Honestly: My Life and Stryper Revealed (13 page)

I even recall seeing flyers and stickers in Christian bookstores that would say things like “If you like Iron Maiden, listen to Barren Cross.” Or, “Instead of Madonna, try Amy Grant.” I always thought that was odd. Amy Grant sounds nothing like Madonna. In many ways, Amy Grant is better, but they’re certainly not comparable.

But this was the way the Christian music industry was working—jumping on bandwagons and trying to capitalize on each artist’s mainstream counterpart. I get it. I know what they were trying to do. Mom and Dad were shopping at the bookstore hoping to turn their child on to some music other than what they were listening to. These were suggestions to help Mom and Dad. But the kids saw right through it. They didn’t want a clone of Iron Maiden. They didn’t want a clone of Ratt. Kids wanted something raw, fresh and exciting, regardless of the message in the songs.

Stryper, with all of our faults and flaws, tried really hard not to sound like the bands we played with on the Strip. We didn’t sound like Motley Crue, or Ratt, or any of those. Stryper had its own sound, or at least we tried really hard to do so, and I believe we succeeded and was part of the reason we stood out from the pack.

To me part of being a musician is to be an artist, and to be a great artist you have to be original and express your own artistic views. It was incredibly important for Stryper to be unique and original in all aspects of our art.

It was around the beginning of the
Soldiers Under Command
era that we made a conscious decision to try to do as few shows as possible with Christian bands. We had performed with bands like Bloodgood, Barren Cross, Rez Band and a few others, but we always felt that we needed to be taking our message to people and places that no other Christian band had gone. We needed to stay the course and continue playing clubs and theaters and tour with acts that were not Christian bands. This is a philosophy we still hold true to today. Just recently we performed in Indonesia and India, both countries rarely visited by Christian rock bands.

There were some great musicians rising in the Christian music scene at the time, though. Rex Carroll (Whitecross) and Tony Palacios (Guardian) were (and are) two of the most talented guitarists in any genre. Ted Kirkpatrick (Tourniquet) is an incredible drummer and one of the best out there. Kevin Max (DC Talk), Bob Carlisle (Allies) and Bryan Duncan (Sweet Comfort Band) are three of the most amazingly talented singers around. I was, and always will be impressed with these guys and their God given abilities and talents.

I personally like most of the Christian musicians that came of age around the same time as Stryper. They are, for the most part, great people. I just never really got into their music. I wish that were not the case. I wish there had been 20 Christian bands in the ‘80s that rose to the level of Stryper. I would have loved nothing more than to see the Billboard charts filled with bands representing God. It was saddening to me that this never happened. I was, and still am, rooting for any band that shares their faith openly and does what God calls them to do. Yet I can’t help but feel most Christian bands from the ‘80s should have worked harder to set themselves apart from the rest.

NINETEEN

To Hell With The Devil
. Little did I know as we were preparing to make this album, those five words would become synonymous with me and my band for the rest of my life. The title-track from that album was never even a major single, yet it’s presently one of our highest viewed videos on YouTube—a live version no less, which wasn’t filmed until years later in Puerto Rico during the reunion tour of 2003. Somehow, that song and title have stood the test of time and become as much a part of Stryper pop-culture as the yellow and black stripes and the Bible tossing.

We toured to promote the
Soldiers Under Command
album from September of ’85 through May of ’86. Even to this day, I’ve always enjoyed having the Christmas holidays off, and this year was no exception. So we took a brief break and that’s when I did a lot of the writing for
To Hell With The Devil
. I was writing all the time back then, in hotel rooms, on the bus, in dressing rooms and any off time at home. I was still living with my parents on Fonseca Avenue in La Mirada.

I’ve always done a lot of writing over the holidays. For some reason I feel creatively inspired during the holiday season. I did a lot of writing Christmas of ’85. I had a small keyboard in the rehearsal studio and early one morning inspiration hit and I began to experiment with some chord progressions on that keyboard.

Although Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Van Halen have always been a huge influence on me musically in terms of all things hard rock and metal, there’s another side of me that has enormous appreciation for the power ballad talents of artists like Styx and Journey. On this particular day I was feeling more Styx and Journey than I was Maiden or Priest, so I began to experiment with some tones and chord progressions on the keys instead of guitar. It took me just short of a day and I would emerge from the garage with a song that would become the most notable and biggest selling song of our career, “Honestly.”

I’ve never written ballads just for the sake of writing ballads—for the sake of selling albums, so to speak. In the ‘80s there was a lot of pressure from labels to write pop/power ballads. I can say very honestly, pun intended, that I didn’t succumb to that pressure, nor did I even feel that pressure from Enigma—at least not at this stage in our career. They allowed me the creative freedom to do what I wanted to do as a writer and musician without pressuring me at all. I guess I was spoiled a bit in that sense because I heard horror stories from other bands who received immense pressure from their label to write radio “hits” and it seemed they had no creative control whatsoever.

I write ballads because I enjoy them. I love the big vocal harmonies and that hold-your-lighter-in-the-air feeling you get when you listen to Journey or Styx. “Honestly” was a reflection of my appreciation for their songs.

When I emerged from the garage that day I had no idea this song would eventually become a radio smash. Yes, I felt I had a good song, but that was the extent of it. I also wrote “Sing-Along-Song” on the same cheap keyboard at the same time. I had laid down that signature loop and written the melody and chord progression around that rhythm.

At this stage in my life, I also never wrote songs solely for the purpose of being on the radio. We still had very little radio play, so it wasn’t even really on my radar to “write a song for radio.” It’s not as though I didn’t want to be on the radio, I just always assumed we’d be one of those bands that would get airplay occasionally, but that our live show would be our catalyst to success. So writing for radio wasn’t something that came naturally to me. I just wrote what I knew and what I was feeling—and some days that was fist-in-the-air metal, and others it was pull-out-your-lighter ballads. I just never really wrote songs thinking “I need to succeed. I must write a song that will make me or us a success.” I just tried to write great songs that moved people and hoped that if I did, things would fall into place.

It wasn’t until I started writing for
In God We Trust
that I started thinking radio. That entire album was written to mimic the success of
To Hell With The Devil
, which is one of the biggest creative mistakes of my career. I wrote almost every song on
In God
as a direct answer to a song on
To Hell
. Big mistake, at least in my opinion.

What
was
a little more calculated on my part, at least during my writing for the
THWTD
album, were the lyrics. I try to focus not only on my own experience when writing lyrics, but also on the listener. Writing the lyrics for “Honestly” was no exception. I was purposely ambiguous as I etched out the words for this song, wanting the audience to be able to relate to their relationship with God, their wife, girlfriend or boyfriend or whomever. Although writing
certain songs
for me may a bit more inspirationally based, sometimes certain lyrics are much more calculated. I didn’t write music for a specific audience, but I always tried (and still do) to put myself in the shoes of the listener when writing lyrics, regularly asking myself if this is a lyric the listener can relate to.

Since the release of “Honestly” barely a week has gone by that I haven’t been asked to sing it at someone’s wedding and every time that inquiry comes to me, I’m honored. To have written a song that has touched so many lives in very diverse ways is still a huge blessing to me.

You hear a lot of artists talk about how much they hate their big hit and how they wish they would have never written it. Not me. I love that song, still do to this day and I enjoy singing it. Over the years we’ve done various versions of the song and it always seems to be a crowd favorite no matter what.

I can certainly understand and relate to artists that despise their hit song. It’s not so much that they despise the song as it is they wish it wasn’t so closely tagged to the definition of their career. I understand this. When you write hundreds of songs over your career you may feel that many of them are much better than your hit, and it can be frustrating to be known the world over for one particular song while your best work is often overlooked. As musicians we progress and mature, we get better at our craft, and we’re eager to showcase our work to an audience. It’s frustrating to have that audience just want to hear that one song—the “hit.”

What I don’t understand is hating a song that is as much a part of you and your reason for success as the rest of your catalog. “Honestly”—yes, sometimes I get tired of playing it night after night after night. But more importantly, I don’t like the feeling that I
have
to play it, the feeling that I’m letting the audience down if I don’t play it, but I think that’s human nature. We like to do things because we
want
to do them, not because we
have
to do them. And that’s what a hit song will do—it will make you feel like you
have
to play it. But I’m proud of that song and I feel it holds its own.

After the Christmas break we started touring again in February of ’86, and continued straight through into May. Our popularity was growing everyday on the road and we could feel what was to come. We were excited to get into the studio and start making the next album. Both the crowds and protestors were growing at each stop along the tour so we knew something big was about to happen, we just didn’t know what it would be.

For me, it was more than just a career in music that was on my mind. I was about to go from kid to man in an instant. I was living at home. I was not married. I was in the biggest, most successful Christian rock band at the time, and in May of ’86 I found out that my girlfriend was pregnant. Yeah, not really the most opportune time to write a smash-hit Christian rock album. So fortunately, most of the album was written by the time we got off the road because I’m not sure I would have been in the frame of mind to write it otherwise.

Over the next few months my to-do list looked something like this:

Get married, quickly.

Pick a producer for the next record, quickly.

Move out of my parent’s house, also quickly.

Make the biggest album of my career, quickly.

And prepare for a new baby in my life, quickly!

Turns out, the choices I would make in regard to my personal life would be the best and most fulfilling ones to date. My professional life however was headed for some turbulence, and I hate turbulence.

TWENTY

Spirits were high in the band upon returning from the
Soldiers Under Command
tour. Whenever we were home we were attending church regularly at Calvary Chapel in West Covina, which was quite the drive from Hollywood but well worth it. Raul Ries was and still is the pastor. We felt at home at Calvary and were always treated like family. The band had a great sense of unity during this time in our career and we were full of hope and optimism as we wrapped up the
Soldiers
era.

Almost immediately upon returning from tour we began meeting with the label about the next album. We knew we wanted to go in a different direction than the previous two albums, and hopefully this one would have a mainstream accessible sound. Theoretically, that would happen largely in part by picking the right producer.

Enigma tossed around several ideas for producers, and we were all in agreement that we wanted someone who could help us make an album that would take us from small theaters to arenas. Initially we were leaning toward a guy named Bernard Edwards. He had produced Power Station and was the bass player from the band Chic. We liked him and thought he was a great option and certainly unique.

Then another producer entered the picture. We had no idea who he was, but the selling point was that he had a hand in a chart topping hit single from the early ‘80s. I can’t say with certainty we were told he
was
the actual producer of that song, but we were led to believe that he was. I can only assume this notion came from the producer himself, or perhaps his manager.

Regardless, we felt he was what we needed—someone who could help us with our sound and reach the mainstream music fan.

We later found out he actually did
not
produce the song that made us want to work with him after all, and to this day it’s unclear what role he played on that song, if any.

We hired him anyway and quickly realized this wouldn’t be the last half-truth, if not outright lie, we’d get from him. We thought he was a household-name producer. It turned out that he really wasn’t well known at all. We felt somewhat deceived about a number of things as time progressed while making the album.

I had eloped with Kyle, so “Get Married” had been checked off my to-do list. I had also moved out of my parent’s house so Kyle and I purchased our first home together soon afterward. We had a baby on the way. Life was complicated. I wasn’t really concerned about conducting extensive fact-checking on producers, but as time went by we started to uncover some pretty hilarious stuff. Well, it wasn’t really funny in the moment, but looking back on it, it’s somewhat comical now.