What are your warmest musical memories? Maybe you were one of the first to swoon over Frankie at the Paramount. Maybe Glenn Miller and "Chesterfield Time" helped you get through your homework...or one of the great disk jockeys: Al Jarvis, Alan Courtney, Martin Block, Fred Robbins. Maybe you splurged one night and danced first to Dick Jurgens at the Trianon, then over to the Aragon for the Champagne Music of Lawrence Welk. Maybe you were one of the lucky ones who caught Duke's first Carnegie Hall concert, early in 1943. Maybe you were even one of the kids whose roaring enthusiasm told Benny that swing had finally made it way back in '35 at the old Palomar. Whatever your biggest musical moments, you'll live them again in these pages. George Simon was there - and now he takes you back with him. This book is a first. No mere collection of memories, these are George Simon's on-the-spot reports for Metronome, finest magazine of the Swing Era. This is how it was during the golden age of American popular music - the first book to assemble contemporaneous accounts of the unforgettable sounds that knitted our lives from 1935 to 1955. Every page is drenched in good memories, and that would be excuse enough for this book. But Simon Says is much more: the magnum opus of America's pioneering critic of jazz and popular music. When George Simon joined Metronome in 1935, nobody, but nobody, was writing intelligently about both jazz and dance music. George Simon showed them how. The evidence is all here. In 1935 he hailed the first Benny Goodman band with an A rating - even after the impresario of the Roosevelt Grill handed the band its two-week notice on opening night. He raved about Ray Noble's first American orchestra at the Rainbow Room, and took care to alert his readers to the wonderful lineup that included stars-to-be Glenn Miller, Claude Thornhill, Bud Freeman, George Van Eps, Charlie Spivak and Will Bradley. In June, 1935, he subwayed uptown to the Savoy to catch the Chick Webb band, and promptly predicted stardom for a scared little girl named Ella Fitzgerald. Simon's tastes were catholic. All but alone among the jazz critics, he could enjoy dance music as well as hot music. Nobody ever listened so knowledgeably to all kinds of bands and singers. Nobody ever criticized so constructively. Nobody ever tried so conscientiously to enter into the spirit and the music of each orchestra, each vocalist. Which is why he can be read with pleasure and profit by lovers of jazz or dance music or singers. For all his credentials as the dean of popular music critics, George Simon refuses to take himself grimly. All through these pages, humor keeps breaking through. Reviewing the soft-soft-soft sound of Guy Lombardo, he observes that "at dinner sessions, you can even hear a mashed potato drop." He reprints prophetic pieces that first heralded greatness for struggling kids like Dinah Shore, Buddy Clark, Harry James (before his Goodman days!), Helen Forrest, Glenn Miller, Louis Bellson, Carmen Cavallaro, Frank Sinatra and Clark Terry. But he is quick to remind us that he also sounded the trumpets for might-have-beens like Jayne Whitney, King Guion, Billie Trask and Jimmy Littlefield. Still more unassuming, Mr. Simon reprints many of his first fresh-from-the-campus articles - and lets them run unretouched. They have a wonderful Joe College, campy flavor, rich in the show-biz argot of the period. Then, as the years go on, his work ripens. But earlyu Simon or later, his musical judgments stand up remarkably; and they take on added stature when we reflect that he was writing de novo: leading, not copying. this book is likely never to be surpassed as the definitve work on the golden age of jazz and popular music - even though it's great fun to read. - Dust jacket.