Remembering White Lion (Part Two)

The Short Career of a Multi-Faceted Band

Upon reflection, I should qualify what I wrote in the penultimate paragraph of the first part of this series of posts. By 1989, two years was not an unusually long time between albums. Nevertheless, the Pride Tour was unusually long, ending in early 1989. Greg D’Angelo commented in a 2021 interview on Waste Some Time with Jason Green that its followup, Big Game, was necessarily rushed. In the same interview, he vaguely commented in another context that the young members of White Lion received some bad advice from people in the music industry. Spending too much time on the road and/or waiting too long to start work on their second Atlantic album may or may not fall into that category.

Big Game sold significantly less. Rushed or not, lack of quality is not one of the reasons for its lesser commercial success. At the time, it was White Lion’s greatest album.

Brief trends were starting—White Lion’s albums were increasing in artistic success and decreasing in commercial success—and other, less brief, trends were continuing, with the band using another leonine pun as an album title. The White House adorns the cover of this one, hinting at more reflective and political themes, which the title also suggests. Michael Wagener returns to the producer’s (and engineer’s) chair. Mostly, the formula of Pride returns: Wagener in charge of both the conceptual and technical aspects of recording and Vito Bratta & Mike Tramp writing everything, with one exception: White Lion’s only studio cover. The Japanese record company requested an extra track to release as a single B-side, the songwriting partners were unwilling or unable to write another song in time for the release, Tramp suggested covering Golden Earring’s “Radar Love”, and the band and producer were so satisfied with the results they added it to the album.

“Goin’ Home Tonight”, Big Game’s opener, starts with Bratta’s distinctive clean tone and cascading picking style. Tramp has rarely sounded more earnest and appreciative in his lyrical paean to a wife or girlfriend. Bratta’s solos, to paraphrase Tramp, are miniature compositions in themselves, integrated wholes that sound like every note is inevitable and ineluctably leads to none other than exactly what he’s playing—like a less extemporaneous and even more dextrous Frank Zappa solo. “Goin’ Home Tonight” and its solo are high water marks of White Lion’s oeuvre.

(I can’t confirm this is an official music video.)

Another highlight is “Little Fighter”, which cemented conservatives’ scorn, ensuring, along with “When the Children Cry”, that the band would be added to “enemies lists” when The American Spectator conducted a campaign for a new “red scare”. (This was not the late, great PJ O’Rourke’s finest moment.) It’s true that the song was inspired by the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship. There is a dedication to the ship (but, notably, not Greenpeace) in the liner notes. In Escape from Brooklyn, Tramp explained that the song’s detractors were missing the point (again). The lyrics do not mention Greenpeace or its mission at all—just the abstract themes of courage, dedication to a cause, fighting a lonely battle, and the importance of commitment to values. In Escape from Brooklyn, Tramp discusses the song:

We [wrote] it in a cheap motel room in Palm Springs right after the Pride Tour. …. The Rainbow Warrior, the whole thing about that, I wanted to write, but I didn’t want to write a story. So I just sort of wrote like a tribute to a good cause again, and there was a song that I think some people mistook because it’s like, “Oh, here they are doing this Greenpeace song. What does that have to do with anything? It’s a song … a tribute … to … a ship that they lost, but really it was ‘Little Fighter’. I also saw— Here’s this little person fighting the government or something like that. And it’s one of my finest. I’m very happy with it.”

Some of the songs could be part of an EP titled Pride II. “Dirty Woman”, probably the weakest, lapses into Eighties hard rock stereotype, but “Living on the Edge” (four years before Aerosmith’s) defies stereotypes, a mid tempo tune of proud independence that invigorates despite lyrical clichés. “Let’s Get Crazy” has an anthemic shout along chorus (the band typically opened concerts in the Big Game era with it). “Don’t Say It’s Over” begins with one of Bratta’s catchiest, happiest guitar hooks before leaving it behind with a more pedestrian but undeniably enjoyable song.

A song that has no counterpart on Pride (or any other White Lion album) is “If My Mind Is Evil”, which is uncharacteristically baleful and would have been more at home in Tramp’s future project Freak of Nature. (It might be an homage to Diamond Head’s “Am I Evil?” a song best known via Metallica’s cover version. Both songs feature the line “Am I evil? Yes I am.”)

“Radar Love” is a jauntier, more adroit improvement of Golden Earring’s original. I remember hearing that the drummer of my world-renowned high school jazz band was unable to replicate D’Angelo’s drum solo (which replaces a brief drum break in the original). Yes, he was a teenager, and D’Angelo was already a veteran professional. But that teenager was a jazz drummer occupying a highly competitive drum throne, and within a few years there was nothing on the radio or MTV that anyone auditioning for that throne couldn’t play with one hand tied behind his back and two broken legs. (I was later the guitarist of that jazz band for a year, but that’s another story.) The “Radar Love” video is a short film, slightly longer than the track, with more content. That kind of music video is something else that didn’t survive the Eighties.

True to formula, Big Game ends with another lament for its times. Inspired by apartheid but, once again, about more than that, “Cry for Freedom” is yet another White Lion song that is hard to classify musically. Bratta’s angular, jazzy chord progression doesn’t sound like anything his peers were writing. Tramp’s plaintive cry, as it was on Pride’s closer, is more topical now than ever despite apartheid’s historic ending. Even the drumming sounds different—it could be D’Angelo, a drum machine, or a combination of the two. (Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love includes tracks in which Max Weinberg embellishes a basic track with a drum machine. The machines are used for different reasons, not necessarily because someone can’t play.) There’s a sharp left turn of an instrumental bridge with one of Bratta’s best metal riffs (Beavis and Butt-head would have a blast humming and playing air guitar to it). Lesser songwriters would have built entire songs around it, but he returns to the angular, jazzy chord progression after a few bars. MTV played the video once, probably because of harrowing footage of the ruins of concentration camps (including skulls), another hint that it’s not (only) “about apartheid”.

(Some shots may disturb some viewers—but these days, observing the culture at all is disturbing.)

Big Game, the only rushed White Lion album, continued White Lion’s artistic growth and started their commercial decline. MTV put “Little Fighter” in fairly heavy rotation, and the album was certified Gold by the RIAA. Its minor hits did not penetrate the culture like “When the Children Cry” did, but the album, with its improved songwriting (“Dirty Woman” aside); the nigh on frightening virtuosity of Bratta and D’Angelo; the subliminal, interstitial playing of LoMenzo; and Tramp’s laconic Euro drawl is a favorite of many fans. In his uneven but entertaining 1991 book Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, notorious blowhard Chuck Eddy listed Big Game as number 271. (“When the Children Cry” is number 62 in his appendix “The 100 Best Heavy Metal Singles Not Available on Any of the 500 Best HM Albums”.)

Here is Eddy’s review in its entirety, with my interpolations in brackets. Most of Eddy’s reviews are logorrheic backhanded compliments like this.

This is blues that smokes warm and tuneful because it’s not afraid to be corny, because it doesn’t say ‘this is blues.’ Only the diamond industry would refuse to be moved by “Cry for Freedom”’s antiapartheid worldbeat/Nerf-metal merger, and Mike Tramp’s cracked vowel-savoring in “Goin’ Home Tonight” curls unblushingly around Vito Bratta’s strums exactly like Ferron, the Queen of Lesbian Folksingers. Not long before this album came out, White Lion staked out an uncharted acoustic frontier in their pop- topping [sic—it peaked at number 3] ‘When the Children Cry’ single, Mike’s bleeding heart offering a naive universalist plaint for ‘no more presidents,’ as if he thought he was John Lennon. He pleaded for little kids to stop fighting, but in real life his own answer song (‘When the Children Die’!) was in the can, and he was pledging to get Stryper’s lead-preacher laid. [Stryper is a Christian metal band. I know nothing about “When the Children Die” and can’t confirm its existence.] Here, he precedes an impossibly infectious Greenpeace ode (“Little Fighter,” which could be about Jesus, or Jesse Jackson—the chorus bubbles up with “rise again!” the subtitle’s “In Memory of the Rainbow Warrior”) and a post-“Luka” anti-kidbeating treatise [“Broken Home”] with some embarrassing Van Hagar cockstrut called “Dirty Woman.” After the protests, he mails a yucky “I’ll Be There for You”-style mall-valentine with “Tom Sawyer” changeups [“Baby Be Mine”], rides into this lush sunset in his beaten 501 blues [“Living on the Edge”], links [Thin Lizzy songs] “Jailbreak” and “The Boys Are Back in Town” (and Mott the Hoople’s “Violence,” judging from his “no mercy for the old and weak”) in “Let’s Get Crazy.” The rockers, even the antievangelist Metallica-move [presumably “If My Mind Is Evil”], couldn’t conceivably make a difference to anyone anymore. But the sweetness mostly piles melodies like rappers pile beats—it’s a campfire-pop Grand Canyon.

Eddy, Chuck. Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe. Second Edition. 1991. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998, p. 127.

In 1990, the band, with a different producer and a different engineer, started work on their third album for Atlantic Records. Veteran producer Wagener would later name Bratta his favorite guitarist.

To be concluded …