Cinderella BE A'HAPPENING NOW!

Cinderella BE A'HAPPENING NOW!

Richard Hogan

At 10th and Arch Streets in Philadelphia stands the Trocadero, once a notorious striptease joint, now a rock club. But maybe what’s happening here tonight isn’t so far removed from the stage scandals that used to smolder in downtown Philly before burlesque went the way of Ben Franklin’s kite and George Washington’s wooden teeth. Perched on a platform above a pack of beefy, fist-pumping customers is a prettified all-male quartet that’s cranking out some bump-and-grind metal rock. At stage center, the singer, Tom Keifer, dons and doffs assorted hats, jackets, guitars and sunglasses, like a girl stepping out of her mom’s walk-in closet.

Through the Troc’s stellar sound system, Keifer, 25, howls one of Cinderella’s regional favorites, “Back Home Again”:

Trusted my hopes ayn dreams Wit sombwon who said day nyew

Jist how ta bake ends beet,

Day havain’t parp a clyuel...

I’m baked, baked, baked, baked home uggin!

"Not bad for a bunch of rock dogs, huh?” Keifer inquires in standard English as Cinderella concludes a “Stormy Monday”-style blues. The pack down front (some girls further back with the requisite drinks, tattoos and cigarettes) gobbles up the show as if starved for all its components: the high notes that singe their ears, the perpetual onstage hustle, the blatantly feminine wardrobe and hip motions.

Back at PolyGram Records in New York, Britain, Holland and Germany, “starved” has become an operative word for a company whose coffers languish halffilled during a dearth of productivity from Scorpions, Kiss and the mysterious Def Leppard. Kids hoping to hear the clang of British steel, the roar of New Yawk greasepaint or the frothy metal overflow of Germany’s finest are thus being spoon-fed a variant suggested by the wise Doctors Philips, Seimens, and head nurse Polly Graham, who’ve all initialed the musical prescription blank above the line “Substitution Permissible.’’

To Keifer and pals, the effort of standing dead still six months to write words and music for Night Songs seemed worth it. “Def Leppard?” he asks incredulously. “It’s over three years since Pyromania” The photogenic singer-guitarist emits a faint, competitive chuckle. “It’s all right with me. Take your time, Def Leppard!”

Keifer, bassist Eric Brittingham, 25, colead guitarist Jeff LaBar, 23, and drummer Fred Coury, 20, all hope to do for Philadelphia and South Jersey what Leppard did for Sheffield—what AC/DC did for Sydney and Newcastle. Tom Keifer got his start nearly nine years ago in a high school band, Already Gone, while Eric Brittingham first picked up guitar in a subteen Ocean City, Maryland, outfit known as Rock Steady. Keifer continued his musical understudies at Delaware County Community College, with recent minors in racehorse hot-walking (“It was a real shitty exercise job, seven days a week") and drugstore film delivery. While playing guitar with a rouged and lipsticked all-boy band called Saints In Hell, he met Eric Brittingham.

“The Saints were playing a Maryland club, and we were unhappy with our bass player,” notes Keifer. “Eric was walking around, and I said, ‘ThaFguy looks cool— wonder if he plays bass?’ We just approached him. When he said he did play, we kidnapped him and brought him back to New Jersey, where most of our gigs are. He hasn’t seen his family since.”

Brittingham didn’t object: “I’ve actually shoveled chicken shit,” he boasts of his resume. But Saints In Hell nearly lived up to their name during a New Jersey date at the Menagerie club in 1981, where a pyro/special effects man substituted standard black gunpowder for the slow-burning Green Dot powder that the Saints’ stage-side flares required. The explosion reportedly sent more than 15 people to the emergency ward for quick attention to lacerations and burns.

“It was on Channels 3, 6 and 10 and in all the newspapers,” Keifer recalls. “We didn’t get to do any interviews that night,

though—we were in the hospital.”

It was Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1981. Brittingham and Keifer next landed in the Priscilla Harriet band, which played the club circuit up and down Delaware. Maryland, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Priscilla Harriet was another cover band—this one fronted by a girl—and Tom rarely got to sing anything besides his own “rip-snortin’ versions” of AC/DC’s “Back In Black” and “Hells Bells.” Limited completely by club policy to regurgitating other people’s songs, the duo left the group in ’83 and went home—Tom to Springfield, Pa., Eric to Ocean City—until Keifer had enough songs to warrant assembling a new band.

“We wanted to do our own thing,” Eric says simply. “Tom got it started. I came back from Maryland five months later and we’ve been kicking ever since.”

“Jon Bon Jovi just happened to catch us at the Empire Rock Club in Philly while he was recording his album 7800° Fahrenheit at the Warehouse, a downtown Philadelphia studio,” Keifer continues. “Next thing I knew, our manager said, ‘What did you guys do to Jon Bon Jovi? He’s up at his record company, raving about you guys.’ We said, ’We just played.’ ”

Played what is the question. Maybe a videotape of the porno flick Cinderella for which the band was named after the musicians spotted the title in a cable TV guide. Maybe the bonecrunching numbers that fill Night Songs, a professional piece of work that resurrects the styles of the same groups whose songs Saints In Hell always covered: AC/DC, Scorpions, Aerosmith, Kiss, with a bit of a PolyGram A&R nudge toward the sound of the reclusive Def Leppard.

Night Songs is the first album of a deal that gives Cinderella’s label an option on seven more. Considering that at press time the record is well on its way to platinum—and the band is on the road with David Lee Roth—guess whose option will be picked up very soon indeed.

Meanwhile, if you were wondering, the Cinderella moniker doesn’t seem to worry Keifer in the least.

"It’s twisted, like ‘Kiss’ or ‘Sweet,’ ” he says proudly. But Eric Brittingham isn’t so confident. Seems there were some elderly pharmacists on his film-delivery route, no more than a year ago who were asking hard questions about the outfit.

“ ‘Cinderella?’ they’d say. ‘There’d better be a girl in that band.’

“When they found out there wasn’t, you’d see their faces drop right in front of you.”

The pharmacists, it seems were diehard Def Leppard and AC/DC fans who will accept no substitute.

For now.