Stryper frontman Michael Sweet opened up about the moment he realized the band was achieving real mainstream success. He revealed how they once topped Bon Jovi on the MTV charts.
Sweet was asked when he first started realizing that Stryper was having real mainstream success. His response detailed a pivotal moment tied to the release of “To Hell with the Devil.”
“Well, I mean, when ‘To Hell with the Devil’ came out, the first time I realized it and I it was like a, you know, pardon my French, an O moment for me, that’s the only way to put it,” Sweet said. “That’s literally what I thought at the time, is when we I turned on MTV and our video was number one and Bon Jovi was number two or three.”
Sweet went on to explain just how significant that ranking was, given the competition at the time.
“Because Bon Jovi was as big as it got, right?” Sweet continued. “And then under that, you know, was Poison, which they were huge. And it just it was a real eye opener for me like, whoa, wait, what’s going on here? And that’s when I realized like, you know, something’s happening here, which is I can’t explain it. We can’t explain it, but something’s happening.”
He then reflected on how even the band’s label was caught off guard by their rapid rise, along with his own spiritual perspective on that period.
“And I think the label felt the same way. I don’t think they ever expected that for us to beat out bands like that on charts and we moved into arenas,” Sweet said. “We were playing arenas, headlining arenas. I don’t think anyone expected that including us. I mean more so us. But I think my personal view on that is we were at that time sold out to God. There came a time not long after that where we weren’t.”
Sweet closed out his reflection by acknowledging a difficult chapter that followed the band’s peak.
“We kind of like turned to the old man and went the other way and had a couple really bad years spiritually speaking,” Sweet said. “But at that time we were sold out to God and I think God was moving and doing things that would blow our minds and it blew our minds. We were like what the heck? You know, we couldn’t believe it.”
The numbers back up Sweet’s memory of that breakthrough era. The album’s trajectory tells its own story about just how far Stryper had come.
“To Hell with the Devil” became the first Christian metal album to go platinum, eventually selling over a million copies in the United States. The record held that title as the best-selling Christian metal album for years, a status that underscored how unusual Stryper’s crossover success truly was for a band built around an openly Christian message.
On the charts, the album peaked at No. 32 on the Billboard 200. The single “Honestly” climbed to No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. Both “Honestly” and “Free” reached No. 1 on Dial MTV in 1987, giving Stryper the kind of heavy rotation that put them in direct competition with the era’s biggest hard rock acts.
That period also marked a dramatic shift in the band’s touring fortunes, taking them from small venues to some of the largest stages in the country.
Sweet has described that shift in blunt terms, crediting the album with changing everything for the band almost overnight. “Those songs, particularly that album is what catapulted the band into crossover mainstream success,” Sweet said. “So we went from playing theatres to playing arenas and selling three or four hundred thousand units to selling a lot more than that.”
