Recently, after picking up my six-year-old daughter from school, we were driving home while I was playing John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy album. I remembered when the album came out and also remember how the songs blanketed radio stations after Lennon’s death in December 1980. And as the song “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)” played, I began thinking of Lennon’s life around 1980, while also thinking of my own family during the autumn drive home.
Lennon knew that he had not been a great father to his first son, Julian, born in 1963 to Lennon’s first wife Cynthia. At that time, Lennon was in his early 20’s dealing with the growing fame of the Beatles. So when his second son Sean was born to him and Yoko in 1975, Lennon hoped to do better and avoid many of the mistakes he had made with Julian.
Lennon began working on a song with Sean in mind in 1979, and he recorded another demo in 1980 before the studio sessions for the Double Fantasy album. The original demo has appeared in later years, including on The John Lennon Signature Box., but in both versions the song is a love letter from a father to his five-year-old son, made more poignant by John’s life being cut short not long after the recording. The song closes out side one of the original record album. And the lyrics begin with the father comforting the son about an imagined monster.
Close your eyes,
Have no fear;
The monster’s gone,
He’s on the run,
And your daddy’s here.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
Beautiful boy;
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful
Beautiful boy.
Lennon later explained how Sean remained on his mind throughout the recording of the songs for Double Fantasy. ““I was guilty all through the making of Double Fantasy. We had his picture pinned in the studio because I didn’t want to lose contact with what I’d got. We had the picture up there all the time in between the speakers, so whenever you’re checking the stereo, he was looking at me all the time.”
Paul McCartney has praised the song written by his former writing partner, saying, “I think it’s a beautiful song. It’s very moving to me.” Others have fallen in love with the song, which appeared in a touching scene in the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995), where Mr. Holland, played by Richard Dreyfus, performs the song as his own love letter to two people: his favorite artist John Lennon and his deaf son, Cole.
And so, while listening to “Beautiful Boy” as I drove my daughter home from school, I came on that October Fall day to reflect on Lennon’s life, the love of fathers for their children, the meaning and history behind the lovely song, and the tragic too-short reminder of mortality that took away a father from his son with a flash of a bullet.
And as the song played again after I hit repeat, a little tear began rolling down my cheek. . .
And then I heard a voice. It was coming from the back seat in my six-year-old daughter’s voice, getting louder . . .
Singing along with this song . . .
“Stinky, stinky, stinky, stinky BO-OY. . . . Stinky stinky stinky stinky Boy. . . “
And that is the Story Behind the Song. Leave your two cents in the comments.
