In 1966, Juan Carrión traveled from Cartagena to Almería with a notebook full of gaps. They were not incomplete notes: they were very specific gaps, the fragments of Beatles lyrics that I had not been able to decipher listening to them on the radio and on their records. He went to ask John Lennon to help him complete them. A request that would result in an editorial decision that the recording industry would retain for decades.
Who is Juan? Juan Carrión Gañán was born in Madrid in 1924. He became a senior official in the Ministry of Agriculture before resigning to go to London as a Spanish teacher at the Language Center associated with the British Embassy. When he returned to Spain, he settled in Cartagena, where he was offered a position at the Tentegorra military base, and set up his own academy. At that time, no one followed this system of teaching English with song lyrics, but it was a tricky job: I transcribed them in real time while listening to them on the radio, leaving blank the fragments that he could not decipher.
A pioneer. Let’s remember that in 1966 there was no convenient way to access the lyrics of a song. Singles occasionally included it on their back cover, and LPs rarely did. The fact is that Carrión’s pedagogical method was effective and pioneering, according to describes the writer Javier Adolfo Iglesiasauthor of the book ‘Juan and John, the professor and Lennon in Almería forever’. Carrión was a “pioneer in the use of multimedia resources, cinema, BBC news and Beatles songs” to teach English. But still, there were fragments that escaped him.
To the meeting. When Carrión found out that John Lennon was coming to Spain in October 1966 to film ‘How I Won the War!’ Under the orders of Richard Lester, he took the bus to Almería. He stayed there for a week even though he didn’t have much money: first he made friends with Les Anthony, his driver and bodyguard, and through him he sent him the notebooks. They finally met in person. He had a very specific request: that the Beatles include printed lyrics on their albums to make his job easier. Apparently, Lennon promised him that it would be done on the next album.
Curiously, Lennon’s relationship with his colleagues was not going through the best moment, and he was considering leaving the Beatles. In those same days in Almería he would compose ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, a song that the Beatles would record at the end of 1966 and publish as a single in February 1967.
Against Sgt. Pepper’s. The LP that the Beatles released after the meeting was ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, in 1967. And according to it is saidwas the first rock LP to include all lyrics printed on its back cover. Curiously, many sources specialized in the history of the Beatles document the fact, but Carrión is never mentioned. And yet, the importance of the Beatles’ decision was very significant: what the band did on ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ became standard practice in the industry.
To the cinema. In 2013, director David Trueba adapted Carrión’s story in ‘Living is easy with your eyes closed’, with Javier Cámara in the role of the professor. At the 2014 Goya Awards, the film won six awards, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Leading Actor. It was the Spanish candidacy for the Oscars that year. Carrión died on August 30, 2017 in Cartagena and Trueba lament having “met very late in life, especially in his.”
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