MIKE TRAMP Everybody in White Lion was severely burned out. But a week after coming off the Pride tour—and I’m not bullshitting you—we end up in a deserted motel in Palm Springs and we’re sitting in these bungalows with adjacent doors, and we sit and pull out ideas here and there. Then we meet and Vito says, “Check this out.” Then I sing and then I go in the next room and I start working on some lyrics. And after four or five days, we actually end up coming out with ten or twelve songs.
VITO BRATTA I remember when he sang “Little Fighter” the first time, I said, “Mike, what’s that about?” He goes, “A Greenpeace boat that the French government destroyed.” I’m like, “You wrote a song about a boat?” I mean, we’re coming off a multiplatinum record and our first single’s about a boat?
MIKE TRAMP There’s a famous quote also from John Kalodner that he says to Vito: “Man, tell Tramp that saving whales doesn’t sell albums; leather pants do.”
GREG D’ANGELO James, Vito, and I spent maybe two weeks in a rehearsal room in New York going through the arrangements for Big Game. But there was not a lot of work done as a band prior to making that record.
MIKE TRAMP As we neared the completion of the album, Jason Flom and Doug Morris come out to Amigo Studios in L.A. to hear the record. There’s a song on Big Game called “Cry for Freedom,” written about apartheid in South Africa, and the three other guys in the band have no fucking clue what that means. It was a haunting track in the studio when you played it loud, and that drumbeat could be U2 or whatever. Doug said, “Man, this is some of the most interesting stuff I heard since Led Zeppelin.” We were told later that as they were driving back to the hotel, Doug Morris turned to Jason Flom and said, “Why are you letting them do this?”
GREG D’ANGELO James used to start that groove to “Radar Love” and we used to play along, and honestly for me, that’s the highlight of that rec-ord. Not to take away from any of the other White Lion melodic stuff, but I don’t think there’s any other recording that we’ve done that captures what the band was really like live.
MIKE TRAMP “Radar Love” was actually shot the day after we finished a six-week tour with Ozzy Osbourne. At this point, we were a “special guest” with our own stage on top of his, and we were getting serious money.
VITO BRATTA Making the “Radar Love” video was like filming a whole movie.
MIKE TRAMP The director, Jean Pellerin, and us just wanted to do our version of Vanishing Point.
VITO BRATTA I had a Lamborghini like the one I’m in in the video, but it was in a dealership being stored under covers. The car in the video is from the movie Rain Man.
MIKE TRAMP That’s actually me on the motorcycle going 120 miles an hour with no jacket and no helmet. Like a fucking idiot.