There would be more good moments for Mike Tramp and White Lion on that tour. And when we played When The Children Cry, thousands of lighters went up. “When we went on,” he says, “all 15,000 people were in their seats. As Tramp recalls, “We said, we have to be the band that we are.” And what followed was the sweetest of victories.
Minutes before they went on stage, the four members of White Lion made an important decision. And most of all, he worried how they would react if White Lion played their new single When The Children Cry, a gentle acoustic song harbouring a do-gooder message. He feared that AC/DC’s fans might be hostile to a pretty Danish boy with big hair.
Their second album, Pride, had sold a million copies, and they’d been on the road for the best part of a year, opening for KISS – whose bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons had told Tramp he had “the coolest name in rock n’roll” – and then Aerosmith, whose singer Steven Tyler would greet Tramp each night by singing White Lion’s breakthrough hit Wait.īut Tramp, an AC/DC fan, knew that this audience would be the toughest that White Lion had faced. White Lion, the New York-based rock band fronted by Danish singer Tramp, were beginning a three month tour as support act to AC/DC at Indianapolis’ massive 15,000-capacity Market Square Arena. May 25th, 1988 was a day that Mike Tramp would remember for the rest of his life. Paul Elliott of Classic Rock Magazine reports: