Tom Keifer Electric Guitars Used in the Video Dont Know What You Got Until Its Gone
Nosotros recently got a take chances to catch up with Tom Keifer, the frontman for one of the about pop bands to come out of the eighty's, Cinderella. With sales of 15 one thousand thousand albums earth wide, some of the most memorable videos of the MTV generation and of course some of the nearly memorable hair. So that might beg the question, "why is American Blues Scene interviewing the singer of a 80'southward glam rock band?"
That question can and volition exist answered by Tom himself in the interview but his biggest influence on the guitar was Albert King and near fans of Cinderella could tell you lot that they(Cinderella) were just a petty bit different than some of the others in that genre. Offset of all, they were rooted in the dejection, in fact on Long Common cold Winter the song "Bad Seamstress Blues" might take been the showtime introduction of the blues to a largely unsuspecting audience.
Keifer'southward latest anthology The Manner Life Goes is actually his solo debut and it borrows a little flake from all of his influences. His dejection rock groundwork and his power to craft wonderful songs comes shining through on this album. Tom was gracious plenty to spend some fourth dimension with u.s. and we dug into his background to learn a little more than about this fantastic musician.
ABS: A lot of bands in the lxxx's got a bad rap nearly their hair, regardless of the music they were making.
Tom -Well sometimes people like to put a label on things and unfortunately with music a lot of times the label has more to do with the visual than the music itself. And so, I have a thing that I e'er say about that, and that is I recollect people should mind to music with their ears and not their optics.
Non everyone would concord only at that place was really good stuff that came out of fourscore'due south.
Yeah I agree, I think information technology was a great decade for music, not just in the hard stone, only you know, everything in the 80'due south was just very colorful and very creative. Everything from the pop stuff like what Madonna was doing to the kind of more new wavy stuff, similar, I beloved that song Scientific discipline by Thomas Dolby, and the video that went along with it. So all the hard rock stuff that we were doing, it was just a very artistic time for music, and you know a big office of it had to do with MTV evidently. Considering there was this visual aspect that I think added a whole new dimension to music, to the artists and bands so it was a fun time.
How unlike is information technology now from how it was so, what are some of your thoughts about that?
Well I think the weird problem of the industry is lack of revenue, because of music basically being pirated, so that starts to reflect in the fine art itself. I was fortunate enough to come in when Cinderella was coming up, it was a fourth dimension where record companies had the coin to stay with an artist for multiple albums, and so when we signed with Mercury, nosotros were very fortunate that they were like, whatever it takes, nosotros want to make certain you guys are in the best studios, with the best producers and the best engineers. And I'm non saying that doesn't still proceed today, I merely think that those opportunities for the artists are fewer and further between. I think that because tape companies don't take as much money to put into artist development and working with new artists that they're really more and more these days looking to them coming in already adult with a finished production. So you're kind of on your own these days, you know? The days of "here's a shitty work tape," and label guys having an imagination and proverb "well we'll just draw up a budget, and get you lot a producer". It'southward very unlike, and so on peak of it, the piracy also contributes to those same artists who piece of work their asses off to develop themselves and risk everything not really having any kind of a return on it. There'due south huge bands and artists today that just in terms of being well known and being high profile, who are barely making a living. And so it's a foreign time. Anybody deserves to be paid for their work, you know?
Entitlement is a word that get tossed around when talking nigh piracy. Thoughts?
I think there's been a mindset like y'all said, of entitlement, with a certain per centum of the population out there, but with others I don't remember it'due south intentionally done to impairment anyone, I simply think that people don't think about it. Yous know? Information technology's simply kind of similar become the accustomed norm almost. I don't know how that volition alter, I'grand just not sure. I judge through continuing to brainwash people and really make them realize that ultimately it affects the fine art and the quality of music that they're receiving. The general mentality not only impacts the art itself and new artists and arts development, but only in full general the idea of piracy, there's more than to it. It impacts four major industries, everyone'south so concerned about the economy, and I don't hear a lot of people in Washington talking about this, merely there's 4 major industries impacted past piracy. Music, software, literature and movies. That's a huge segment of our economic system. It is. And everyone's simply kind of like 'fuck information technology.'
Right. I hear what you're proverb.
I mean, information technology'south similar, we already have laws in the books, they're called copyright laws, information technology's just no one'southward enforcing them on the internet because they just think the internet is this other crazy place where laws don't utilize or something. I don't know what they're thinking in Washington, but nosotros have laws to finish all this, and my understanding is there's even technology, it just needs to exist legislated equally to who is responsible for installing it. Whether it's the servers or whatsoever. I've read a lot about it and it'due south just kind of crazy the mode this bleeds into our economy, downward to trucking and retailing and across the board in those iv industries, it'south a huge touch on. Wait at all the retail stores that have airtight, betwixt movies and music, it's but crazy. Information technology's huge, I mean, it's millions of jobs in that location's no incertitude near that.
If somebody was trying to steal some gasoline from the oil companies you lot recollect Washington would sit past and let that happen?
They'd be in the dirt and eating physical. Or walk into a bookstore with a copying machine and just start copying books, and see how long they would become away with it. I don't think it's malicious, I don't remember it's malicious on people's office, it'southward simply become an accustomed convenience to people, and I remember until people realize how much it impacts our economy and how it affects jobs and how it affects the fine art and the artists who are trying to create this, and ultimately the quality of music and art. I think when maybe society needs to feel that impact before they make a change, you know? When artists can't beget to exist artists anymore, and art suffers, and all the music and art that nosotros're getting and literature and movies simply outright suck, then maybe people will say 'wow, did we do this?'
Right? Yes, that could be. Well I hope we don't actually get to that length to figure information technology out.
I hope we don't either.
I was looking through your bio and it said your mom was going to become you a guitar, a Les Paul if you finished school. Yet have that guitar?
Yeah, to graduate high school she bribed me with a Gibson Les Paul, 78' tobacco sunburst custom and aye I still have it. Information technology's actually blackness at present, I had it refinished years ago. If you're familiar with the early Cinderella videos similar Shake Me and Nobody's Fool, it's that blackness Les Paul in those videos. And so that's what got my diploma for me. I was not the virtually academic student, only because I simply had different plans. I didn't think I needed to know any of that other stuff, because I wanted to be in a rock band and I was playing guitar. I'd been playing guitar since I was eight years old, so I kind of wanted to move on by the time I was about half way through high school. I actually had offers from bands to become out and piece of work professionally but my mom said you lot really demand to become your high school diploma and she knew what would motivate me would be that guitar.
What was the offset song you ever learned on the guitar?
Oh homo, well I call back the beginning electric song was Sunshine of Your Love by Cream. An older guy up the street had an electric guitar and an amp taught me that riff, and I didn't even know the song, I just heard him playing the riff. And so I said "that'due south cool, teach me how to play that". But I was playing audio-visual guitar before that, I had lessons when I was near seven or viii for a couple years, because I saw the Beatles on TV. I loved that bear witness The Monkeys too when I was a kid. So I was strumming chords and singing songs. I honestly don't call up what the very first song was in those early on lessons with the acoustic was, simply I do recall my outset electric heavy blues hard rock riff was the Cream song, I thought "god this is kind of absurd, I wanna play some more riffs like this".
Cinderella is definitely rooted in the blues, even though a lot of people probably don't fifty-fifty realize that, where did your blues groundwork come from?
Honestly information technology was 2nd generation, and I didn't even know it was blues. When I started hearing Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and the Rolling Stones, and a ton of artists that I could name for days from the late sixties and seventies when I grew up, I started emulating their guitar playing way and the vocal style. I didn't know that it was blues, to me it was just rock. And I was very immature and so. But then I was in a band there was a guy who played drums with us who was a few years older than me. Ane 24-hour interval he brought me an album called BB King – Live at the Majestic, as a gift. I judge he was trying to inspire me, which he did. And I call up we had it playing, the tape, think those days? Spinning round and round?
Oh aye, I remember.
And I retrieve my starting time reaction was, as I turned to him and I said "this guy sounds like Jimmy Page". And he only started laughing and he said "actually it's the other way around. This is called blues music". And that was my first exposure to blues, and I loved information technology. A great manner to get into blues is BB Male monarch, because it'south very simplistic, his atomic number 82 work, but it has a lot of experience and just great melodic sense. That led me to getting into Albert Male monarch and Johnny Winter, and I got into Elmore James with the slide thing. Then Muddy Waters, so that record Live at the Regal just got me hooked on the dejection all the way back to Son House at that point. Because when I realized that Jimmy Page and Keith Richards' guitars and Janice's vocal mode, where all that came from, was from this whole other matter, the blues music that I wasn't fifty-fifty aware of, and and then I was like "I gotta cheque that out". I but really started getting into it and that is the mode it is with all the American roots music. I was a huge James Brown fan, I started earthworks into that stuff. And the affair with the country influence, you know, I loved the Eagles, and I loved the country influence that Stones had, and just all that stuff is the ingredients to me that made the music that I loved. So I went back and kind of reviewed it all, specially the dejection. Not review, review is a bit of an understatement.
Yeah, I gotcha.
It became my diet, you lot know?
How important do you call up it is for immature players to have a dejection foundation in their playing?
I think it's simply essential actually, it improved my playing more than anything. A lot of guitarists I recollect, they maybe find it too elementary, you know, they listen to it and they don't sympathize why they need to learn this. When you heed to a player like Albert Rex, the reason you demand to larn Albert Rex is because he tin can play the same four or 5 notes a hundred times and never play them the aforementioned, his phrasing is different every time, his experience is different every time, and when y'all tin can learn to express just a few notes that way, information technology's just a good thing. I didn't make it the beginning why blues guys played with that kind of cleaner sound just it finally dawned on me and I finally got that, and when I started learning, actually digging into blues, I would turn off all the distortion and all effects, cause now it's just down to your fingers and your soul, there's nothing to hibernate behind. That forces you, with that cleaner more pure sound, to try to put the emotion into the strings, because you got no help from a stompbox.
Right. So dejection is essential then?
It's a skillful thing to learn. Information technology'south a good thing to learn for any player, and it will definitely drain over into whatever style that you play, that sense of expression. And information technology develops your ability to put your emotion into the notes, information technology actually does, it's like running with ankle weights. Then when you lot take the ankle weights off and you lot plug into the big high distorted Marshall Amp or whatever, it'south like, information technology'south like wow, y'all're like superman at that point. And that's non to say that blues guys haven't used distortion, simply the really, actually traditional stuff, it's a pure cleaner audio, and you just hear the soul and the feeling of the musician coming off those strings, and I retrieve that's a proficient exercise for everyone to partake in if they desire to improve their playing. Not to mention just the endless phrasing that some of those classic guys similar Albert Male monarch have on four or 5 notes, I mean you put on an Albert Male monarch rails, and at first listen it'southward like "oh that's piece of cake I can do that," and so sit down and endeavor and learn information technology, by the time yous become 4 phrases in you go "what were those first iii once again? I tin't remember them," considering every i is different. You know, and information technology'south pretty amazing.
Oh yep man, I hateful, a left handed Flying V, dude was a badass.
Yeah he was badass. Yep, if he's not the all-time he's certainly right up there, I learned a lot by listening to him. Albert Collins was kickass as well human being. He was simply and then nasty and he just has that feel…… and that's what you learn more than anything from trying to emulate and larn that stuff is, to feel an expression in the notes.
Buddy Guy says the blues has never gotten the respect it deserves. Why exercise you think that is?
I call up in some ways it does, I mean it's, information technology'due south funny, I know what you're saying, merely at the aforementioned fourth dimension information technology's so mainstream like in commercials. Information technology'south like that heritage, because it's merely so uniquely American, and it'due south such a vibe. You do hear it in mainstream in a lot of the popular culture and commercials and even on TV shows and movies, it sets the background and the landscape for so many things. I call back what yous're referring to is in really the pop music, similar superlative 40, even rock. If you're gonna just play similar a straight blues thing it'due south very rare that any of that can break through to the big radio formats, correct? But it'due south very well represented, or was anyway, in the hard rock earth. And I estimate in a different class that information technology took on, so, yous know, information technology definitely has bled out into the world, only yep, in that location's non a big reach radio format that accepts like pure blues. In that way I recollect you lot're right, and I don't know why that is. The pop culture, the rock formats and pop formats of radio, they're looking for, I estimate, the new. But I practise think a lot of dejection elements are plant in those new styles of music, certainly but in its purest grade it seems to be segregated from in that location.
You've ever been a fantastic songwriter. What instrument are y'all using when you're writing? Guitar? Pianoforte?
Well that depends. Information technology'southward one of two things, information technology'south guitar or piano. And that really depends on the song. It depends on what I'm hearing in my head. A lot of times if I start hearing a lyric and a melody in my caput, and this feels more than like a ballad, then I'll sit down at the piano, or an acoustic guitar, but to kind of get that kind of more organic mellower sound for lack of a better word. And if the lyric and melody I'm hearing in my head but sounds like a hard driving stone song and so I'll pick upwards an electric and plug it into some footling practice amp and kind of approach it from that angle. 'Don't know what you got 'til it's gone' was written on the pianoforte, definitely. Some of the other piano ballads likewise. Generally if there'southward a piano in it, and they're ballads that I've written, so that's probably what I wrote it on. Although Heartbreak Station, that song I actually wrote on an acoustic and the piano was added later.
Let'south talk about your voice. You've had your share of ups and downs, how's the voice doing now?
It's really stiff now. There'southward no cure for the condition that I had, the paralysis thing, merely information technology'south very stable at present, and in some means stronger than it was before I was hit with that paralysis. Because at that place isn't really a cure for information technology, it's a daily maintenance, of an hr and a half or two hours a 24-hour interval of vocal exercises to keep it in shape. Only it's very strong right now.
Did your singing way accept anything to do with condition?
No, it doesn't have anything to do with the style of singing. There are iii or four dissimilar ways that I'm enlightened of that it tin happen, and 1 has to do with general anesthesia, which I'grand non sure how that works only it can paralyze a song chord. Another i is from a brain tumor, information technology can be pressing on a nervus, cause it'southward a neurological condition. Or the other mode is information technology tin can be damaged by a virus, similar a flu or cold virus, and if it lodges in the nervus that controls the betoken from the brain to that song chord, the virus tin deteriorate that nerve causing the response of the vocal chord to be diminished, and that'southward what they treated mine as. And it literally happened overnight, and I just woke up ane solar day and I couldn't sing, and they said I would never sing again. That there's no way that they tin fix a neurological condition with medicine or surgery. And they said if yous have any prayer of singing over again, yous're gonna just have to attempt to effigy it out, and start working with coaches and try and train it back, and it'south taken years. Information technology's been up and downward and v steps forward and iii back. Two forrard and six back, and I've had a lot of surgeries forth the way to repair collateral damage besides. Merely because it's so hard to sing with it, I've blown my pipes a bunch of times and had vi surgeries to repair that. So yeah, information technology's been an up and downwardly road, but overcoming it has been the culmination of working with a lot of dissimilar coaches, and speech communication pathologists, and a lot of experimenting considering it'southward not an exact science, and finally just figuring information technology out.
What was it like when they said you may never sing once again? That had to exist devastating.
It was awful, really awful. Y'all know, I went through a very long deep low, and you know, there were a lot of other things going on at that time in my life that were piling on, like Cinderella losing their deal with Mercury and the whole music scene was irresolute effectually that time, with the Seattle grunge affair coming in. So those 2 things alone among other things, personal things likewise that were going on, but it was just a pretty nighttime time, the ninety's were, for me. But the two things I merely mentioned, betwixt losing the vocalism and the career changes, were very frustrating because when the whole music scene changed and we were permit go by our record company and Cinderella started drifting autonomously. That's when I wanted to make music more than annihilation. To kind of get back in there and say " I'll show you, and I am nonetheless relevant, and fuck you", and I didn't have my instrument, I didn't have my voice. Then information technology was a crude time.
Whatsoever thoughts of you doing just a direct upwards filthy blues album at some indicate?
I think nearly it all the time…I've done a couple of pure blues themes in recent years that I really enjoyed doing. I don't know if you've heard the acoustic version of Shake Me. It's a delta dejection kind of vibe… it's on one of those VH1 series chosen "Stripped". There's a book one two and three, and I have a rail on all 3 of them, but Milk shake Me is on one of them, I retrieve it's on the second one. Strip volume two. Um, but you know, if you lot go on YouTube and put in Tom Keifer Shake Me Acoustic, it'll come up upwardly. Then the other affair I did was Blueish Christmas, and that song I did was like a Chicago blues style thing for monster Christmas a few years agone. And that was a lot of fun, we only went in and cut it alive and. I used my 335 and a crazy former spring reverb Gibson amp, and we just laid it downward, information technology'southward a pretty cool version. You can find that on YouTube too. So yeah, I take that in me and I've idea almost it. Those ii I just mentioned are the near pure dejection things that I've done, even from the sense of the style they were recorded, similar the audio-visual one was but, no overdubs, merely prepare mics, play acoustic and sing it, Robert Johnson fashion. Bluish Christmas was that mode too with the total band, we just ready and just laid it down. And information technology was fun doing that, I enjoyed it. Check out Blue Christmas. Blue Christmas has got some pretty cool vocals and lead guitar on it.
Let's talk a piffling chip about your solo album. It took a while to get finished. Can you go into what took so long?
Well, it was a point in my life where nosotros had had a record bargain with Cinderella go due south, and information technology was pretty ugly with legal battles, lawsuits and that type of thing. When I started it, it almost didn't even really feel like a record, it was just nigh going out and recording some songs. Without lawyers involved or record companies or any of that stuff. So I started producing information technology with my married woman Savannah and a friend of mine here in Nashville, Chuck Turner, who's a really great engineer and producer. The three of us were just having fun and laying downwardly some tracks, for the ameliorate part of nine years, merely kind of working on information technology for months, and then taking months abroad from it. And so coming back to it, and and so going on tour with Cinderella. It wasn't like constant over the nine years working on it. But over time information technology started to feel similar a record, and that's really, why, combined with my voice problems it took and then long. Of form like I said the mindset in the beginning was 'it'south not really a tape, we're just kind of recording music, nosotros'll see what happens'. There was no record company involved, there was no release appointment, there was cipher to attach to in terms of a time-frame. It was just about laying downwards music and making it as skillful as we could brand information technology. And then at some signal it felt like a record and so when it was done, or what we felt to be a finished tape, we started shopping at labels. Pretty early on in the shopping procedure we found the characterization that I signed with, Merovee Records. They've been very supportive and just amazing in their delivery to the record, then it just kind of all unfolded and worked out I approximate the style it was supposed to.
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Tom Keifer Electric Guitars Used in the Video Dont Know What You Got Until Its Gone
Source: https://www.americanbluesscene.com/tom-keifer-talks-the-blues-cinderella-and-the-music-industry/
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