WHITE LION: THERE IS LIFE EVEN AFTER A BROKEN HEART

WHITE LION: THERE IS LIFE EVEN AFTER A BROKEN HEART

Anne Leighton

Julia Williams

One week in 1983, Mike Tramp and Vito Bratta were hanging out at the rock capital of Brooklyn, L’Amours West, saying, “Let’s start a band.” They mentioned their great idea to the club owner Richard Sanders. He said, “OK, and I’ll manage you,” even though he’d never seen them perform together—because they had never performed together. Richard had seen them in other line-ups and was very impressed. He thought Vito, whose influences are very diverse (he thinks both Glen Campbell and Jimi Hendrix play great guitar) was an extremely talented (guitar) player. Richard also thought that Mike was a hell of a performer.

Mike had been a major mid-70’s European pop superstar in a Danish band called Mabel. “I learned so much from being in Mabel,” Mike explains, adding that the band had no musical focus. “Our first two albums went gold, but when we didn’t get a hit with the next album, we’d change our music. We did pop, disco and heavy metal. The group was bad that way. The learning experience was that it taught me to stick to my guns and do the music I like the most.” It also gave Mike a chance to see America, ’cause Mabel toured here in 1982. On that tour, they met up with Vito’s band, Dreamer. Vito and Mike exchanged numbers and forgot about each other for a while.

A year later, a con artist told Mike he’d help him make it big in America, if he came over to perform. Mike believed the guy and came to America. The con man was no help, so his heart ripped a bit.

Still, he hung in there, determined to make it big. Living in Brooklyn in a small room, with a family that only spoke Espanol, Mike found solace at L’Amours. And Vito found him there.

Often they’d jam onstage with other bands. Richard noticed Mike and was impressed with the way this blond singer looked, danced and sang. Onstage and in video, Mike’s got the rock ’n’ roll spirit that great frontmen like David Lee Roth show— handclapping and leaping his way into a fan’s heart. In fact, Mike bares a resemblance to Roth, except Mike doesn’t look like a goat with blotchy skin. He’s a hunk at every glance. And it was this pure-blooded rock ’n’ roll talent that drew Richard to dedicate himself to work with White Lion from the beginning.

The first thing the band did was write and record their album. A month later (early 1984), Elektra records signed them. Nobody at the label had seen the band in concert or even knew what the band looked like. “They signed us on the strength of our songs on Fight To Survive’s demos,” Mike explains. “When the signing day came, we were gonna send four black guys to sign the contract!” But the group came to their senses, realizing their signature on the document would insure the group would be paid for the work they’d done so far.

With the album already made, the group was looking forward to the record’s release. After months of postponements and the label firing various A&R people who (coincidentally) were very fond of White Lion, Elektra decided to shelve the album. Since that label’s other metal acts, Dokken and Motley Crue, have proven to be top-notch record sellers, there was an excellent chance that White Lion’s album would have been just as big if the label had gotten behind the band. Yet it’s always hard to predict what would have happened if the band got more support from the record company. What did happen was a bummer ... a broken heart for the band.

Having no record meant doing very few gigs. “Nothing’s definite,” Vito states. “Even when the record comes out, it’s never definite if it will catch on. People get caught up in priorities, and Motley Crue was more important than we were. Besides, we had it easy when we got signed. We hardly did any gigs. Now that we’ve paid our dues, we appreciate our success and our fans. Then it happened too fast. We got signed four weeks after we did our demos.”

“Yeah,” Mike says in accord. “We were together only a year when we got signed. And the first half year, we spent time just talking on the phone figuring out what we’d do.”

And there is life even after a broken heart. Together the group rationalized that not getting a record out now doesn’t mean forever, because they were hanging together. Well, the core (Mike and Vito) of White Lion hung together. 1985 was when the line-up really settled in with drummer Greg D’Angelo and bassist James Lomenzo. “We all feel this is our first real band,” Greg says. Granted, there’ve been other bands: most notably Greg hit the kit for Anthrax and Cities. But both Greg and the other bands are the first to admit he didn’t fit in. Fortunately, both bands have found themselves as a working unit and are doing well.

White Lion found their stable line-up in 1985. That’s when miracles happened. Richard Benjamin put the band in his movie, The Money Pit. CBS Japan called the band, begging to release their album in that country. U.S. importers called Japan for shipments of the record. In early 1986, a U.S. indie (Grand Slam Records) released Fight To Survive in the States.

After selling 20,000'copies, Atlantic Records has decided to sign the band. Now (early ’87), they’re in the studio working on new songs that should be available by Christmas. And White Lion is rocking on the road and reaching fans. All in all, not bad for a bunch of (formerly) broken-hearted guys.