STRYPER Trivia — 30 Entries
30 sourced facts about STRYPER.
Trivia
Before Stryper had officially toured anywhere else on earth, they had toured Japan. In a 2023 interview Michael Sweet put it plainly: when the band flew over in 1985 they had never officially toured any country, and Japan was where that began. He had turned 21 the year the debut EP appeared and was 22 by the time he landed. They went genuinely unsure how it would go, and found crowds waiting. What he keeps returning to is how humbling it was that a largely Buddhist country took a Christian band to heart.
Stryper crossed to Japan three times during the 1980s: 1985, then 1987, then a third trip after In God We Trust that put them on the stage of Nippon Budokan. Their Japanese label lists those three visits as the milestones of the decade there. A BARKS live report, written years later, dates the Budokan night to 1989.
The run that finally brought Stryper back for headline shows of their own after twenty-seven years was not set in motion by a label or a promoter. According to Christian Today Japan, the April 2016 tour — billed as the "Yellow & Black is Back" Celebration Tour in Japan — grew out of a long campaign by fans, among them a group calling itself STRYPER Street Team Japan. They played Umeda Club Quattro in Osaka on the 15th and Club Citta' in Kawasaki on the 16th and 17th; the Kawasaki room, 1,300 standing, was full. Japan also got the opening dates of the world tour behind Fallen.
On 5 April 2024 the Christian pop duo for KING + COUNTRY — brothers Joel and Luke Smallbone — released a single and video of "To Hell With The Devil (RISE)," credited to the duo with rapper Lecrae and Stryper. Michael Sweet went back and re-played his own closing solo for it, and the arrangement gained a newly written passage on the idea of rising out of darkness into light. It came from the companion soundtrack to Unsung Hero, the biopic about the Smallbone family, which arrived on 26 April alongside the film's US theatrical release through Lionsgate. The same soundtrack carries a second Stryper item, a separate track billed as a Stryper Interlude featuring Sweet. The brothers have said that one of their earliest memories is sitting at a record player holding a 45 with the sleeve of The Yellow and Black Attack.
The odd spelling has a source. Stryper takes its name from Isaiah 53:5, the verse about being healed by wounds — stripes — and the yellow and black bars the band wears are that word made visible. Michael Sweet has described the reasoning without much ceremony: they kept playing the music they had always played, rewrote the words instead, and put Isaiah 53:5 behind the look so that the stripes stood for something rather than being decoration.
Before there was a Stryper there was Roxx Regime. In 1983 the Sweet brothers, Robert and Michael, put a band together with Oz Fox — a classmate from high school — and Timothy Gaines, a bassist with a local reputation. They cut a demo under that name and worked the Hollywood club circuit with it, and the band eventually caught the ear of Enigma Records. The name changed to Stryper soon afterwards and the first nationally distributed record, The Yellow and Black Attack, followed. The demo itself surfaced commercially in 2007 with no overdubs and no re-recording, and one of the tracks on it is the earliest version of "Honestly" — the song that would later become their MTV and Billboard hit.
When Stryper were looking for a second guitarist, the man who came closest to getting the job was C.C. DeVille. In an interview timed to his autobiography, Michael Sweet said the deal was as good as done — all that was left was signing — and that what killed it was not the music but the wardrobe: DeVille decided he did not want the yellow-and-black. Sweet says there were no hard feelings on either side. DeVille went on to Poison, and looking back Sweet reckons both parties made the right call.
The Japanese dates set for August 2018 did not happen: Oz Fox fell suddenly ill and everything moved to two consecutive nights at Club Citta' Kawasaki in February 2019. The point of the shows was to rebuild the band's 1985 Japanese debut, and both nights opened with that set played in its original running order. The reconstruction extended to small things — Michael Sweet walked out for the first song carrying no guitar, just a hand mic, exactly as he had in 1985. As for the health scare, Young Guitar's reviewer reported seeing no trace of a man recently unwell.
The Japanese pressing of the debut EP was not quite the same record as the American one. Enigma issued it in 1984; Japan got its own version the following year, with material from a contemporary single added to the running order. Stryper's Japanese label, Marquee Inc.'s Avalon imprint, credits the melodic streak that set them apart from their LA contemporaries for the reception they found there — and places the band's first Japanese shows in that same year, before the first full album, Soldiers Under Command, had even been released.
Stryper's Grammy history is one line long. The Recording Academy's own artist database records a single nomination and no wins under the band's name: the 30th Annual Grammy Awards, held in 1988, in the category Best Gospel Vocal Performance By A Duo, Group, Choir Or Chorus, for the album To Hell With the Devil. It did not win. Across a career now past forty years, that entry is the only one the database holds for them.
Stryper's way back into Japan was a festival slot. The official Loud Park 11 lineup for October 15, 2011 at Saitama Super Arena carries their name, and the festival's own timetable has them starting at 11:50 in the morning — the third act of a day that Whitesnake and then Limp Bizkit would close. Their Japanese label describes that appearance as the band's first trip to the country in twenty-three years.
God Damn Evil reached shops in Japan before it reached them anywhere else. Avalon, the Marquee Inc. imprint that handles Stryper in Japan, listed the record for 11 April 2018 and flagged it, in as many words, as an early Japanese release.
A second Japanese version of God Damn Evil exists, made for a visit. Avalon put out a tour edition on 22 August 2018, describing it as a release rushed through to mark the band's arrival in the country, pressed on SHM-CD. It carries three bonus tracks, two of which are demos cut in 1983, the year the band came together: "Loud 'n' Clear" and "Co'mon Rock."
The twin-guitar harmonies are a Stryper signature, but the band did not begin with two guitarists. Michael Sweet has said they spent a good while as a three-piece with him covering every guitar part himself, and only started looking for a second player when they wanted a fuller sound and more harmony leads. A fair number of guitarists auditioned, among them C.C. DeVille and Whitesnake's Doug Aldrich. The job went to Oz Fox, whose real name is Richard Martinez.
Tim Gaines left in 2017 and the two sides never agreed on why. Gaines told KNAC.COM that everything came apart after his divorce, which he suggested was treated as taboo in a Christian band, and pointed out that he was not the only member who had been through one. On 1 September the remaining three — Michael Sweet, Oz Fox and Robert Sweet — issued a joint statement rejecting that reading outright. The band had gone on hiatus, they said, precisely to give him room; divorce had never cost anyone their place; what ended it was conduct the three of them called deliberate, erratic and hostile, and which they said had harmed the band and put its ability to carry on working at risk. They added that a public suggestion from Gaines in 2016 that he might sue had forced them to retain lawyers.
Stryper had already settled on somebody else. Michael Sweet told ListenIowa that the band made the call over the phone to hire Sean McNabb of Lynch Mob, then pulled back: McNabb had a busy year ahead with that band, and after conversations with George Lynch and Oni Logan, Sweet says they decided against walking into anything that looked like it might turn into drama. Chris Wyse and James LoMenzo had also been in the mix. Perry Richardson's name came from the band's co-manager and struck Sweet as the option nobody had thought of. He was flown out, arrived having learned five songs, sat straight into the pocket with Robert Sweet's drumming, and the harmonies came out sounding like the records. Richardson had in fact met the band once before — in 1985, when his first group Maxx Warrior opened for them in Charlotte, North Carolina.
A little over a year before the band fired its bassist, Michael Sweet was categorical on the subject. In June 2016 he said the four of them had made a pact to stay together, and that the day they decided they could not, Stryper would end. If they were not getting along, he said, the right answer was to call it quits, not to swap people out — replacing members cheapens both the band and the brand and is unfair to the audience. The following year they replaced one. Asked afterwards how the two things sat together, Sweet told WSOU that he still believes what he said, but that people make choices whose consequences land on everyone around them, and when that happens you are forced to re-evaluate. The original line-up remains the ideal, he said, and it is a sad thing when something gets in the way of that.
Stryper's frontman spent a stretch inside Boston. When Boston lost singer Brad Delp in 2007, bandleader Tom Scholz brought in two people rather than one — Michael Sweet and Tommy DeCarlo — for what was only supposed to be a farewell concert. Scholz liked the result enough to take the band out on tour the following year, and Sweet stayed on until he stepped away in 2011. Sweet has said the invitation astonished him, and he has never moved off the position that Delp could not be replaced.
Stryper's ballads were not written on a guitar. Michael Sweet picked up just enough piano through the act of writing, and says every Stryper ballad — "Honestly," "Together as One," the lot — was written at the keyboard. The cycle was consistent too: six or seven hard rock or metal songs, then a ballad. The earliest one they recorded was "You Won't Be Lonely" on the debut. And he insists the chronology tends to get remembered backwards. When Stryper were working the same clubs as Ratt and the rest, none of those bands were putting ballads in their sets and Stryper were; the 80s power ballad boom came afterwards, and he has spent years being asked whether they jumped on it.
The first evidence that To Hell With the Devil had worked arrived in a car. Oz Fox remembers putting a cassette of the final mixes into his Ford Escort, sitting there listening to it all the way through, and saying out loud that this one was going to succeed. Michael Sweet's memory of the same moment is the feeling that raises the hair on your arms — and that everyone who heard the tape had it too. Telling the story thirty years later, Fox added that on the way to the interview that day he had been looking at an old photograph of the band in Japan, in the suits, and it had floored him.
On one track of Against the Law the bass is not played by anyone in the band. Tim Gaines played the album, but "Shining Star" wanted a feel that was simply outside what he played at the time. The same name came up from both sides, the band's and the producer's: Randy Jackson. Tom Werman had made records with him; Michael Sweet knew him from Journey. Jackson was flown in, put the part down in a couple of hours, ate with the band, and never crossed paths with Sweet again. Try to imagine the song without that bass, Sweet says, and it is not the same song.
Michael Sweet has gone back to Against the Law more than once, because he keeps being read as hating it. He does not. He is careful to separate the album from the man who produced it: Tom Werman made some of the defining records of that generation, and Sweet still counts him among his favourite producers of all time. The regret is about a decision — throwing away a sound the band had established, gone platinum with and filled arenas with, in order to try to be an ordinary hard rock band. His sharpest formulation of it is that the one thing they should have changed and did not was the name on the sleeve, because what made that record was effectively a new band. He also names "All For One" from it as one of his favourite Stryper songs ever written.
Murder by Pride exists because a schedule moved. Michael Sweet had understood that recording would start at a certain point; then the label rang and said they wanted to begin earlier than that. He kept his reaction to himself, went into his own studio, and for a month did nothing but write. By his own recollection thirteen songs came out of that month and they became the album. Give him a deadline, he says, and he will shut the world out and deliver — which he calls a gift and, in the same breath, a bad thing.
"God," the single original on The Covering, came together between one night and the following morning. Michael Sweet wanted at least one new song of the band's own on the record, and the melody turned up after he had already gone to bed. He went downstairs, found chords for it on a guitar, then rang his own landline from his mobile and sang the melody into the answering machine so that he could go back to sleep. In the morning he played the message back to remind himself how it went, and wrote the words at the kitchen island over a cup of coffee. Melody first, lyrics last — that is the order he works in.
The track list of The Covering had at least one casualty. Stryper had long messed around with "Fox on the Run" by Sweet, and at one point it was in the running to take the slot that went to "Set Me Free." Michael Sweet ruled it out, and not for musical reasons: as he reads the lyric, it is a man telling a woman whose figure has changed that he no longer wants to know her name, and he did not think that was a message Stryper should be putting out. Even on a record made of other people's songs, subject matter was a selection criterion.
The raw material for No More Hell to Pay was gathered on a phone. For a few months Michael Sweet carried his iPhone everywhere and, whenever something occurred to him — in a supermarket, at the theatre, in a restaurant — hit record and sang a melody line or hummed a riff into it. That left him with forty fragments. He then went down to his own studio and spent two weeks arranging them into eleven songs. The one track on the album he did not write is the cover, "Jesus is Just Alright."
"Jesus is Just Alright" on No More Hell to Pay is an Arthur Reid Reynolds song that had already passed through the Byrds and the Doobie Brothers before Stryper got to it. Michael Sweet calls it their theme song and says he wishes they had written it themselves. His point is that the band had been saying those same words for thirty years to an audience that largely disagreed — people who assumed Jesus was not real, or was boring, or was a joke. Becoming a Christian, as he keeps having to explain, does not mean cutting your hair, trading in your rock and roll clothes or selling your gear.
"Yahweh," the opening track of Fallen, began with a riff that came from outside the band. Michael Sweet's wife had been a Sevendust fan for years while he himself barely knew their music — and then he found himself on a plane with Lajon Witherspoon and Clint Lowery, who introduced themselves, and contact details were exchanged. Sweet later asked Lowery whether he would send over some riff ideas and be part of the record; Lowery said yes immediately, and what arrived was the figure the song opens with. Sweet reworked it into something Stryper-shaped, and states flatly that without Lowery the song would never have come to pass.
"Big Screen Lies" on Fallen is aimed squarely at Hollywood. Whenever a Christian turns up in a film or a television programme, Michael Sweet says, they are placed there to be laughed at or rolled one's eyes at, and he wrote the song to say exactly that. He describes it as raising an arm at the industry — a way of telling them the portrayal is wrong and that the band has noticed. Speaking while the album was still being made he put it harder still, saying the film business portrays Christians as complete buffoons every single time; he also allowed that such people do exist, but that they do not represent everyone else.
A piece of games software exists that is built entirely out of Stryper's catalogue. In 2010 Digital Praise put out an expansion pack for Guitar Praise, its PC guitar-controller game, timed to the band's twenty-fifth anniversary. It holds twenty-five Stryper tracks; the songs the announcement chose to name come from Reborn, Murder by Pride and the live album 7 Weeks: Live in America. It was not a standalone product — it required the Guitar Praise base game plus one or two wireless guitars, and sold for $19.95. Digital Praise's chief executive, Tom Bean, called it the first and only time Stryper's catalogue had been put out in game form.