Rolling Stone Magazine calls Tom Keifer "a gritty, bluesy, (rocker) with enough genuine swagger to draw comparisons to Mick Jagger." The Rolling Stones celebrated the Delta Blues in their songs and sound by citing players like Ry Cooder, Leadbelly, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Willie Dixon among others as a derivative 25 years prior. Tom Keifer and his band Cinderella re-injected that influence into mainstream Rock n' Roll when they burst onto the hard rock scene in 1986. Where most of Keifer's hard rock/pop metal contemporaries had grown up on a third-generation of Rock n' Roll (with its implied blues influences), Tom preferred from a young age to dig back into the core of the Delta Blues sound, that had first given birth to Rock n' Roll's infancy.
Quickly carving out a niche as a revivalist blues-rock singer/songwriter with Cinderella's debut album, Night Songs, which spawned the hits 'Nobody’s Fool', 'Shake Me', and 'Somebody Save Me', Tom Keifer and Co. set out on a whirlwind path of success that would stay remarkably disciplined both in terms of Keifer's musical focus and the band's influence over the decade's sound.
Perhaps this focus is part of what made Cinderella stand apart musically from the band's generational rock counterparts. The emotional sophistication of Tom's songs on the band's next album, the iconic Long Cold Winter would take the hard rock genre as fans knew it even deeper into the bohemian psyche of the traveling musician than it had gone before within the context of that generation. Long Cold Winter, released in 1988, was a truly penetrating narration, journeying into the highs and hells of life on the road from the eyes of one of hard rock's last real gypsies. Written by Keifer almost entirely on the road during the Night Songs tour, all of the album's hits, including 'Don't Know What You Got Till Its Gone', 'Gypsy Road', and 'Coming Home' offered listeners an authentic insight and appreciation for the hardships of life on the road that hadn't been so brilliantly captured in song since the days of Bob Seger's 'Turn the Page'and Willie Nelson's 'On the Road Again'.
Rolling Stone Magazine declared boldly in a review of the record that "Long Cold Winter is indeed a radical departure from the no-frills crotch-rock mentality of Night Songs, Cinderella's 1986 debut. As for the variety it offers, this album leaves its predecessor in the dust... It...teems with feisty moments, and...exhibits an admirable willingness by Cinderella to take a stab at something different...The top-notch musicianship and streetwise savvy displayed on the album...make Cinderella a force to be reckoned with."
The band's third and perhaps most accomplished album, Heartbreak Station was immediately recognized for its achievement, both in terms of the authenticity of songs and sound, and as a true masterpiece that could stand up among rocks finest records. Heartbreak Station made Cinderella a permanent member of rocks elite, particularly via the moving hit 'Heartbreak Station', which bore a soul-stirring and authentic resemblance to Robert Johnson's 'Love in Vain' in terms of the desolating essence it captured. According to AllMusicGuide.com, with this record, Cinderella "created a sneering, raunchy hard-rock album that was artistically their finest moment...Heartbreak Station shows that Cinderella has more genuine rock & roll grit than most of the metal bands of the late '80s."
Meanwhile, Rolling Stone Magazine gave Tom Keifer perhaps his greatest critical compliment by acknowledging him for the musician and songwriter he had truly become, remarking that "Heartbreak Station is amazingly likable and even brave: You'd have to search pretty far to find white blues this consistently catchy and rhythmic, this varied, (and) this free of gut-busting macho slop...Heartbreak Station could prove the most inescapable hard rock since Appetite for Destruction." HeartBreak Station wasn't just a celebration of Keifer's songwriting achievement, but also a nod to Cinderella's members in how far they had come as a band in terms of musicianship. Rolling Stone Magazine commented to that effect in their review of the album, remarking specifically that they rose to the musical challenge of Keifer's material by authentically "tempering their shriller tendencies with strings, saxes, logrolling bottleneck blues, whorehouse piano, trashy tambourines and what sounds like a jew's-harp, Keifer's backup boys replicate Big Brother and the Holding Company's crunch, pausing for pit stops in the neighborhoods of not just Bad Company, Humble Pie and Led Zep but of the Allmans, James Brown and even the Flying Burrito Brothers."
By 1991, Tom Keifer's songs and Cinderella's sound had captured the hearts of millions of rock fans around the world, (14 million to be exact in terms of records sold,) and had already achieved a legacy and place in Rock n' Roll as perhaps the only truly authentic hard rock blues band of the 1980s. Riding high on the success of Heartbreak Station, a sudden twist of fate marked the beginning of a tragic period in Tom's life, both professionally and personally. What was supposed to begin as a break between the band's US and Japanese legs of the 1991 Heartbreak Station tour, on a routine day, as Tom sat down in his home studio to record, he found he simply couldn't sing. Even more frightening than the silence within his own voice was that of the doctors he saw who couldn't give him any explanation for the loss of his voice! The only answer Keifer got was a statement of the obvious, that it just went away. Finally Tom found a specialist in Philadelphia who explained he had a paresis of the laryngeal nerve controlling his left vocal cord. In addition to undergoing a pair of delicate vocal surgeries to remove a cyst and repair a hemorrhage, the bulk of Tom's recovery in correcting the vocal paralysis came via vocal therapy wherein Keifer had to literally learn to sing all over again. Retraining his voice by working with a speech therapist and vocal coach, Keifer, after a 12 year battle, has finally attained the victory of a full recovery that has left him singing better than ever!
In addition to Tom Keifer's battle with his own vocal cords, he also lost his mother during this time period in the early 1990s. These tragedies informed the songs on the band's fourth album, Still Climbing, released by Polygram in 1994. While the record sold well among the band's fan base, it lacked the label support due to a shift in rock trends from pop metal to Grunge, denying it the opportunity to truly achieve what Cinderella's past albums had commercially and quietly opened the door for Keifer to begin focusing on his solo career. While Tom was personally battling the paresis of his vocal cords, the band's breakup in 1995 was a welcome change for the musician personally. Relocating to Nashville in 1997, Tom spent the next several years focusing exclusively on what he most loves, songwriting. He collaborated with country music stars like Andy Griggs, and worked methodically on writing and re-writing material for what would become his first solo album, due in 2005. Over the early part of the millennium, Tom reunited with his Cinderella bandmates for a pair of summer shed tours and this past year, started a family with wife Savannah Snow (also a songwriter), who gave birth to the couple's first child in February of 2004. Tom Keifer's latest effort, an as-yet-untitled hard rock solo album will bring him full circle in his evolution as a blues-influenced hard rock artist. Blues forefather Son House (a mentor of both Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson) once wrote if 'I didn't have no blues, I just wasn't satisfied.' Having come full circle personally and artistically, by virtue of his new life and album, Tom Keifer would seem to agree...
– by Jake Brown Tomkeifer.com
(Brown is President of rock label Versailles Records, and has authored 5 biographies on entertainers including Death Row Records' Suge Knight, R. Kelly, rap legends Biggie Smalls and 50 Cent, Motley Crue‚s Nikki Sixx, and currently, is working with Motley Crue's John Corabi on a forthcoming authorized autobiography due in 2005.)
