Ms. Mishap of The Vinyl Mishappenings recently sat down with Stryper guitarist Oz Fox to discuss 30+ years of battling the devil, and whether or not the original Stryper lineup will continue; an excerpt follows:

Stryper is going on a little bit of a break. Michael Sweet had hinted at some trouble within the band in his last interview, is this a reason for the time off?

Oz Fox: “Well it’s a number of things. A lot of it is Michael has a lot projects coming up that he wants to take time off to do, which is fine by me because I’ve got a lot of stuff going on here in town. As I get older in age, I kind of want to set myself up so that I’ll have more opportunities here in Vegas so that someday if I ever stop touring with Stryper, I can maybe stay here and work as a musician. He (Michael) definitely is going to be doing a second album with George Lynch. He also just released a solo album and wants to go out and tour that a little bit, and we (Stryper) are going to be playing on the Monsters of Rock Cruise the first week of February.”

Does that mean it will be the original lineup playing the Monsters of Rock Cruise come February?

Oz Fox: “As far as I know yes, but Tim (Gaines) our bass player is going through some personal issues and we're trying to let him work all of that stuff out. It’s no secret anymore, but he’s going through a divorce so we’re giving him time to work those things out. As far as I know, he’s looking like he’s on his way to making all of that stuff in his life correct and fixed, and then we’ll see where he stands after he’s all done with that; I know he wants to keep touring. It’s a very difficult thing to go through a divorce, it’s difficult for everybody. We’re very close to him and his wife, so it hurts us as much as it hurts them... as far as I know he’s going to be on the cruise with us. Then the only other thing I can say after that is there are plans to do another Stryper album, so we'll see how that goes later on.”

Do you think any of this will delay that new album?

Oz Fox: “I think there were plans to possibly get on it in January, it hadn’t been booked or anything. But once this whole thing started happening with Tim, we thought it was a better idea to just postpone everything. We decided to maybe wait until later on in the year. I think it’s good for us to just give him time to do his thing and deal with his issues, and then later on we can come back together after everything is already healed over.”

To read the complete interview, visit this location.