Rockin’ Interviews: How are you?
Mike Tramp: I’m great, how are you?
Rockin’ Interviews: I’m really good, thank you! You formed White Lion 40 years ago, in 1983, how did it feel revisiting these beloved songs and putting a new spin on them and was there a song you were most excited to reinvision?
Mike Tramp: I just get so scared when you say 40 years. I remember being around ten years old. My brother and I were at our grandparents’ 60th birthday and we were sitting in the corner saying “look at all these old people”. Back then the people were really old at 60 years old. Everyone will have a different story as to why you venture back to a place you’ve once been. In 1991 I made the decision, which was quite hard to do, to end the band. The band was my dream, it was the reason why I had come to America, it was everything I had ever wanted in life, and I said no to that. I wasn’t a member of this band, it was my band. It was a personal feeling that said under these circumstances I don’t want to be a part of this anymore. Those circumstances weren’t only internal things within the band, but also that the 80s musically had come to an end. I felt it as we were recording the final album, Mane Attraction, in 1990, but when we went out on the road in Eastern Europe, it wasn’t as noticeable because we were a very big band there and were selling out arenas. When we got back to America, our rhythm section, James LoMenzo and Greg D’Angelo, decided to leave the band. Vito Bratta and myself had to find two new guys for the band, which actually gave us a resurgence of energy, however when we came to play our hometown of New York City, no one from the record company showed up. This is when I started to get the inclination that things were changing. After considering all of those things, it actually made leaving White Lion a little easier. I was ready for a fresh start and felt like my knowledge of the music industry was at a really great place. At that moment I thought I had said farewell to a chapter that I never thought I would be revisiting again. But around 2001, after I had released my first solo record in 1997 and did a US tour, half of the venues I was showing up to were announcing the show as White Lion instead of a Mike Tramp solo show. I was coming to these gigs with a completely different catalog of music, things similar to Tom Petty, Springsteen, John Meloncamp and Bryan Adams, more of a singer-songwriter with an electric guitar. I was having to get onstage every night knowing I would be disappointing the people. My hair was cut off, I had a guitar around my neck, I wasn’t the frontman that I used to be anymore. I realized that everything I did, even up to today, would have the White Lion sticker attached to it.
For the last ten years when I’ve been touring as a singer songwriter/storyteller, I’ve been doing a lot of the White Lion songs acoustically. When I decided to do this album, I said to myself that it has to be done the proper way. I’m not 26 years old anymore, I’m 62, and I wanted it to make sense. I didn’t want it to be the last breath of a dying man that you’re listening to, I wanted it to sound energetic, refreshed, but also to sound like this man has been around a while and when he sings these words, we believe them. I had to work with singing the songs in a different key, which wasn’t that difficult, however the difficult part was to keep the guitar playing of Vito Bratta which is just as big a part of White Lion as my voice. It’s almost impossible to play those guitar parts in a different key, but Marcus Nand, who played guitar on the album, spent a lot of time with the songs. When he came back, he said “I think I can do it”. I sat with Vito for many years writing these songs, and his guitar parts are so important. Down to every little note in the guitar solos, you can’t change them, because the song will fall apart.
Rockin’ Interviews: I had the chance to listen to it already and I think it’s really good!
Mike Tramp: Thank you, I really do appreciate that because you weren’t even born when the band broke up *laughs*.
Rockin’ Interviews: Haha. Going back to the beginning, you first started out in the music scene in Copenhagen in your home country of Denmark with a band called Mabel that eventually turned into Lion (not to be confused with the L.A. band of the same name) in 1982. Did any of the material you had written for that band eventually become something White Lion recorded?
Mike Tramp: That’s an interesting question that no one has actually ever asked me before. I always thought it would be a very valid question. When I came to America in ‘82 with the Mabel band, we played in New York for half a year, and experienced for the first time in our lives what it’s like to play rock n’ roll in front of an audience that loves rock n’ roll. After the band ended and I came back to America and I met Vito and started rehearsing together, all the songs we were playing were the songs I had brought with me. Very shortly after, when Vito and I sat down and wrote our first song which was Broken Heart in April of ‘83, we knew we were going to write our songs together. The only song that stayed with us from my time in Mabel and ended up on our first album ‘Fight to Survive”, was a song that I had written called El Salvador.
Rockin’ Interviews: Moving from Copenhagen to New York, how did the music scene compare and was it a bit of a culture shock at first?
Mike Tramp: I’m one of those people who prepared two years prior to moving there. When Mabel was living in Madrid, Spain, I had met a lot of American teenagers who were living on the American airforce base. They started introducing me to how it was in America, the way of life there. It was like going to school for me everyday, I soaked everything up. I knew the day I arrived in the States, I didn’t want to be a tourist. I wanted to fall straight into the culture like I had always been there. I lived in New York for seven years and I’ve never been in the Empire State building, Statue of Liberty or any of the other tourist attractions, because I was a New Yorker. I brought nothing but my knowledge with me from Europe. Not missing my mom and brothers, or the Danish food, I was an American. I basically made the statement that I would never return to Denmark.
Rockin’ Interviews: What were the early days of White Lion like? Did you play a lot within the New York club circuit?
Mike Tramp: In the early years, looking back at it, the chase was so much better than the catch. Once we had really started hitting success, we parted. I remember our first big shows, which we only got one day notice for, were supporting Triumph for a couple of arena shows on the east coast. Their original support act, who I think was Yngwie Malmsteen, something had happened that he couldn’t play those shows. Because we had good contacts with managers and agents, we got thrown into the shows. From one day painting apartments to the next night standing in front of fifteen thousand people. We knew from day one that we should always be ready for that day. We’d be sleeping in one motel room, the four guys in the band, taking turns of who was sleeping in the chair or on the floor, and who got the beds.
Those memories and how we walked out on stage together was like a fist, and when we ended the band we parted as four individual fingers. There should be a rule of law that no matter how big the band gets, you stick together, no having separate dressing rooms or things like that. That’s where the strength is, when the band is one unit and not separate people going through the motions.
Rockin’ Interviews: Early 1987 you signed to Atlantic Records and you went out to California to record your second album Pride. What was that experience like?
Mike Tramp: It was a great experience. White Lion has a history that not a lot of people know about, we had a big record deal with Elektra record in ‘84 and the album never came out globally. It came out in Japan and was imported to Europe, so the band broke first in those places. For those two and half years before signing with Atlantic, our lives were the Pride album. When we went in to record the album with Michael Wagner in January of ‘87, it was like second nature. The band was so strong together and Michael Wagner invited us out to California, he put us up in an apartment and everything. He brought the band together and captured what we were. We had played those songs for such a long time and after the massive success of Pride and spending two years on the road with AC/DC, Aerosmith, and Kiss, promoting the album, we had the complete opposite experience when it came to recording Big Game. We had two weeks to write that record, the follow up to a multi-platinum success. Vito and I always said that Big Game was an unfinished album. We cried in our sleep that we weren’t given enough time to live with the songs. They were so fresh when we took them out of the oven, it was too soon.
Rockin’ Interviews: Although I wasn’t alive during the height of White Lion, in my opinion I feel as though you guys stood out amongst a lot of the bands. Writing songs such as “As The Children Cry” and “Little Fighter”, was it a conscious choice to write about more pressing matters than just sex, drugs and rock n roll?
Mike Tramp: In the 80s, I can’t speak for everyone, but a lot of the messages in a lot of bands’ albums were ‘let’s party’. I had come over from Denmark and wanted to be part of this new world that in many ways I felt Van Halen had started. There was a whole new look upon the scene. Rock became energetic in a visual way and David Lee Roth and Eddie Van Halen were the frontrunners for that. When Vito and I sat down and started writing these songs I knew there was a part of me that I had brought with me that I couldn’t let go of. I was never into singing about tits and ass and parties, it wasn’t natural for me. A lot of people were very good at it and I think because I felt uncomfortable with it, I didn’t venture into that. There were a lot of people who were really good with coming up with innuendos, and having messages written between the lines and stuff like that. Now 40 years later, I’m really happy I didn’t write those lyrics because going out and singing these songs, especially with an acoustic guitar, doesn’t feel weird. I feel like the songs of White Lion have stood the test of time.
Rockin’ Interviews: White Lion music videos, like Radar Love, Love Don’t Come Easy, and Wait, were all filmed in really cool locations. Did the band ever have any input on the creative direction?
Mike Tramp: Radar Love became the time when the band actually enjoyed making a video. We had never enjoyed it before because it felt unnatural for us at times. Being allowed by MTV to do a seven minute video for one of the greatest rock songs ever written ‘Radar Love’, which was supposed to only be a bonus track for the Japan release. We, however, ended up loving it so much that we decided that it had to be on the album world wide. When we got the chance to do that video, we wanted it to feel like a day out in a fantasy world, where we got to hang out and be ourselves. Videos are all about sitting and waiting and it’s not natural. We always tried, to a certain degree, to limit it. We didn’t want to fall into this classic trope of videos filled with girls and stealing away from the focus that was the music. We tried to keep it at a place where you could see what the band is all about.
Rockin’ Interviews: At the end of 1991, when White Lion disbanded, you started working on the project that would become Freak of Nature? What was it like stepping into something new and working with different musicians?
Mike Tramp: Not everyone will be able to relate to this, but it was like the freedom of walking out of the prison gates. I know that’s a pretty extreme thing but it was a liberation in many ways. Even though Vito and I parted on good terms, I was so energetic and ready to work on something new. What was driving me in this band was missing from White Lion, I was missing the brotherhood at the end. Because of my background, where we had a very strong neighborhood and all my friends from growing up are still around, Vito and I were never ever to establish something like that. We weren’t compatible as friends outside of our songwriting and being on stage together. I was the total opposite of him. I was an outdoor man, a mountain climber, a biker, a swimmer, etc., and Vito just wanted to stay home and play guitar. I wanted Freak of Nature to be myself and four other guys who had similar interests and personalities. I wanted us to have fun together rehearsing, onstage, but on a social level as well. I also knew from the beginning that I wanted us to write the song together as a band. I put us in a circle so everyone had the equal vision of each other and everyone would take care of their part. On those two albums we had done, it’s probably some of the finest collaboration and freedom given to the five individuals in the band.
Rockin’ Interviews: Between White Lion music videos, photoshoots and live shows in the 80s, you had a very cool collection of leather and denim jackets, do you still have any of these and did you have a favorite that you wore?
Mike Tramp: Yeah, of course I do. And actually, one leather jacket that I had specially made for the Big Game tour in ‘89 that I never got to wear, I’ve got it ready for the European festivals I’m playing this summer. David Bowie and Freddie Mercury were my heroes, which led to me being a very bright and colorful frontman in the 80s and I think it’s important to keep some of that when performing the White Lion songs.
Rockin’ Interviews: Top 5 Desert Island albums?
Mike Tramp: They would definitely be something from my foundation, like Slade – Slade In Flame, Elton John – Captain Fantastic, Queen II, Bruce Springsteen – The River, and Miley Cyrus – Endless Summer. And I say that seriously because there’s both an admiration and respect for something that my kids were into ten years ago. Seeing someone riding out the storm and still delivering quality after quality and being a top performer. When you’re the shit, you’re the shit, and I’m gonna take that album with me.