TOM KEIFER Heartbreak Station was kind of an effort for Cinderella to step away even more from the slick ’80s production and get back to all the great music from the ’70s that I grew up on, like the Stones and Zeppelin. When they made those records, they didn’t go in and track all the drums in one studio with the same sound and then overdub everything from the ground up. A lot of tracks were recorded in different locations, and they all have different characters to them as a result. So that was the goal. For songs like “Shelter Me” or “Love’s Got Me Doin’ Time,” we wanted a tighter, more ’70s R&B vibe, so we did those down in Louisiana, outside of New Orleans. We also wanted that classic “Tumbling Dice” gospel background vocal on “Shelter Me,” and the studio found us some local girls who were amazing. And we supplemented in the way my heroes the Stones did, where they’d bring in other players and stuff for a particular feel that they wanted. We were trying to grow the landscape and the color of the songs in a way that we weren’t hip to when we made the first record.
FRED COURY It’s definitely a great way to make a record, because you get the vibe of the city and you just have a good time. But it can be a little distracting. I remember that we were in Miami and we were supposed to show up at the studio at eleven in the morning or something. Jeff and I, walking on the beach to the studio, found some Jet Ski guy who was like, “Hey, you guys want to go on the Jet Ski? I don’t charge you.” In the ocean? Jet Ski? That could be kind of fun. We didn’t show up until maybe five p.m., sunburned and so tired, like, “Oh, we’ve got to play?” We didn’t do anything that day. I think we went to dinner.
JEFF LABAR We record loud, and for some reason that would always put me to sleep. We had a Polaroid camera sitting around the studio, so there was a succession of pictures of me sleeping throughout the making of that record and they would write captions on them like “Jeff working out his solo for ‘Heartbreak Station.’” “Jeff contemplating the world’s problems.” Shit like that.
JOHN JANSEN (producer, Britny Fox, Cinderella) We did part of the record in Philadelphia, and in those days, I used to seek out the best restaurants, ’cause I like food and wine. So I found this French restaurant, one of these places where if you don’t come with a jacket they put a size 56 long on you. But I invited the band. I said, “You wanna go eat at this French restaurant? It’ll be good, I’m buying. Just so you know, you should wear a sport jacket or something.” So Jeff shows up in this black suit, and all over it, as if with a stamp, is “Fuck.” It has like one hundred and twenty “Fucks” on it. And I go, “Oh great.” I think they made him take it off and put another jacket on. Of course, when he went to the men’s room, he still had his “Fuck” pants on.
LARRY MAZER We delivered the record, everybody loved it, and I went to the marketing meeting and I said, “Look, here’s what I want to do. Because we recorded this record all over and it’s got this bluesy-type feel, I want to do this party and I want to launch the record in New Orleans.” So we rented a riverboat called the Natchez on the Mississippi River. They flew in two hundred journalists from all over the world, the party cost a quarter of a million dollars. We did a three-hour cruise and then we moored in the middle of the Mississippi and had a fireworks barge that did a fifteen-minute fireworks display that ended with the Cinderella logo being blasted into the air.
MADELYN SCARPULLA They spent a lot of money making that record and setting it up, but Cinderella could just never get over that hump into mega-sales like Bon Jovi and Def Leppard did.
LARRY MAZER For the “Shelter Me” video, we hired Jeff Stein, who had done the Kids Are Alright movie for the Who. He was friendly with Little Richard and got him to be in it. We also needed a girl for the scoreboard in the video, so Jeff Stein was in the bank one day and sees this gorgeous blonde and says, “Hey, I’m a video director, I’m doing this video shoot.” She was like, “Oh, I’m a struggling actress. I just got my first TV show, called Home Improvement.” He said, “Would you like to be in a video?” And she said, “Yeah.” And that was Pamela Anderson. At the time she was dating Scott Baio, from Happy Days, and he came to the shoot to make sure nobody was gonna hit on his girlfriend. And at one point I walked up to her and said, “Hey, you know what? Chachi’s bumming everybody out, can you tell him to calm the fuck down?”
TOM KEIFER “Shelter Me” came out and it was, I think, the highest-charting rock track we had in terms of crossing over to the Top 40. Usually, only ballads got over to Top 40 but the rock tracks didn’t. But it didn’t get that high. It crept up to like thirty-six on the pop charts.
LARRY MAZER If I could do it over again, I probably would have led with “The More Things Change” to lock in the Cinderella core audience because, looking back at it now, even though it went to number one at rock and also went on Top 40 radio, “Shelter Me” was such a departure that you could sort of feel their audience was not buying in completely. But it was still a big hit, and we booked a European tour.
ROSS HALFIN I’ll tell you how they fucked up their career. They were about to be massive in England and the Gulf War broke out. They played these shows in Nottingham, London, sold out, and they were about to go to Europe and they were like, “We’re going home.” And I was like, “Why?” “Well, we could get bombed by Sudan.” I’m like, “Sudan’s going to bomb Munich?”
LARRY MAZER The tour is completely sold out—ten dates in the UK and then a full European tour. We land in England in January to start the tour and that day the Gulf War starts. So we’re at Hammersmith Odeon the first night, and Tom is losing his mind ’cause then we’re supposed to go to Germany. I showed him a map and said, “Here’s Kuwait, here’s Europe, here’s England. Scud missiles can’t go that far.”
Anyway, for whatever reason, the poison then starts spreading to the crew and now the crew guys are freaking out. So the morning of the second Hammersmith show, they had a band vote/crew vote and they voted to go home. I said, “Guys, this is terrible.” “We don’t care, we’re going home.” So we rented a plane, it cost us a hundred grand in cash, and we had a police escort take us to this military airfield and we flew home.
MADELYN SCARPULLA We went straight from the arena to the airport. And I remember that I had banged my knee into a ramp or something backstage when I was running to do something, and that the pressure on the plane made it swell up and almost explode out of my jeans. The stewardess kept bringing me bags of ice but nobody else seemed to care. Eric, Jeff, and Fred were against coming home, and everyone was having their own private drama about canceling the tour. It was a very morose flight.
LARRY MAZER So this was January 20, 1991. We land in Philadelphia, January 21, 1991, and the next day the Gulf War ended.
TOM KEIFER Actually, there’s a bit of backstory to this: The previous time we had been in Europe, we had tickets on hold for the Pan Am 103 plane that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, but didn’t end up using them. So terrorism was a little close to our hearts at the time. When things started feeling weird and we had military coming in with bomb dogs and all this at every show, that experience from before was in the back of our minds, and it wasn’t hard to make the call. A lot of artists were coming home at the time, so I don’t have any regrets over that.
LARRY MAZER Before we went to Europe, we had a meeting in my office to start planning the American tour. At that point Mötley had had the big Girls, Girls, Girls stage with Tommy in the cage and right away it was, “We gotta beat them.” I said, “What for? You’re Cinderella, they’re Mötley Crüe. They need that stage to get over because they can’t just rely on the songs. We can.” I fought tooth and nail and I lost. Tom was like, “We gotta be big, we gotta be big.”
JEFF LABAR The thing that made the production so huge was the stage itself. Bands don’t usually take their own stage. They take stuff to put on top of the stages, but arenas have their own stage. We brought our own fucking stage that took up three trucks. It was designed to look like an old porch. Like, the ego ramp stairs were all jagged and looked like old planks of wood, and our backdrops looked like a swamp with the Spanish moss hanging from them. The drum riser also was all jagged planks of wood, and behind it was a Cinderella logo that had about six hundred lights in it, I think. Or maybe it was six thousand. The logo was on hydraulics, so it could lay flat or be pushed up so the crowd could see it behind the drum riser, and it would light up and had pyro around the edges.
We all started out under the stage, and the drum riser would come up slowly as the Cinderella logo was burning into the back of the stage. And then, at the end of the intro tape, it would just be a big bang, big pyro explosions, and they’d throw us up onstage from underneath. It looked like we just appeared out of nowhere because pyro would go off right in front of each of us.
LARRY MAZER The tour started in Madison and the ticket sales were terrible. By the third show, promoters were getting killed and it was costing us a ton of money. We had a meeting and we basically sent the stage home and cut everything down.