and rattles each time Ringo hits the skins.

George Martin speaks with some candor about “desperately” trying to keep Revolution 9 off the White Album and commenting on Paul’s “relentless professionalism,” a loaded phrase if there ever was one.

Martin also has this terrific quote: “I think that the great thing about the Beatles was that they were of their time, their timing was right. They didn’t choose it – someone chose it for them. But the timing was right, and they left their mark in history because of it.”

And possibly because he made himself available to the documentarians, the script at one point says Martin “continued to lead them into new territory.” Maybe, maybe not.

The closed caption option on my television spelled out Phil Spector as Phil Specter, which is defined as a ghost or something widely feared as a possible unpleasant or dangerous occurrence. Sounds about right.

Unless you had access to tenth-generation blurry bootleg tapes, The Compleat Beatles was the only place to view, snippets unfortunately, of the Hey Jude, Penny Lane, and Strawberry Fields Forever videos, among others. Trying to remember them in the early 1980s, years after they originally aired on television, was often like seeking to recall a dream.

There’s a directness to the documentary that you’ll not find in any of the Apple-approved material out today. (Speaking about Magical Mystery Tour, it describes how the aim was to film whatever happens on the bus trip, before dryly adding, “unfortunately nothing did.” We also see the band labor through a 1966 live version of If I Needed Someone that’s sluggish, off-key, George forgetting the lyrics).

Apparently originally released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Love Me Do, more than forty years later The Compleat Beatles is a concise, unbiased introduction to the Beatles story.