TOM KEIFER I started playing the club circuit in Jersey and Philadelphia and the Northeast five nights a week at a pretty young age. I was still in high school, and I was on what they called the work-study plan program; they thought I was going to a job during the day, but actually, I was asleep. There was a lot of partying going on and I struggled with a lot of that stuff through high school and a few years after that, and through a lot of the club bands I was in, including Saints in Hell.
ERIC BRITTINGHAM (bassist, Saints in Hell, Cinderella) I was living in Ocean City, Maryland, and Tom’s band Saints in Hell, which was basically a cover band with a few originals, was playing at this local club on Halloween. The band had gotten in a day early from Philly and were hanging at the bar the night before the show. I was in the bathroom just taking a leak and Tom and another guy from the band walked in and were bitching about their bass player. And then Tom just sort of tapped me on the shoulder lightly and was like, “Hey, do you play bass?” And I was like, “Actually, I do. But I don’t really have a bass right now.” And Tom said, “Well, if you want to come down to jam tomorrow morning, you can use our bass player’s stuff.” So I showed up the next morning, played a couple of Kiss songs or whatever, and they were like, “All right, you have the gig. Just figure out where you can get a bass and we’ll see you in Philly.”
TOM KEIFER We did that for a while, and I woke up one day and felt like my life was going nowhere. I actually moved back with my parents and got a job and started writing songs, tried to clean my act up a little bit, and pretty much stayed on that path from there on.
LARRY MAZER (manager, Cinderella, Nelson, Kiss) If you remember, Fotomat had kiosks in shopping-center parking lots where you could drop off film in the morning and the photographs would be ready to be picked up at the end of the day. Tom had a route of x amount of kiosks that he would drive to in the morning to pick up the film to take it to wherever and then later in the day, at five, drive back the prints. Then as soon as that was done, he would drive to the Galaxy club in Somerdale, New Jersey, where the owner let Cinderella practice upstairs. He would literally work from, like, six in the morning to five in the afternoon and then go right to New Jersey to rehearse. It was just ridiculous dedication and he already had twenty or thirty really good songs written.
TOM KEIFER It’s kind of living the two lives, working during the day and then we would rehearse at night and work on songs, and every once in a while get into the studio and bang out some demos. That was the goal: to create a sound and get a record deal.
ERIC BRITTINGHAM We did that for about a year before we even played a gig.
LARRY MAZER There was a recording studio in suburban Philadelphia, called Veritable Studios, and I was very close with the engineer, a guy named Joe McSorley. It was a little studio, mainly for local bands, whatever. One time I was there working with a band, and he said, “Can I play you something?” He played me a couple of Cinderella songs and it blew me away. He said, “Well, I know they’re talking to Gene Simmons, who heard some stuff and is interested in working with them, but he’s asking an arm and a leg,” which is typical. It’s ironic that I then managed Gene Simmons three years later.
ERIC BRITTINGHAM Our guitar player at the time, Michael Kelly Smith, had actually auditioned for Kiss around the same time that they ended up picking Vinnie Vincent, so he had Gene’s number. We met with Gene at his apartment in New York … It was pretty surreal sitting in Gene’s living room with him because this was like 1982 before they took the makeup off for Lick It Up, so none of us had really seen his face before. But then he sent us some songs, because it turned out that he wanted to do a production deal where he would write the songs for us and produce the records and manage the band. And honestly, the songs he sent us were really bad. So here we are, like huge Kiss fans, telling Gene Simmons, “No thank you. That’s not what we want.”
LARRY MAZER They had a Saturday-night residency at the Galaxy, which was ten minutes from my house, so I went one Saturday night and there were about forty, forty-five people there, and they came on, and you would have thought that Tom Keifer was at Madison Square Garden. The guy just came on with an attitude like there’s twenty thousand people here and it blew me away.
TOM KEIFER We had a lot of potential and I’m glad somebody saw that, but we had a long way to go. I think the beauty of being that age is not only the abundant energy that you have, but there’s also a confidence; there’s no self-doubt. It’s like, “We know what we’re doing, fuck you!”
LARRY MAZER There was enough interest that every label came, but I could not get them a deal because people didn’t like Tom’s voice. Whereas I thought his voice was a plus because at that point in time Aerosmith had just reformed and had come out with Done with Mirrors, which was not a great record because they were still in their heroin phase. AC/DC was in that period of Fly on the Wall, Flick of the Switch, Who Made Who, which weren’t great AC/DC records. And here’s Cinderella, right down the middle of Aerosmith and AC/DC. The closest we got was Jason Flom, who at that time was A&R at Atlantic Records and who said to me, “Well, I kind of like it, but it’s either this or Savatage and I think Savatage has a much bigger future.”