Cinderella

In 1986 Cinderella was a heavy-metal band when heavy metal was not cool, headlined arenas when metal became cool, and remained a heavy-metal band long enough to capitalize on its late-'90s revival. Their teased coiffures, leather ’n’ lace costumes, and thudding blues-based music heard on the multiplatinum albums Night Songs (#3, 1986) and Long Cold Winter (#10, 1988) and Top 20 singles "Nobody’s Fool" (#13, 1986), "Don’t Know What You Got (Till It's Gone)” (#12, 1988), and “Coming Home” (#20, 1989) can be seen as the advance wave of the metallic invasion that produced Guns n’ Roses, Poison, et al.

Cinderella was formed by Philadelphia bar-band veterans Tom Keifer and Eric Brittingham. Jeff LeBar, who sometimes played the same clubs as the nascent band, thought they needed a guitarist and volunteered. They chose the name Cinderella for its lack of heavy-metal connotations, but the band did have a Prince Charming, in the form of Jon Bon Jovi. He saw them at a club in 1985 and recommended them to his label, Mercury, which signed them the next year. Drummer Fred Coury joined while they recorded Night Songs. Produced by Andy Johns, the album has a slick, aggressive sound, topped off by Keifer’s throat-shredding vocals. The band supported it and its followup, the bluesy, ballad-laden Long Cold Winter, with near-constant touring, opening for Bon Jovi, David Lee Roth, Judas Priest, and AC/DC and playing before a crowd of over 100,000 at England’s Castle Donnington festival in 1987.

Heartbreak Station (#19, 1990), led by the ballad “Shelter Me” (#38, 1990), was a surprising turn toward a softer sound. Embellished with horns, gospel singers, and strings arranged by ex–Led Zeppelin John Paul Jones, it gave the band entrée to MTV and classic-rock formats and secured its headliner status. Like so many other metal bands, Cinderella sounded irrelevant in the wake of Nirvana and grunge. Still Climbing (1994) sank without a trace, a fate that also befell the greatest-hits collection Once Upon a...(1997). A live album released in 1999 by the indie metal-specialist label Dead Line garnered some interest, and the band found itself signed to a major label deal in 2000 and, back on the road, touring with Poison, Dokken, and Slaughter.

from The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001)