Cinderella: No Pumpkins, Just Metal-Lite Calculation

Although Cinderella played until just about midnight at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre on Friday night, the metal-lite quartet didn’t undergo any of the coach-into-pumpkin transformations of its fairy-tale namesake. But one could easily imagine their guitars becoming briefcases, amps turning into investment condos and perhaps Cinderella’s members themselves becoming inside traders and advertising execs.

Where rock and its attendant youth culture once aspired to chuck aside the hollow affectations of show biz--striving instead for an unfettered honesty, immediacy and sense of life--rock music as presently embodied by Cinderella is easily as calculated, vacuous and pandering to the lowest common denominator as anything Las Vegas could ever have offered.

Show highlights included Keifer--visually a cross between Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler and pretzel logo Mr. Salty--being lowered to the stage playing a fake grand piano; Keifer and co-guitarist Jeff LaBar exchanging overwrought white-guy blues licks, and Keifer heading Springsteen-like into the audience. Unlike Springsteen, though, Keifer moved amid a phalanx of security guards who literally straight-armed any fans who dared get too close to their hero.