Today would have been John McGlinn's 67th birthday. I met him in April 1983. He had been working for Ira Gershwin on Gershwin show scores, and he came to an orchestra rehearsal for The New Amsterdam Theatre Company's concert production of the Gershwin-Romberg show Rosalie. I had orchestrated several cut songs for the concert and he was complimentary. He was at the time helping John Mauceri as well with the City Opera production of Candide, and I was curious about that.
In 1984, he called me and said, "I need an orchestrator and you're the only one I know," and we worked on the Book-of-the-Month Club recording "Songs of New York," the first major recording for each of us. Our friendship was difficult, tortured, and not easy; he borrowed things and money and never returned them; he broke promises and lost friends, but I never in all those years had a bad time working with him. I once said to him, "your problem is you don't know which battles you can afford to lose to win the ones you really need," and in the end he let his demons destroy him. Ted Chapin used to say that he burned his bridges while he was standing on them.
There were projects he wanted to record but never accomplished because of all those burning bridges: a complete Camelot, Oklahoma!, Love Life, Sweet Adeline, among others. I believe in 2001 the stress of recording too many things for the Packard Humanities Institute gave him a nervous breakdown, and that led to a logn decline of work and income before a heart attack finished him off in 2009. Rest in peace, John. You are still missed.