The bands transitions smoothly from song to song with a bit of banter in between and the screaming girls in the audience seem to like it. Vito Bratta shreds, his solo in L’ady Of The Valley’ is superb. I don’t own that VHS so I can’t compare.Īs I expected, the band did sound significantly heavier live. The songs are fun and up-tempo for the most part. I’m not positive but I think this is the audio track of their live VHS that was filmed on February 11th, 1988 on the Pride tour. Simply entitled LIVE this concert was recorded at The Ritz in NYC. Now for the best part Disc five a full, unreleased live album! The band never released a live album and I always suspected they were heavier live in concert but disappointingly never got to see them live. I don’t think there is anything truly new and unreleased but a die-hard member of the White Lion pride might be able to correct me and we still get to enjoy a decent seven bonus tracks across the four studio platters. The band didn’t seem to have a wealth of unreleased material lying around. All of these albums in this set comes with a number of bonus tracks, mostly singles and radio versions edited for length. The next the albums were the ‘glory years’, and the band churned out PRIDE, BIG GAME and MANE ATTRACTION in just under four years. It is nice to hear this under-rated album (their heaviest) on CD and replace my old cassette. It wasn’t even issued on CD in the US until a few years later until the success of their second album, PRIDE, prompted demand.
Oddly enough in the early days, the band had signed to a major label outside of the US but it was a smaller label Grand Slamm that issued the debut, FIGHT TO SURVIVE. The good-looking all-white style look makes it stand out from many other more ‘Metal’ red and black boxes. This five disc set comes in the standard clamshell box with a big fold out poster with all the liner notes and credits for the bands four album run from 1985-1991. So to me it was ‘four and out’ and that brings us to this box-set.ĪLL YOU NEED IS ROCK ‘N’ ROLL is one of the latest set in a long and successful campaign by Cherry Red / Hear No Evil to plunder back-catalogues of 70’s and 80’s bands and bring them to the fore in an affordable set. Yeah, sure Mike Tramp tried again in 1999 under the White Lion banner, but it really was a solo album with all new guys and of course, it tanked. Maybe they were smart enough to not tarnish their legacy with grunge-influenced albums or maybe they just didn’t care, but the end result was they left an untarnished legacy of four studio albums, Gold and Platinum albums, a few hit singles, some fun videos and whole lot of great rock ‘n’ roll songs. More dedicated fans like myself, knew where the various members went and hat they were doing in the music scene but for the most part it was over. When that glam type sound fell from favour, White Lion also fell prey to changing musical tastes and the band just…went away.
White Lion already had three albums before most of those bands put out their debut, so they were just ahead of the curve.įor me, White Lion more accurately epitomizes a ‘true’ 80’s band. Founded in 1983 or so the bands debut was actually quite ‘Metal’ and as time went on they adapted quite quickly to the growing MTV video age and evolved but never truly embraced the glam ethic of L.A.
However, if you really examine the musical climate all that stuff that people point to as ‘80’s bands Warrant, Danger Danger, Firehouse, Slaughter, Winger, etc really didn’t get going until the very late 80’s. Many casual music fans and observers have this concept of the 80’s being this time of glam and decadence, hairspray and any other clichés you may recall.