Cinderella

Although they would be forever associated with the L.A. hair metal bands of the 1980s, Cinderella originally formed in suburban Philadelphia. The original line-up of lead of bassist Eric Brittingham, singer/guitarist Tom Keifer, drummer Tony Destra, and guitarist Michael Schermick first coalesced in 1982. Destra and Schermick left three years later, replaced by guitarist Jeff LaBar and drummer Jim Drnec. They would switch out drummers again after the recording of their debut LP, 1986’s Night Songs, which climbed to Number 3 on the album chart with the help of the Number 13 single “Nobody’s Fool”. Their sound evolved away from glam and toward blues with 1988’s Long Cold Winter, another top 10 album that gave Cinderella their biggest charting single, the power balled “Don’t Know What You Got (Till It’s Gone)”. 1990’s Heartbreak Station continued to push in a bluesier direction and would prove to be the end of the band’s hitmaking streak. Keifer would suffer through a period where he lost his voice, delaying the release of Still Climbing until 1994. That album barely scraped the bottom of the top 200 and with grunge now ascendant, the hair-metal band was released by their label. They would reunite intermittently for live gigs over the next twenty years, often playing with other hair metal alumni such as Sebastian Bach and Bret Michaels. In 2017 longtime frontman Keifer announced Cinderella would likely never reunite again. Consecutive days in July of 2021 saw the deaths of guitarist Jeff LaBar and keyboardist Gary Corbett, who had been a fixture on their tours from 1990 until their dissolution.