White Lion – When the Children Cry – Live at The Ritz (1988)

The Guitarist Who Said No To Kiss And Then Disappeared

Released in November 1988 as the third single from the album Pride, “When the Children Cry” peaked at number three on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming White Lion’s highest-charting single. The song held that position for twelve weeks between December 1988 and March 1989, also reaching number two in Canada. For a glam metal band from Staten Island fronted by a Danish immigrant, this was the moment everything clicked. The album Pride eventually sold over two million copies in the United States and earned double platinum certification.

The single outperformed their previous hit “Wait,” which had peaked at number eight, and helped keep the album on the Billboard 200 for 69 weeks. White Lion became unlikely arena headliners, supporting Kiss at the Palmer Auditorium in Davenport and Ace Frehley in Cincinnati during 1987. The irony wasn’t lost on guitarist Vito Bratta. Years earlier, Kiss had offered him the job of replacing Frehley, but he declined after being told to change his name to something less ethnic. Now he was opening for the man whose gig he’d refused.

Mike Tramp wrote the lyrics immediately after watching Live Aid in July 1985, the global broadcast hitting him harder than expected. He was around five or six when his father abandoned the family, leaving his mother alone with three boys in Copenhagen. That childhood wound bled into every line. He later called it pretty gutsy to write about presidents and ending wars during the Reagan era, particularly as a Danish immigrant sitting in Staten Island. Bratta transformed Tramp’s strumming into delicate fingerpicking, creating a sparse arrangement that eschewed drums entirely. Metal Forces magazine called it the finest slab of hard-rocking vinyl that year, praising White Lion above Judas Priest and Def Leppard.

Producer Michael Wagener recorded the track at Amigo Studios in Hollywood in early 1987, having previously worked with Mötley Crüe, Metallica, and Dokken. Wagener heard an unreleased version of the album and called their management immediately, insisting he wanted to re-record everything in California. The final arrangement stripped away the band’s usual hard rock attack, leaving only Bratta’s acoustic guitar and Tramp’s voice until the electric guitar solo enters like a quiet storm. Bratta delivered what many consider the most tasteful solo of the glam metal era, emotional rather than flashy, a melody within a melody. Zakk Wylde later said Bratta was the only guitarist whose tapped playing he actually enjoyed.

The song closed the Pride album, which also featured “Wait” and “Tell Me.” Atlantic Records A&R man Jason Flom signed the band after seeing them at a Baltimore rock club, so drunk by the end of the night he never saw the band he’d actually come to scout. Tramp estimated that by the end of the Pride tour in 1989, he and Bratta had each earned over a million dollars as songwriters. Six years earlier, Tramp had arrived in New York with just a few dollars in his pocket. The American dream had worked exactly as advertised.

Bratta disappeared from public view after White Lion disbanded in 1991, not speaking publicly for fifteen years. In 2007, he finally explained on Eddie Trunk’s radio show that his father had endured a five-year illness requiring his full-time care. Then in 1997, while playing guitar lying on his back watching a baseball game, something in his wrist snapped. The injury prevented him from playing for extended periods. Guitar World named him one of the twenty best guitarists of the 1980s, calling him the most tasteful and inventive of his generation. Warren DeMartini and Paul Gilbert both turned down offers to replace him in reformed versions of the band. Nobody wanted to try being Vito Bratta.

Tramp compared his former partner to Mozart. Bratta still lives in his childhood home on Staten Island, caring for family members, occasionally picking up a classical guitar for ten or thirty minutes at a time. He’s never ruled out a reunion. He’s just never been able to say yes. Sometimes the saddest songs come from real places, and sometimes the people who write them simply walk away when the noise gets too loud. Those fingerpicked notes still sound like a man who knew exactly what he was doing, even if nobody understood why he stopped.