Don’t Ask Hard-Rock Band Drummer Where Group (Cinderella) Got Its Name

If there is one thing that Fred Coury can’t stand, it is stupid questions. Not that his job, as drummer with the hard-rock band Cinderella, finds him facing questions very often; mostly, he just drums.

But when he does interviews, there is one question that so annoys him that he is actually grateful when it does not come up. “Thanks for not asking where we got the name of the band,” he said over the phone from his hotel room in Columbia, S.C. “Everybody else asks, ‘So tell me, how’d you get the name of the band?’ ”

He usually replies sarcastically, “Yeah, well, nice talking to you.”

It is easy to understand his annoyance, particularly given the “Cinderella story” nature of this band’s success. Though the group is in the midst of a tour behind its multi-platinum second album, “Long Cold Winter,” it was not long ago that Cinderella was just another Philadelphia bar band.

Not that it was Cinderella’s fault. Musically, the group had so much going for it that once rocker Jon Bon Jovi heard it play, he became an instant fan, even helping the band land its record contract.

Still, it was something of a handicap to have started in Philadelphia, because the hard-rock scene there is, as Coury describes it, almost invisible.

Coury, a New Yorker who joined the band just after it had been signed, said that Cinderella essentially “played at two places. One was called the Galaxy, in South Jersey; we were the house band there. We played every Saturday night at midnight, and then sometimes Sundays and sometimes Thursdays at a place called the Empire, which was in Philly.

Limited as the Philly scene was, though, the members of Cinderella never wondered if they weren’t wasting their time trying to make a living at their music. “If anybody starts thinking that, it’s time to forget it. If you ever think that you’re not going to do it, then just give it up,” Coury advised.