When the Music Stopped: The Big Band Era Remembered

In this collection of trivia, Woods, music editor at Variety during the Big Band era and later personal manager of a number of bandleaders and arrangers, writes about the celebrities he knew during his long career in the music world. His show-business anecdotes include intimate details of the marriages, sex lives, business practices and personal idiosyncrasies of many Big Band stars, as well as accounts of his own experiences with entertainment greats, including a cross-country flight with Woody Herman and involvement in a fistfight between Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. Woods is outspoken about musicians with whom he had difficulties, such as Glen Miller and Patti Page, and opinionated about critics, agents, disk jockeys and his biggest gripe, rock bands, which he considers ``raw and uncouth'' compared with the Big Bands of the 1930s and '40s. Though all the name dropping gets our interest, candor and bawdy stories are not enough to sustain it. Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.)