“Schmidt asked if he had any film of when he played in high school or college and Marvin hung his head and said, ‘I didn’t play in high school.
“So Marvin went in to talk to coach Schmidt about it,” Barney says. Through Barney and Farr, a former UCLA star, Gaye knew most of the Lions and had met their coach, Joe Schmidt.
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“You see, I had this fantasy: I was in the Super Bowl, with millions of people watching me on TV all over the world, as I made a spectacular leaping catch and sprinted for the winning touchdown.” “I was always a sports fan,” he told David Ritz, author of the 1985 Gaye biography “Divided Soul,” “but I was determined to play for real. Though he had never participated in organized sports, the singer believed he was a gifted athlete. “He transformed a master bedroom into a universal gym and bulked up from about 180 pounds to about 210,” says Barney, a longtime pastor and executive at a Detroit hospital. It was during the impasse that Gaye, 31 at the time, set out to join the Lions as a wide receiver. The single remained unreleased for six months while Gaye, indignant, refused to record anything else. Motown executives, however, were said to be unmoved, company founder Berry Gordy reportedly dismissing “What’s Going On” as overly political and a tough sell. The opening “set the record in a specifically black context,” author Steve Turner wrote in his 1998 Gaye biography, “Trouble Man.” “This was no longer just the ‘sound of young America,’ this was the sound of black America, and for the first time Marvin sounded as though he was speaking in his own voice.” It opens amid a party atmosphere, with Barney, Farr and others speaking scripted one-line greetings such as, “Hey, what’s happenin’?” and, “Brother, what’s up?” “‘What’s Going On,’” notes the All Music Guide, “was a new kind of protest song, a sugar-coated pill which surveyed the troubled landscape of an America torn apart by war, poverty and prejudice, but reported its findings not with anger and recriminations but with compassion and tenderness.” The song they laid down, “What’s Going On,” was perhaps the most important recording of Gaye’s career, establishing the singer as a significant artist and not merely a hitmaker. But he said, ‘Lem, you take this part,’ and, ‘Mel, you take this part.’ And as a result, it got us a gold record.” “We thought like always that we’d just sit and watch him perform.
“And then one day he says, ‘Come on, let’s go by the studio.’ “Marvin really went into a stupor, and both Mel and I would go over and try to keep him encouraged,” Barney, 64, says from his home in Commerce, Mich. Later diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, she died in March 1970. Tammi Terrell, his duet partner on a string of 1960s hits including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” had collapsed into his arms during a 1967 concert. “Marvin had a lot of heart, a lot of will and stick-to-itiveness.īut that didn’t stop the 6-foot-4 Gaye from pursuing his dream - with the help of his football-playing friends.īarney and Farr, the NFL’s defensive and offensive rookies of the year in 1967, had befriended Gaye in 1968 after Barney knocked on the singer’s door to introduce himself.
“There’s no question that if he had started out at an early age like most of us, he could have been a fine ballplayer,” Barney says. The way Marvin Gaye figured it, if Lem Barney and Mel Farr of the Detroit Lions could sing with him on a landmark recording, the Motown superstar could play in the NFL.įorty years ago this summer, he set out to make it happen.
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