“SO THE GUITAR RECORDED PRIDE — AND THEN IT DIED IN FRONT OF ME. IT JUST SNAPPED. IT WAS TERRIBLE” — VITO BRATTA
IT’S LATE 2019 and Vito Bratta has started playing electric guitar again. Just around the house. Ten minutes here, 30 there. He’s careful not to play too long at one time, to avoid reinjuring his right wrist, which has been delicate since he heard it snap one day in 1997. It was a freak accident that happened as he was playing guitar lying on his back, wrist at a weird angle, while watching a baseball game on TV. These days when Bratta picks up an electric guitar and plays, it’s often classical-influenced arpeggios played with a pick. “And then every once in a while,” Bratta tells Guitar World, “I start relearning stuff from back in the day.” Meaning the brilliant, melodic guitar parts he played with his multi-platinum hard-rock band White Lion from the mid Eighties through the early Nineties — before Bratta walked away from the music business entirely.
Few guitarists during his heyday or since have wielded the balance of flair, feel and fearlessness — the soaring solo and singing fills on White Lion’s signature hit song “Wait,” for example — that made Bratta’s playing so distinctive and thrilling. Summoning that style can even be elusive for Bratta. “I can’t figure out some of my own stuff,” Bratta says early on during our two, 90-minute phone interviews. “For the longest time I said I’m not gonna learn that ‘Wait’ solo because I don’t remember what I did. But it came back to me.”
Bratta lives in the same Staten Island [] home where he grew up, and the red Lamborghini parked in the driveway is a rare extravagance.
