When Muhammad Ali Tried to Reunite the Beatles

George Harrison thought it could happen.

It was January 1977, and the onetime member of the Beatles was being quizzed about the potential for the group to reunite after going their separate ways seven years earlier.

“Will it happen?” Harrison asked rhetorically. “I suppose so. There is definitely no reason why it’s absolutely out {of the question} for the rest of our lives.”

Of course, no such reunion ever took place. But it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. For a period in the 1970s, a number of promoters, entrepreneurs, and optimists mounted attempts to get the Fab Four back on stage. While most simply tried to entice the band with money—and in ever-increasing amounts—one man opted to take a different approach. He believed the one way the Beatles could reappear was if he could crowdfund the money needed and appeal to the group’s charitable nature. In a brash and impulsive move, he even roped boxing legend Muhammad Ali into the picture.

All any Beatles fan needed to make their dream come true was to send in a single dollar.

A Band Apart

The Beatles—Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison—arrived in New York City for the first time on February 7, 1964. The assembled crowd of around 4000 who welcomed them at JFK Airport seems quaint compared to the histrionics that followed. Roughly 74 million people saw them perform on The Ed Sullivan Show days later. For the next six years, the band was likely the most famous musical group on the planet. One hit record followed another, from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to The White Album.

But unlike contemporaries the Rolling Stones or the Who, the Beatles were not built to last. According to Lennon, the death of manager Brian Epstein in 1967 was the beginning of the end.

“After Brian died, we collapsed,” Lennon said. “Paul took over and supposedly led us. But what is leading us, when we went round in circles? We broke up then.”

Infighting, lawsuits, and bad feelings made a comeback unlikely in the extreme, especially once the bandmates went on to solo careers. But as the 1970s progressed, the appetite for a repeat of Beatlemania grew: Sales of compilation albums and back catalog hits were encouraging, with millions of copies sold. It was even said some attendees of McCartney’s tour with his new band, Wings, were there in the hopes of seeing some of his old bandmates trot onstage.

As more time passed, some came to believe a Beatles one-night-only return performance would break show business records. Promoter Bill Sergent floated a $50 million deal. Sid Bernstein, who once booked the group at Carnegie Hall, made a $100 million offer.

Alan Amron had another idea. A 28-year-old entrepreneur from Long Island with a laudable track record—he invented a high-powered water gun before the Super Soaker and a sticky notepad before the Post-It—Amron believed that the best way to get the group to agree would be to demonstrate the public’s appetite for it.

How? By having them pay for it.

“I thought it would be easy to get a dollar from every Beatles fan in the world to reunite the Beatles,” Amron tells Mental Floss. “A by-the-people funded event.”

Amron launched the International Committee to Reunite the Beatles in 1976. His plan was to solicit $1 from each of the group’s fans, with an eye on amassing as much as $50 million by the 10th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s in June 1977.

“There are 200 million Beatles fans in the world,” Amron said in 1977. “This is a fact. And if there are 200 million Beatles fans, it could reach 100 million of them and {if} only half send in a dollar, that’s $50 million.”

To publicize his idea, he took out an ad in The Village Voice, a New York City alt-weekly, and had his campaign highlighted in Rolling Stone.

The reaction was swift, and mostly positive. “I had started to get money in envelopes in the mail literally from all over the world,” Amron says, “{and in} currency that I never even seen before, from countries I didn’t even know existed.”

Money was one thing. Connections were another. Getting a meeting with a Beatle or their representatives would be difficult without an intermediary, and so would mounting a complex telecast Amron had planned for the concert. Then, Amron had a stroke of luck. While on vacation in Miami Beach, Amron walked into a diner and spotted the only man who could conceivably make a claim to being more famous than the Beatles: Muhammad Ali.

Amron seized the moment. “I read that Ali knew the Beatles and loved them,” Amron says, “so I approached him in a Miami Beach diner asking for his help to raise the people’s money and then in broadcasting the event worldwide into movie theaters like he was successfully doing at the time with his boxing matches.”

Amron tapped Ali on his broad shoulders. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but I’m trying to re-form the Beatles. Would you like to help?”

The cold approach worked. Ali loved the idea and invited Amron to his home in Chicago. With his business partner Joel Sacher, Amron flew in and sat down with the former heavyweight champion, who agreed to take up the cause.

“Our partnering with him made the front pages of major newspapers around the world,” Amron says. “Ali was the most famous person on the planet. The funding picked up 2000 percent overnight. Ali even invited Joel and I to President {Jimmy} Carter’s inaugural ball in Washington, D.C.”

In another welcome coincidence, there was a person on Carter’s inauguration guest list that the three desperately wanted to meet: John Lennon.

Let It Be

The event, which was held in January 1977, seemed like a perfect storm of opportunity. In one corner was Amron, Sacher, and Ali; in the other was Lennon, and with him an opportunity to make a face-to-face appeal without intermediaries or lawyers.

Lennon reportedly listened to Ali’s pitch for a reunion that would benefit charity, perhaps by as much as $200 million. Out of interest or politeness, he didn’t shoot down the idea but instead offered to meet Ali and discuss it further at his apartment at the Dakota, a residential building on New York’s Upper West Side.

“I hope to impress them with the idea that this is money to help people all over the world,” Ali said a few days later. “I don’t need the money, and neither do the Beatles. The idea is to create this fund, and to help people develop a quality of the heart.” The money, he said, would go toward “feeding and clothing the poor children of the world.”

At this point, Amron felt the event was a real possibility. “We never got a ‘no,’ ” he says. “We got messages back from all four members {that were} ‘yes,’ ‘yes,’ ‘maybe,’ and ‘it could happen someday if it was the right situation.’ ”

It seemed like that right situation was finally coming together. But Lennon and Ali never met in Lennon’s apartment. Instead, representatives for the factions met and talked. Depending on the time and source, it was either encouraging or not. When asked by Playboy interviewer David Sheff in September 1980 about the idea of a charity concert, Lennon was dismissive.

“After the $200 {million} is gone, then what?” he said. “It goes round and round in circles. You can pour money in forever ... There is no one concert. We would have to dedicate the rest of our lives to one world concert tour, and I’m not ready for it. Not in this lifetime, anyway.”

Even Harrison, once optimistic, turned sour by 1979.

“It will never happen,” he said. “In the end, it wasn’t nearly as much fun for us as it was for you. ... Let’s face it, the Beatles can’t save the world. We’ll be lucky if we can save ourselves.”

The project came to an untimely end on December 8, 1980. “The idea was a few years in the making when it all ended abruptly when John Lennon was assassinated,” Amron says. Mark David Chapman shot and killed the former Beatle outside the apartment complex where the musician had once invited Ali to visit.

Amron doesn’t have an exact tally of the total amount raised but recalls it was roughly $6000 early on. Following Lennon’s death, Amron donated the funds to charity.

While the reunion didn’t materialize, it was far from a waste. Ali liked Amron so much he asked him to help manage his business deals, a partnership that last for around four years. In both the Beatles project and the Ali association, Amron had developed some additional caché in the business world. “It made meeting with big stars and important corporate people much easier,” he says. “They listened to my every word.”

Still, it was perhaps a quixotic goal. The last track on the final album the band recorded, 1969’s Abbey Road, was titled “The End.”

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