MIKE TRAMP (singer, Mabel, Danish Lions, White Lion) In my local youth club in Denmark, I took part in theater and music. I just sat with an acoustic guitar and played some simple Bob Dylan songs around the campfire. Maybe half of the chords were wrong, but everybody was having a great time.
Then, when I was just fifteen and a half, I was asked to join a successful band called Mabel who were all ten years older than me. They had been a harder rock band but then suddenly decided to go light and have a Leif Garrett–looking singer. I asked my mom if I could leave school. She was basically in shock, but I think just because she was a divorced mother raising three boys in a rough neighborhood, she figured, What was there to lose? After a couple of years of touring all over Europe, we moved Mabel to Spain. The distortion had gotten turned back on the guitars because when we heard Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil” our jaw was dropped. We met an American at a discotheque in Madrid who said, “I’ll be your manager and you can live in my house in New York.” We sold everything we had and a month later we left. On the flight over, there were about three hundred American teenage girls that had been on a school excursion in Europe, and I was testing all kinds of names on them. By the time we landed, we were called Lion, which soon became Danish Lions.
VITO BRATTA I remember the night that I first saw Mike Tramp, I was in the dressing room at L’Amour’s, this club in Brooklyn, just playing and playing. I was obsessed with the guitar. I would get to shows early and just practice.
EDDIE TRUNK (A&R, Megaforce Records; radio personality; Author, Eddie Trunk’s Essential Hard Rock and Heavy Metal) Vito was already kind of revered as a guitar player when he was in Dreamer.
MIKE TRAMP Danish Lions was playing with Dreamer at L’Amour, and about eleven o’clock at night, in through the door walks this guy with sunglasses on, real long black hair, and a broken guitar case with a Stratocaster hanging half out of it. I thought, What a fucking douchebag. We had these little practice amps and he says, “Man, can I plug into one of those?” And I say, “Yeah, let him plug in and make a fool out of himself.” And he plugged in and just ripped through every Van Halen, every Randy Rhoads, every fucking solo that was ever great and I said, “This is a guy I need to play with.”
VITO BRATTA When Mike walked into L’Amour that night, it was like a real major rock star just came in. People just spun their heads and were like, “Holy shit, is he somebody?” And the girls were just, like, melting. He was a beautiful person.
BRUNO RAVEL Like somebody off the cover of a romance novel.
MIKE TRAMP Vito and I formed White Lion and I was playing manager and fucking running around trying to knock on people’s doors. I said to Vito, “I don’t know where to go, I’m out.” He said, “I might know someone.” That’s when he called Michael and George Parente, the owners of L’Amour. Vito got off the phone and said, “They need to hear some original songs.” The next night Vito came over to where I was living in Queens. We just looked at each other and he started playing guitar and I started singing and the first song we wrote was “Broken Heart.” Songwriting is one thing Vito and I have never, ever disagreed on—even for a second.
VITO BRATTA All you have to do is write a chord change, get Mike to listen to it, and he’ll write that song with you. He’s able to do that.
BRUNO RAVEL One day, I got to practice, and Vito, he was sitting in a chair in front of his amp noodling around, practicing. And I showed up and I walked up to Vito and I said, “Hey, Vito, Greg told me that you and Mike are writing for the record.” I said, “I don’t know if you’re interested, but I got a ton of ideas. If you want me to show you any of them, I would be glad to sit down with you and maybe we could write something.” He was like looking down at his guitar, and I remember he just stopped playing. And he looked up at me, and he said verbatim, he said, “You’re the bass player. Play the bass.” And then he looked back down at his guitar and continued noodling. That’s when I knew it was time to move on.
EDDIE TRUNK The owners of L’Amour had a management company, Loud and Proud, that nurtured White Lion, Overkill, Tyketto, and Tora Tora. They would start putting these bands on as opening acts and bring them along slowly. White Lion got to the point where they could fill L’Amour before they even had a record deal. There was a great buzz on them. I mean, you had a great-looking lead singer that the girls loved and an incredible guitar player who was kind of like a new Eddie Van Halen. That combination was very powerful and those guys worked it to the hilt.
MIKE TRAMP Our managers sent us to Germany in January of ’84 to make Fight to Survive because they’d done a deal with a producer and a studio, one of those “You guys come over, pay for your flights, you live in the studio, if you get a deal you pay me, if you don’t, we’re even” deals.
VITO BRATTA I’ve read people say that my playing improved and changed so much between Fight to Survive and our next album. But what happened was when we got to the studio they told me, “We need to get the bass and drum tracks down and they have to follow somebody, so play the guitar so that the bass and drummer can follow you. Then we’ll go in later and we’ll replace all the guitar parts.” So I do that. And then they said, “Okay, we’re gonna do the vocals. And then at the end we’ll come in and redo all the guitar.” Oh, wouldn’t you know, at the end, it’s like, “Guys, we took a little more time on the vocals, so we don’t have time to redo the guitar.” I was like, “You mean my first album is a guide track?”
MIKE TRAMP Two weeks after we got home we signed a record deal with Elektra Records. The wheels started turning with the album photo shoot and meetings with the record company, and then out of the blue one day at rehearsal, we get this phone call from our manager who said, “I’ve got good news and bad news.” And this became something throughout our whole career they always would say. “Well, the bad news is Elektra has dropped you. The good news is you get to keep the money.”
VITO BRATTA It was just crushing. And you don’t ever get answers from these people. Maybe Elektra thought we were too corporate, like we weren’t grassroots enough, which was ridiculous because we were paying our dues like crazy. It was one of those situations where it was better off if it didn’t happen than to give it to me and then take it away. Because at that age, you think that record deals are something that only famous people get, not realizing that the reason they’re famous is because they had a record deal, not the other way around.
GREG D’ANGELO (drummer, White Lion) The band rehearsed in the basement of L’Amour, and the funny thing was, the basement was also an open drain for water with a drastically pitched floor that these guys had to stand on. There were days when we would go to rehearsal and it would be raining, and there was water streaming in that floor. It was not pleasant.
JAMES LOMENZO (bassist, White Lion) The new bass player they had at the time, Dave Spitz, left to join Black Sabbath. I went to audition at L’Amour and I have to say I was a little disappointed when I saw that Nicky Capozzi was gone and that Greg was the new drummer. Not because I was even aware of whether he was a good or a bad drummer at all. I just thought Nicky was a great drummer. Anyway, we went through a couple of songs, and I found that I really liked what they were doing because it didn’t sound anything like metal music to me. It sounded like pop music.
GREG D’ANGELO James played great and he had this giant Alembic bass. He was really a good complement to Mike in a lot of ways, particularly in his appearance. He had great hair.
MIKE TRAMP We had a third manager, Richard Sanders, who got us connected to JVC in Japan. He managed to do a licensing deal with them and Elektra Records and they did a major push on the band. So the band broke in Japan and through the underground in Europe. Fight to Survive starts being imported to record stores in New Jersey, Staten Island, and New York.
EDDIE TRUNK I started going out to the shows and watching them develop. I took them to Jon Zazula at Megaforce when I started doing A&R for the label and said, “I think these guys could hit, we should sign them.” And he just didn’t get it. I mean, Megaforce was Anthrax and Overkill.
GREG D’ANGELO People were paying upwards of a hundred bucks for a copy of this Japanese record. We had tried to buy the masters from Elektra, and they were not having it. Somehow, this guy in Pennsylvania, with this label called Grand Slamm, talked his way into getting the rights and he sold, I want to say, a hundred thousand copies.
MIKE TRAMP And suddenly we were an album band.