Honestly: My Life and Stryper Revealed (17 page)

Mikey was born on February 11, and I was scheduled to return to tour in Houston on February 14, which would have been fine except Kyle was still in the hospital with many complications.

I left on the 14
^th
to continue the tour, but I flew home every night before each day off to visit her, then turned back around and flew to the next city on the tour. This went on for about two weeks until she thankfully recovered enough to go home.

I, however, would not see another tour break until the end of April. So Mikey was born on the 11
^th
, I left for tour on the 14
^th
, and I was gone for the next 10 weeks straight. And when I came back, it was only for three weeks before we left again to go overseas.

February 11, 1986 I was single. The sky was the limit and all of life was ahead of me. If I had enough food, money, and happiness, that was all I needed. One year later, however, the world looked considerably different.

With all of this going on, and countless lonely nights in hotels on the road, I couldn’t help but ponder everything, especially the music business and whether or not I was making the best of it.

Questions continued to weigh heavily on my mind and heart regarding the entity of Stryper. What are we? Are we four friends making music together? Are we a corporation? If we are a corporation, who owns it? Years earlier I thoughtlessly gave my song rights away for nothing. What about the rest of Stryper? The records, the tours, the merchandise? Was I also giving my rights away here as well? The topic of us incorporating had come up before, but it never really went anywhere. Should I re-address the topic?

These things didn’t matter to me when I was 21, but now I was a husband and a father who needed to be a responsible man. And a responsible man examines his business affairs.

I didn’t have all the answers yet, and no doubt I was enjoying a hugely successful tour, but I knew that these questions in my head were about to start coming out of my mouth. I needed to start gathering answers, for my family’s sake.

TWENTY-FIVE

The
To Hell With The Devil
tour took us through August of 1987. During the second half of that run, we began playing arenas for the first time. Times were changing for Stryper. Our popularity seemed to be growing by the minute. Money was coming in as fast as we could spend it, and that trend would continue over the next year or so.

We took a short break before we were right back in the studio working on our next record,
In God We Trust
.

In our post-tour meeting with Enigma, we shared that we wanted to produce the next album ourselves. Although Enigma gave us incredible freedom and support throughout our tenure with them, self-producing the next record was met with some reservations on their part. Our compromise was to bring in an acclaimed producer, one who had a track record and hit list in pop. That producer was Michael Lloyd.

Michael is a great person and one of the most humble guys I’ve ever met. Michael was known for having produced groups that were a lot more polished, poppy and slick, like Donnie and Marie Osmond, Shaun Cassidy, The Bellamy Brothers, and The Monkees. And in our meetings with Enigma, it was clear that they wanted our next album to follow in the footsteps of
To Hell With The Devil
, only bigger and better. We did our best to deliver just that.

In God We Trust
would become our definition of an over-produced, over-abundant record. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s my least favorite album in the Stryper catalog, but it’s certainly not my favorite. There are some great moments that shine through. That album contained some of our very best material and some of our worst. I’m of the opinion that songs like “In God We Trust,” “The Writing’s On The Wall” and “Lonely” are some of the highlights of that record yet songs like “Come To The Everlife” are some of the low points, at least for me.

In 2005 we did an informal poll with the fans asking what songs they thought we should play for an upcoming tour. We asked fans to rank the Stryper catalog from favorite to least favorite. “Come to the Everlife” came in rock bottom on that poll, and that was no surprise to me.

In general, I think that
In God We Trust
was about as unimaginative as any project we had recorded. I answered almost every shining moment from
To Hell With The Devil
by providing an equivalent. “Honestly” was a hit ballad? Then I’ll give you “I Believe In You.” A hard hitting, title track opener worked for the last album? I’ll give you “In God We Trust.” “Calling On You” was a pop-metal #1 video? I’ll counter that with “Always There For You.”

It was as if I went down the track list of our previous album and wrote its counterpart for this album. I hate to acknowledge it, but that’s exactly what I did. What a disservice that was both to Stryper and to God, who has blessed me with the ability to be creative. Honestly, I was as un-creative as an artist could be on this album. And despite all of that, it turned out to be our second most successful album, selling only slightly less units than
To Hell With The Devil
.

I don’t blame Michael Lloyd for this record being overproduced. I was the one who really navigated the ship in terms of production. I don’t say that to try to win favor with anyone. Had Tim produced it, I would give credit where credit is due. Had Rob produced it, I’d give him the credit. But for all intents and purposes, I was the producer of most of
In God We Trust
. I just didn’t get the credit, or the producer’s paycheck.

It wasn’t as if Michael Lloyd sat in the break room all day and collected his check. He did indeed play an instrumental role in helping us achieve a great album.

The album was recorded at three different studios: The Village Recorder, Cherokee Studios, and last but not least, the infamous A&M Studios. We spent more than $600,000 making the album, in comparison to the roughly $200,000 we spent making its predecessor. Most of that $600k was wasted, not on your typical strippers and cocaine that most rock bands wasted money on during that era. It was wasted simply by not managing our time wisely. We’d spend all day working on a guitar solo or a vocal part trying to perfect something that was better on the first take. The $2,500-per-day studio rate added up quickly.

Also, just prior to tracking the lead vocals, I got sick and my voice didn’t recover so well. It took me almost a month to get the vocals wrapped. I was facing a couple of hurdles vocally during the process. The most obvious was the physical barrier I faced with my diminished vocal capacity due to illness. But the more prominent underlying challenge I faced was psychological.

These songs were written at the peak of my vocal range. I had a mental war going on inside my head thinking, “I can’t sing this stuff. It’s just too high.” Daily, I struggled to achieve that perfect vocal take. We were purposely trying to get the tightest, most radio-ready recording we could possibly achieve. Eventually, we did, but accomplishing that “polished” sound was difficult.

It is part of the reason we rarely play any of the songs from that album in our set today. Truthfully, it’s just too difficult to pull off, and the problem isn’t just the vocal challenges. That album is layered and stacked with multiple guitar parts and an exorbitant number of backing vocals, keyboards and whatever else we could throw in. Often as we get together to rehearse for tour, we’ll make a feeble attempt to perform acceptable renditions of a few of the songs from
In God We Trust. I feel that it
’s easier said than done, not without playing to pre-recorded tracks, which is something we haven’t done since the tour we did to support that album.

During that tour Robert played to a click track so that we could run backing tracks along with our live performances. Included in those tracks were extra guitars, keyboards, and a lot of extra vocal harmonies. I’m proud to say, that era of our life—the “playing to tracks” era—was short-lived. Even then, we always performed live. It’s not as if we weren’t playing our instruments—we were. We just had a little help, or a lot of help, enhancing the sound with some pre-recorded backing tracks. Funny thing is, you’d be shocked to learn not only how many bands did it then, but how many bands do it to this day.

In addition to label meetings laying out the sonic goals for this album, we were also coming to a crossroads with the business of Stryper. Dissention was brewing within the band over songwriting. There seemed to be a definitive division starting to build between the band and me concerning songwriting and royalties.

Songwriters usually make more money and this was starting to cause some friction within the band. I began to feel an obligation to split all the songs with the band in response to indirect comments and criticism.

In an effort to keep the peace, I lined up a meeting with our attorney Stephen Ashley to discuss my proposition. I told him that I wanted all the songwriting to be split equally, regardless of who wrote what songs. Oz wrote two songs on that album (“Come To The Everlife” and “The Reign”). I should never have agreed to those songs making the cut (at least not without undergoing some major changes), but in 1988 I was more interested in keeping the peace than ensuring we had the best songs possible on an album.

Because I remained silent, “Come to the Everlife” and “The Reign” are now forever etched in the Stryper archives of recorded music. I mentioned previously that I had two major barriers when singing this album: the physical constraints of being sick and the physiological constraints from the high vocal range. But, there was a third—I just wasn’t “feeling” these two songs. I sang them, as best I could, but it was difficult as a singer/songwriter to relate to not only the lyrics of “The Reign,” but also the music of “Come To The Everlife” as well. I didn’t truly believe in those songs, and therefore I couldn’t quite sing them with the same passion that it takes to make them believable.

Stephen Ashley privately consulted with me after our meeting on splitting the songwriting and strongly advised me against it. He told me that I would be giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing so. But again, I wanted to keep the peace. I could tell that I was becoming the bad guy, or at least that’s how I perceived it. How did that work out by the way? How was I becoming the bad guy? I wrote what I felt—and apparently what the fans felt—were some really good songs that obviously played a major role in our success. Somehow, though, I was feeling like the bad guy.

That’s what being in a band can do sometimes. Somehow spending relentless hours alone refining and re-refining songs to become the greatest they can be for the band can be turned around to be a negative thing. What should have been gratitude appeared to be resentment, at least from my perspective.

I allowed mediocre songs to creep into our repertoire just to make everyone happy. I gave away what probably amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars in songwriting royalties just to smooth things over. Everyone seemed happy for now, except me.

Fortunately Stephen had the wisdom to convince me not to allow my idea of splitting songwriting to stand in perpetuity. After a certain number of years, the songwriting credits would revert to the original writers. So short term, the term when the bulk of the money was earned on a song, we all split the money equally. Long term, the term when minimal money rolls in, I retained the songwriting credit for the songs I wrote. We all agreed to this arrangement and moved forward. For seven years I gave 25 percent to each band member and songwriting credit on songs they didn’t write.

Songwriting was and still seems to be the black cloud that hangs over the head of Stryper. I’m a bit of a perfectionist. Well, not a bit—I’m an extreme perfectionist when it comes to music. I want the songs to be brilliant—every single one of them. Unfortunately I seemed to be the only one in the band who felt that way. With the other guys, it was as if it didn’t really matter if the best songs made the album, just as long as everyone was contributing and everyone was equal. Who cares if a sub-par song makes its way on the album, as long as everyone gets a fair shake?

That’s a fine philosophy for fairy tales, but in the brutal, and fickle, world of music, it’s nonsense. And in this ruthless world of music, there are usually managers and labels involved who can tell the band “Look guys, here are the 10 best songs. I don’t care who wrote them. These are the ones going on the album.” We didn’t have that. We had my mom, who just didn’t seem to have it in her to say these sorts of things, at least to the band as a whole. Or perhaps equally as possible, she just didn’t
know how
to say this.

So, I was the bad guy. I was the one saying “Nope, that song’s not good enough for the record.” And, honestly, I said that to myself more than anyone. For every good song that I wrote, there were dozens of ideas that never saw the light of day, all because I knew I could do better. It was somehow okay to say to myself, “Michael, you can do better. You can write a better song than what you’ve got here.” It was just very difficult to say those things to my band mates about
their
songs.

Even to this day there’s dissention within the band over songs, but today it’s less about the songs and seemingly more about the money those songs generate. Sadly, today they generate a small fraction of what they once did, but still the black cloud of songwriting lingers in the Stryper camp. Despite my best efforts to deliver the best songs possible to the band and for the band, the songs don’t always seem to be a welcomed addition with everyone.

If you’re a professional race car driver and your livelihood depends on your car’s engine running flawlessly, it would make sense that you would hire a mechanic who had successfully built and repaired many cars in his lifetime. If you were a professional racecar driver, you wouldn’t trust someone who had only built three or four engines in his entire life.

The number of songs I’ve written in my life, not to mention the success that many of them have had, seems as though it should make my input as a songwriter a welcomed asset to the band. Instead, even today, and despite having released seven solo records, several of which appeared on Billboard and radio charts, I feel like the enemy sometimes when I bring in a set of songs for Stryper to record. I’m often made to feel as though I should allow the others to have songs on Stryper records, even though there’s no real track record representing their ability to successfully do so.