johnnycnote

January 18, 2013 at 6:18pm

Once in the latter half of the 80's, I was at a music store in San Francisco where we'd purchased a lot of stuff. There was a copy of BAM (Bay Area Music) on the counter, and I caught a glimpse of the cover photo.

"Who's this hooker (I'm sure I used another word) looking girl?" I thought. Indeed, she had overly teased blonde hair (color probably from a bottle), all sorts of heavily applied make-up, like she was either trying to hide her age, or had bad eyesight and over-applied it in order to be able to see it without her glasses.

Or maybe she'd never outgrown her adolescent days of experimentation with "being grown-up" and raiding her mother's make-up stash. Even the heavy red lipstick was thick enough to cover dozens of pairs of lips in more reasonable quantities.

Then I noticed some hairs on "her" chest! "What the hell?" I probably said out loud.

The people in earshot looked my way, so I asked "who the hell is this?".

"Oh, he's with Stryper," someone explained. "It's a Jesus band".

That was my introduction to Stryper. Now I read that they're going to re-record their "classics", to which I'm inclined to conclude they must not have any decent new songs, so they'll pull the old "re-release our 'classics'" trick.

That's Stryper . . .