TOM KEIFER Even the heaviest songs on Cinderella records start with a lyric. Then the emotion of that lyric tells me whether it’s a ballad or whether it’s a heavy song. The melody and the lyric is what comes to me first always. And during the Night Songs tour, we were out experiencing things that we’d never experienced before. I’d barely left Philadelphia before those tours. So we’re out living life, and different feelings and emotions, and I’m just writing them down.
LARRY MAZER Tom is a writing machine and he was on fire. I think Long Cold Winter is one of the defining records of that period. I think it’s just, from beginning to end, one of the most brilliant records I’ve ever been involved with.
JEFF LABAR When Long Cold Winter came out, it was like we got a little grittier, a little dirtier, looser.
TOM KEIFER It was pretty apparent to me that there was, like, a trend going on that was very flavor-of-the-day, and it was everything from the photography, to the imagery, to the clothing, to the sound of the records being very slick and processed. We started trying to steer the boat out of those waters after the first record. Because at the time it was still considered cool and hip, but the writing was on the wall to anyone who had half a brain that this was eventually going to become an anchor. If you look at the packaging for Long Cold Winter, the pictures on that were kind of more classic black-and-white. There was no picture on the cover. The sound started to get more organic, we were bringing in harmonicas and Dobros and pianos and trying to paint the picture production-wise more like the classic ’70s records.
LARRY MAZER When Long Cold Winter came out, we did tours with Judas Priest and AC/DC and then we did arenas as headliners. It was a great show and we had a beautiful stage. The show started off with Tom standing on top of the speaker cabinets with his National guitar on a stand and a shroud over him. And we had this little intro tape and after that the shroud would go up and the spotlights would hit Tom and he would start the acoustic slide-guitar opening of “Fallin’ Apart at the Seams” and play that by himself, and then he’d run down the steps and join the band.
Then in the middle of the set we had this elevator system that went up to the top of the arena, and Jeff would come out and do an acoustic guitar solo. And while he’s doing that, Tom would go in this elevator and climb on a white baby grand piano that had an electric keyboard built into it, and basically when Jeff finished the guitar solo the opening chord of “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)” would start. Then Tom would lower down from the rafters on the piano and sing the first verse, and the piano was timed to hit the stage just as the drums kicked in going into the second verse. Then Tom would pick up his guitar and play the song out. That was the high point, and then for the encore we had these snow machines on the lighting truss and it would snow during “Long Cold Winter.”
TOM KEIFER Before we started the tour we did production rehearsals in Louisville, Kentucky. They rolled all the trucks in and we had like two days of rehearsal in the arena before the opening night. That was the first time we ever did the thing where I came out of the sky playing piano. The first time I got on that, all the houselights were up so I could see the floor. I could see how high I was. And one of the rigging motors got locked up on the way down, so the platform started to tilt. Obviously the piano and the bench was bolted down but I wasn’t, so I was white-knuckling on the piano. The rigger realized this and he stopped the motors, but it was sitting kind of cockeyed in the middle of the air. And the worst part was, you know, those guys sling around on those chains like Tarzan. So the way he got out to the piano was to jump from one chain onto the chain that was locked up, which started the whole thing swinging. I came down and I thought, “Fucked if I’m gonna do this every night.”
JEFF LABAR The amount of space you have to run around when you’re headlining, it’s like, “Ooh, this playground’s big!” It’s like the bigger amusement park as opposed to the carnival. I used to be very physical or acrobatic, I would run around a lot, and the bigger the stage the better for me. I would just run further and jump higher.
LARRY MAZER We sold three million copies of Night Songs and three million copies of Long Cold Winter. We even sold a million of Heartbreak Station, but we didn’t become the bona fide arena sellout that Poison did, Ratt did, Bon Jovi did, Mötley Crüe did, whatever. I think because the guys were more like Dokken or Great White, more … not faceless, ’cause they certainly weren’t faceless, but they didn’t play up to that showbiz, Hollywood, tabloid thing. If you remember, Jon Bon Jovi started going out with Diane Lane, the actress, at that point. And obviously Tommy Lee was with what’s-her-name. With Cinderella, unfortunately, because they never became rock stars in their own minds, they didn’t develop that kind of lifestyle, and in a way that kept them from becoming even bigger. You never saw them hanging backstage at other bands’ shows, you never saw them getting into car wrecks or whatever. Tom, even though he was a rock star, never played into the rock star thing. He lived with his wife in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, in a nice house a block from my office. We hung out every day.