Free Honestly: My Life and Stryper Revealed by Michael Sweet, Dave Rose, Doug Van Pelt

were a family now. And I was happy.

TWELVE
    I have a love/hate relationship with our Yellow & Black motif. Actually, it’s mostly a hate relationship. Just the thought of yellow and black and I begin to feel anxious and uneasy, wishing we had never gone down that road. It has been the single most persistent antagonist of my career.
    That is not to say I wish we had eliminated the motif all together, I just wish we had toned it down a bit. By the time Stryper was in full force, Rob had everything painted in yellow and black stripes. If it wasn’t yellow and black, it wasn’t on stage. I even remember Rob suggesting we dye our hair yellow and black. Seriously.
    Would Stryper have become successful without the yellow and black? I would argue we would have been even more successful. Although Rob was the first to introduce it, and push it to extremes that left me uncomfortable, I’m also to blame. It wasn’t as if we suddenly, in one day, painted everything we owned yellow and black. No, it started with the drum kit, then the guitars, then the clothing, then the mic stands, then the guitar cables, then the cars! One element at a time, and before I knew it, we were living in a striped world and I was getting a headache.
    Rob was always focused on the show whereas my focus was the music. Rob was the visual guy hence the name “The Visual Timekeeper”, and I was always the music guy. It’s always been that way as far back as I can recall.
    Rob was consistently and acutely on the lookout for our next big gimmick—Always on the search for new ideas. I can’t say for sure where he got the idea for yellow and black stripes, but I can say that he had an obsession with that combination of colors. As teenagers, long before the development of Stryper, we would go out and steal yellow and black road signs to line the walls of our studio. For me it was just fun to get rowdy and go out stealing road signs. For Rob it was a quest to acquire more yellow and black, or so it seemed.
    Rob was really into Kiss, and I think that played a role in his desire and need for us to have a visual gimmick. I liked Kiss too, but not like Rob did. I was more drawn to bands like Bad Company, Van Halen and Journey who had great songs, talent and production. I couldn’t care less what the band looked like. But Rob really enjoyed seeing a band and saying, “Look at those guys! Look at those outfits! Look at those lights, look at that stage!!!”
    In that sense I suppose we are the perfect Yin and Yang. Yet I can’t help but feel the attire, makeup, and glam of Stryper often detracts from the substance of the music and the message.
    We certainly weren’t the first band to introduce stripes into our overall theme. Honestly, a lot of things that fans may perceive as unique to Stryper aren’t that unique at all. We weren’t the first to do many of the things that became synonymous with Stryper. Matthias Jabs of The Scorpions, for example, used to wear stripes, as did David Lee Roth and Kevin DuBrow of Quiet Riot. Matthias even implied once in an interview that perhaps Stryper had stolen his yellow and black striped look. Perhaps we did subconsciously. I honestly don’t know how it all got started. I just know that I went along with it but I wasn’t necessarily a huge fan of it.
    We also weren’t the first to introduce a sideways drum kit either. I believe Kelly Keagy of Night Ranger was the first to do that.
    I would like to think the name Stryper largely came about because we had already donned stripes. That may have been part of it, but I’ve heard stories that the idea for the name Stryper may have been inadvertently planted in Rob’s head by a local band from Texas named Stryker, whom Rob supposedly had met in a local park several years earlier during our Roxx Regime days. Stryker, according to insider legend, had met Rob and told him about their band, even going so far as to telling him that they chose the name Stryker and spelled it with a