FRED COURY Cinderella’s first arena tour was with David Lee Roth, and when we first met him, he was peeing in one of my road cases. It was great. It was awesome. I was like, “Wow, I’m never going to sell that road case.” He couldn’t have been nicer, but we started crossing him on the charts.
JEFF LABAR The better our album did, the more restrictions they tried to put on us. At one point Tom was told that he was not allowed to speak in between songs. We pointed out how ridiculous that was, so then they said, “Okay, you’re allowed to say the name of the city and the name of the song.”
LARRY MAZER A couple of weeks in I’m starting to get phone calls from Dave’s manager, saying, “We have a problem. Dave thinks that Tom is ripping off his raps.” I said, “Wait a second.” I said, “Guys, with all due respect to Tom, I can tell you right now what his raps are, and they’re barely raps.” “Hey, Houston, you having a good time?” “Hey, light up your lighters!” You’ve got David fucking Lee Roth, the greatest front man in the music business, and you’re telling me that Tom Keifer is ripping off his raps?
FRED COURY But while all this was happening, Dave was inviting me to all of his after-show parties. The rest of the band wasn’t allowed to come, just me, and I would go. It was called “Club Dave,” and I would go every night.
STEVE VAI (guitarist, David Lee Roth, Whitesnake; solo artist) It was like Caligula from hell. Dave knew how to take fun really seriously. Every night the hospitality room was festooned with curtains and a gigantic stereo system with speakers that were like PAs. There were tables and tables of food and drink, and the techs and security guards during the show would go out and pull between fifty and sixty people, and ninety percent of them were girls in their underwear. Then he would invite all of the radio programmers and record company people and they’d get drunk and laid and they’d go on the radio the next day and talk about it. You know, Dave was very well crafted that way.
DAVID LEE ROTH My recreation director was named Paul. I had met him at a Club Med in Tahiti. He was entertainment director for the whole village. He would have theme nights, like Waffle House night, where we would come off the stage and he would have hired twelve bikini models from Hawaiian Tropic in Lakeland, Florida, and gone to the local Waffle House, rented uniforms, got menus. You walk in and there’d be two lines of girls in these sickening orange and green uniforms, like corn-dog waitresses. Or we would have Arabian nights and there would be sand all over the floor of the dressing room and he would have gone to a costume store in Omaha and come up with eight Scheherazade outfits. Everyone would show up on the bus later with glitter all over their jeans.
TOM KEIFER From the first arena tour with David Lee Roth we went straight to Bon Jovi. Slippery When Wet was taking off, and our record was going even bigger than it was when we were with David Lee Roth. It felt like Beatlemania.
JEFF LABAR I’m like trying to envision right now what it was like looking out into the crowd. It felt like it was eighty percent chicks, but it had to be at least sixty to seventy percent chicks. And good-looking ones.
FRED COURY It was just hugeness. Everything’s sold out, everything’s multiple dates, seven nights in Detroit. It’s just stupid huge. And to this date, nobody has treated us better than Bon Jovi did. They were just amazing, and we learned how to treat other bands like that. “You guys have enough lights?” “Yeah, we’ve got more than enough.” “Okay, take more.” “What?” “How’s the sound, good? Want to come to a little birthday party?” “Yeah, we do.” Jon would rent out a health club after, there’d be basketball and open bar or bowling, whatever it was.
LARRY MAZER Sam Kinison was everybody’s idol back then. He was the comedian for all the metal bands and he used to come to all the shows.
JEFF LABAR We had made friends with Sam real early in our career because our tour bus drivers were brothers and we were on tour at the same time and we kept crossing paths. So when the idea came up for Sam to be our crazy insane manager in the “Somebody Save Me” video, we were like, “Yeah, that would be awesome!”
LARRY MAZER So we’re shooting in L.A. and it’s during the Bon Jovi tour and call time was at nine in the morning. Everybody’s there, the girls are there, the band’s there, I’m there. And no Sam Kinison. Ten o’clock, no Sam Kinison. Eleven o’clock, no Sam Kinison. Everybody’s freaking out.
JEFF LABAR We had been partying in my room the night before. Last I saw Sam, he was crashed out on my bed. But when I woke up in the morning he was gone.
TOM KEIFER The whole concept was based around his character, him being this off-the-hook manager who was going to chase the Cinderella girls out of the studio. And he was gonna do a screaming and yelling routine and all.
LARRY MAZER In terms of the videos, it was just obvious: Your name is Cinderella, let’s take it to the next degree. The head of video at Mercury Records at the time suggested this guy Mark Rezyka to be the director. We talked on the phone and I said, “You know, we want to do the Cinderella story, basically.” They wrote this treatment based on that. Yeah. I think the “Shake Me” one is great, the setup, but I thought the “Nobody’s Fool” video, which really carried out the whole, you know, the clock strikes midnight, girl running away turning into a pumpkin, was great.
JEFF LABAR The girls who played the evil twins were different in all three videos. There was not one that overlapped.
LARRY MAZER No. It’s the same girls for “Shake Me” and “Nobody’s Fool,” but “Somebody Save Me” was different girls.
JEFF LABAR I went to the video shoot and Sam didn’t.
LARRY MAZER Eric and I went in the other room and said, “What are we gonna do?” So basically we wrote the ending that you now see in the video, where the girls leave with the Bon Jovi guys. I found Jon Bon Jovi and I said, “Jon, listen, we have a problem.” I told him the whole story and I said, “I have this idea for the ending, would you be willing to do it?” He says, “Yeah, anything I can do to help out.”
JEFF LABAR That was just them being nice guys. “Yeah, we’ll come down and help you out.” They were just the most amazing people on the planet to us at that time. You know, same label, same tour, guiding us along, teaching us the way.
TOM KEIFER That first record, the success of it and the tours we were on took us to a level of playing live that really felt great. I wanted us to stay there, and I knew that was dependent on the success of the records ultimately. So it was always in the back of my mind: If we want to keep doing this, which is the real payoff, playing these huge shows, we have to keep having successful records. So it’s all connected, it’s all interrelated.