Honestly: My Life and Stryper Revealed (14 page)

For instance, during the making of
THWTD
, he shared with us that he was one of the character actors in blockbuster movie. We were all standing around the studio talking about that movie and he told us he was in it and that he was one of the three motorcycle cops. As I stood there looking at his face, I remember thinking, “I’ve seen that movie several times, and I don’t recall you being in it.”

But I had other things to think about so I let it go. I had to focus on making an incredible record. My suspicions about his acting career would have to take a back seat for the moment.

Several days passed and we were tracking basics at Master Control in Burbank. I had stepped away for a moment to take a breather in the lounge that was equipped with a small TV, complete with rabbit ears. Remember those? Before cable when you received your signal through two long, metal antennas on top of the set?

Despite attempts to watch TV, my mind was wandering to the songs we were recording. I was thinking about Kyle and the baby. I was contemplating how to make the album of a lifetime. And then, as if God had a sense of humor and wanted to let me in on the joke, an add came on that said the movie that he was supposedly in was coming up next. Ha! I couldn’t believe it. What a perfect distraction and a great chance to test my suspicions. I went into the control room and said to him,
“Dude! Your movie is coming on right now. The movie you told us you were in—it's on in five minutes! Can you believe it?”

He turned white as a ghost. He didn’t say a word. His silence told me I was probably right. He likely wasn’t in the movie after all.

A few moments pass and he quietly leaves the control room to “use the bathroom.” As he leaves the room, smiles are exchanged between all the band mates. We were all thinking the same thing: “He’s not in that movie!” Moments later, we hear pounding and banging noises coming from the lounge. We didn’t think much of it. It was brief. Then he returned to the
studio
.

Curious, I went back out into the lounge only to see that the picture on the TV was nothing but static. At first I thought maybe he just changed the channel. Then I noticed that the antenna had been destroyed. Apparently he broke the antenna to keep us from watching the movie and confirming he wasn’t in it.

The
head
tech for the studio, Gary Meyerberg, tried to fix the TV and eventually succeeded. By then, though, the movie was over. Our “actor” turned producer appeared relieved. We knew, at that moment, that he had not been upfront with us. It was a turning point in the making of that record and how we viewed our producer.

Another shady moment came from a piece of rental equipment. We had rented a top-of-the-line Spector bass to use for the record. When it came time to return the bass, this same producer offered to handle getting it back to the rental company. Come to find out, he never returned it. His brother was a local bass player, and he let his brother use the bass around town for a few weeks, all on our dime.

We obviously began to question our choice in producer. That being said, he did play a role in the biggest-selling album of our career.

So that’s something. It had the right sound for the time, and I suppose it would be dishonest to say he had
nothing
to do with it. He did play somewhat of an important role in the creation of the album, it just wasn’t the role we were expecting.
To Hell With The Devil
became a multi-platinum record
despite
the deception, certainly not
because
of it. If anything, I give great props to our engineer, Dan Nebenzal, who played a pivotal part in capturing the tones and the signature sounds that ultimately landed on the finished product.

Dan was a great engineer with access to one of the best studios in Burbank. We were one of the first bands to use the Mitsubishi 32 track digital machine. When we tracked at Master Control, it was one of the first studios in the world to have a Mitsubishi X-850. Yes, I guess you can say that we were the guinea pigs for the digital recording era. We were skeptical because we had always been told analog was better, warmer, and fatter. I was against recording digitally at first, but I was also in the frame of mind to try something new, to experiment a bit. And digital was that opportunity. As a result, we captured a sound that was definitely unique. It sounded like no other record out there. For better or worse, recording digitally was partially responsible for making us stand out from the other records of the time, sonically speaking.

Dan was friends with Tori Amos, and she was coming around the studio really often. This was before she had signed a record deal, but we did take a break one night to go hear her perform at a small club in Burbank. Our producer went with us to the show, and from that point on we started seeing a lot more of Tori hanging out at the studio. I’m not sure if he had a role in her landing a record deal or not, but it was exciting to have creative, artistic people around. It helped keep the energy level high.

All of this—the fake movie star/producer, the engineer with rising-star friends, and the timid feelings toward digital recording—pales in comparison to what was coming next. We had a bass player we had to tell, “You’re not the right guy for this record."

TWENTY-ONE

Everyone has a moment, usually many moments, in life that they wish they had handled things differently. Part of living and growing as a human being, I believe, is making mistakes. If we learn from those mistakes, we become stronger and ultimately, wiser.

Often, we can chalk up the I-wish-I-had-done-that-differently moments to youth and inexperience. I once saw a sign in a store that said “Hire a teenager while they still know everything.” I’m afraid there are moments in my teenage and early adult years that would fall under that heading. As a young adult I often felt I knew everything, and nobody was going to tell me differently. At times I was open-minded like a sponge soaking up wisdom and knowledge from anyone I felt had something to offer. Other times I was stubborn and self-assured that whatever decision I was making surely must be the right one.

If I were to list half-dozen things in my life that I wish I had handled differently, one of them would be the way I dealt with Tim during the recording of
To Hell With The Devil
.

The making of this album came about rather quickly, and as I’ve mentioned before I probably wasn’t in the best frame of mind. When recording began, I had recently eloped with Kyle. I was starting a new life in a new world with a baby on the way. I had a record label telling us all the great things going on with our previous albums and that we needed to make another one, fast. Not only did we need to make another record soon, it needed to be a million times better than our previous release.

Pressure to “do the right thing” was upon me daily in the summer of ’86.

When we made
Soldiers Under Command
, we had been rehearsing those songs for a few years and taking them out on the road.
To Hell With The Devil, though
, was basically written behind the scenes and not performed in public at all. We had barely practiced the songs, much less worked out the kinks that years of playing in clubs can do.

We started tracking drums and guitars, and next up was bass. Tim came in and laid down his parts. We all felt it was a little loose and wasn’t quite what we wanted. We wanted something more “in the pocket,” and more locked with the bed of music we already had recorded. Tim has a unique style of playing that comes partially from a jazz influence. This seemingly made it difficult for Tim to approach the record in a straight-ahead, 1/8
^th
note kind of way. I share all of these feelings in the past tense, as he’s certainly proven me wrong since.

But the way I was analyzing it in my mind, Tim was going to have a difficult time locking in to the groove we felt necessary for the sound we were trying to achieve. I was hearing bass lines that felt as though they were dancing
around
the groove instead of
with
the groove. I’m sure if you were to ask Tim, he would likely say it would not have been difficult at all for him to lock in like we needed him to do. I should have explained better what I wanted with these brand new songs—songs that, until entering the studio, he had barely even heard, much less rehearsed. And if he were to say that, he’d be right. “Hindsight is 20/20”... “Monday morning quarterback”... all those clichés could apply here.

When Tim first joined the band several years earlier, he and I were really close. We hung out almost daily. I’d go so far as to say he was one of my best friends. We went to the beach, parties, almost everywhere together. We were virtually inseparable. Not only did we have a close personal bond, but we fortunately had a musical one as well. Those were good times.

Eventually, however, I believe the creative process began to take a toll on our relationship. I wasn’t consciously pushing him or anyone else out of the creative process. I would just write a song because I loved writing songs, and I’d present it to the band. As time went by, I was presenting song after song after song, and eventually I was creating, arranging, and teaching the guys all the parts—mostly, if not entirely, as a result of my love for songwriting.

Tim took an interest in the business of Stryper as well, and he got shunned—again—but not purposefully. He’d eagerly chime in to help out with promotions or business topics and we’d just dismiss it with a quick
“Don’t worry about it. Daryn or Mom will take care of it.”
He was being told in so many words,
“We’ve got it covered, just play your bass.”

After all of this, by the time we were making the
THWTD
record, he was basically handed some songs and told to play them. It was certainly not the best way to get the creative juices flowing in a band mate.

So as a band, we made the extremely tough decision to replace Tim on the record. He came in one day and made a pass at a few songs. He laid down parts for, I believe, two to three songs. The rest of us stayed at the studio well into the night discussing our disappointment in what we had heard that day. We decided, as a group, (along with our co-producer) to hire a replacement. Tim came in the next day expecting to record again, and our producer, Robert, Oz and I let him know we’d be using someone else for the album. Understandably, Tim was not happy with this decision.

One of the first guys we auditioned was Ricky Phillips (The Babys, Bad English, Styx) who was, and still is, an incredible player. However, for likely the same intangible reasons we chose not to use Tim on the album, we also chose not to use Ricky. Instead we settled on a guy by the name of Brad Cobb. Brad was a local session player and when he laid down some parts, it just felt right. So we went with our gut and we hired Brad to track all the bass lines for the record. All the while, thoughts of Tim lingered in our minds.

Would that record have reached the success it did had Tim played on it instead of Brad? We will never know. Maybe. Maybe not. But Brad did offer something solid and exactly what was needed for the style of music we were making—a slick and polished rock/metal record. Sonically, I’m happy about our decision to go with Brad, but for many other reasons, I wish we had given Tim more of a chance.

In all fairness to Tim, these were brand new songs and he just didn’t have a lot of time to live with them. But we should have given him the chance to work harder. We were a band that wasn’t acting like a band. We should have said
“Alright. So it’s not perfect. Let’s give him some time to work on this.”
But we didn’t.

From that point forward, I believe Tim felt disrespected, hurt, and offended—all legitimate and warranted feelings.

As if taking him off the album wasn’t enough, Tim would get a dose of this treatment twice in ’86. We somehow mended ways after his dismissal from the recording process, but then it came time to rehearse for the tour. Once again, we weren’t feeling it. So we let him go ... again.

This time we brought in a bassist named Matt Hurich. Matt suited up in a custom racing costume, designed by Ray Brown (for Matt, which was later lengthened for Tim), and we took a promo shot that would haunt us for years to come. Matt was in the band less than a month—never even played a show—yet this picture with him in it still shows up on posters and marketing materials to this day. It was as if we took the picture on Friday and by Monday Enigma had circulated it the world over along with a letter stating “This is the only Stryper picture you are to ever use!”

Matt was a good bass player who played in a band called Leatherwolf, but he played more in the style of Steve Harris from Iron Maiden. We sounded like Stryper with the bass style of Iron Maiden. Some of you are probably thinking
“Yeah? And that’s a bad thing?”
Let’s just say it just wasn’t Stryper.

Sitting there one day after rehearsals at SIR Studios in Hollywood, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Stryper is Michael Sweet, Robert Sweet, Oz Fox and Tim Gaines! Somehow when the four of us come together, faults and all, it becomes Stryper. Standing there rehearsing with Matt just felt wrong. Matt’s great, and I take nothing away from his abilities. It just wasn’t Stryper.

So once again, with our tails between our legs, we called Tim and said, “This isn’t working out with Matt. Would you consider coming back?” I wanted him back in the band badly and felt it was necessary for the future of Stryper.

Rob wasn’t so easily convinced, however. When Rob sets his mind to something, typically he sticks to it. And he had made up his mind that Tim was out. I had a talk with Rob and Oz and basically shared how wrong this all felt, that we needed Tim back. It was similar to the talk I had when Oz had left the band for a while in the early days. I’m not positive Rob was convinced this was the right move, but I give him credit for opening his mind and agreeing to it.

So Tim, reluctantly I would assume, came down to rehearsals. Before playing a note we all talked and prayed together. We let Tim know that we had made a big mistake and thankfully he rejoined the band.

I think to this day Tim’s confidence as a bass player is probably not quite as high as it should be because of those times in 1986, and for that I will forever live with regret.