Honestly: My Life and Stryper Revealed by Michael Sweet, Dave Rose, Doug Van Pelt Read Free Book Online Page A

do in 2 minutes—let’s pray because we forgot to.”
    Prayer in the early days of the band was a lot less rushed. We would take time to not only talk to God, but to each other. Our faith was alive and real, not just a set of doctrines that we all agreed on intellectually. We had a very personal relationship with God.
    Before shows we would meet and without thinking about it, we would take the time to sit, talk and pray. Sometimes we’d have crew and friends in the room and there would be a dozen or more people gathered. We’d dim the lights and just talk and pray. We’d pour everything out to one another, and many times it led to tears. Other times it was just short and simple, but always real.
    I think just the fact that we never prayed the same way twice shows me that it was not ritualistic at all. We just completely opened our hearts and laid everything out. Sometimes we’d spend an hour or more praying and talking and it would get pretty deep, yet other times it was short and light-hearted. We did it because we wanted to. All of us genuinely looked forward to prayer. It bonded us together more than we ever could have imagined.
    This is what the “behind-the-scenes” was like when we were just getting started. And we weren’t shy about it either. If you were around when we prayed, I don’t care if you were the house sound guy, the janitor, the bouncer or whatever... if you were standing nearby, we’d invite you to join us. It was casual yet amazingly powerful.

NINE
    “Whose birthday is it?” I asked one of the people at Enigma Records on the first day we met with the label.
    The candles and cake were a dead give-away. But it wasn’t your typical one or two candles on a cake type setting. There were candles everywhere in the office, almost like some ambient mood lighting for the occasion. Either way, I just assumed it was somebody’s birthday. Or maybe I was just making small talk because I was a nervous wreck about the meeting with Bill and Wes Hein (label founders and owners).
    Come to find out, I was right. It was somebody’s birthday.
    On the day we took our first meeting with Enigma Records, the entire office was celebrating the birthday of Aleister Crowley, one of the most influential occultists of all time who is recognized by many as a key predecessor to Satanism.
    “Wow. This is no way to start.” I thought. “Probably not the right label for us. Oh well. We’re here. We may as well take the meeting.”
    Had we not already been escorted half way down the carpeted hallway lined with gold records and album marketing posters when I found out whose birthday it was, I probably would have turned around and left.
    Glad I didn’t.
    Since the addition of Tim Gaines, we had really been working hard trying to get the coveted record deal. Hair bands were starting to get signed and we just couldn’t seem to cross that bridge from the land of “Semi-Popular Sunset Strip Band” over to “Major Label Band Ready To Conquer The World.”
    It was frustrating. We’d hear all these stories of this band or that band taking meetings with labels. We’d here about so-and-so showcasing for this label or for that label. We were dancing with local success, but no labels were interested, until we met with Enigma.
    A week prior, Robert and I carefully pieced together a faux record jacket/sleeve and the infamous early “demo” cassette to send to Enigma. We creatively labeled it with a thin-tipped black Sharpie and a yellow highlighter with the words “ROXX REGIME DEMO.” We taped the package closed and placed it in a padded envelope scheduled for overnight delivery just a few cities away in Torrance.
    By 10:30 the next morning we received confirmation that the package had arrived, and we exercised what little self-control we had and didn’t follow up with a phone call. We had decided that if they didn’t call us by the end of the week, we’d call them.
    They received the demo on a Tuesday and called us that