The White Lion Rumors...
I'm sure many of you have heard the rumors about White Lion getting kicked off the Poison/RATT summer tour. This afternoon I called Sideways Media, the marketing firm handling Poison's tour. I also called ARM Entertainment, the management company that books White Lion.
Sideways Media was much more helpful, and not surprisingly so. While the marketing representative couldn't elaborate on the White Lion situation, she did give me some invaluable information regarding White Lion and Rocklahoma. Apparently, the Rocklahoma shows for Poison, RATT and White Lion were all booked as a tour stop, and therefore inked under the contract deal. If White Lion is, in fact, off the tour, then they will also not play Rocklahoma.
The agent with ARM Entertainment would simply say that a press release on the matter will be released Monday.
Infer what you will.
The controversy stems over the use of the name White Lion, and the band has been down this road before. Singer Mike Tramp and former guitarist Vito Bratta own the name. As such, Tramp formed a new band known as Tramp's White Lion. A couple years ago, Bratta sued over the name before a new version of the band embarked on a club tour. All signs point to the same situation here.
Stand by people. I'm on the press list to get a release when -- and if-- one is issued regarding the matter.
"On behalf of myself and White Lion, I would like to clear up the many misperceptions and rumors that have been created by Live Nation's decision to withdraw White Lion as the opening act of the summer 2007 Poison tour. While we are limited in what we can say about the issue because of pending litigation, we can inform everyone that Live Nation's decision was not based on any controversy over whether Mike Tramp has the legal right to perform as White Lion.
Our information is that Live Nation's decision was based upon a threatened lawsuit by former White Lion guitarist Vito Bratta. Even though Live Nation believed Vito's lawsuit to be frivolous and had confirmed that Mike Tramp has the legal right to perform as White Lion, they did not want to spend '1 dollar' on litigation. Faced with the cancellation of a tour that was to begin within weeks, our attorneys went the extra mile to work out a deal with Vito Bratta to drop his threatened lawsuit but even with the threat of litigation eliminated, Live Nation continued on their ill-informed course of dropping White Lion from the Poison tour.
Like myself, I know that there are many fans across the United States who are extremely disappointed by Live Nation's decision and we intend to use all options to fight this arbitrary and misinformed decision. Hopefully, there will be a day when decisions about staging a rock n' roll tour will be more about pleasing the fans and less about conservative and baseless corporate decisions. Unfortunately, as has been the case far too many times, instead of playing rock n' roll as planned, we are going to end up in court." - Mike Tramp