Stryper frontman Michael Sweet recently recalled how it felt to top the MTV charts above massive acts like Bon Jovi and Poison, sharing his memories during an appearance on Chris Jericho.
When asked about when he first realized the band was experiencing real mainstream success, Sweet detailed the moment they saw their video reach the number one spot.
“Well, I mean, when ‘To Hell with the Devil’ came out, the first time I realized it and it was like a, you know, pardon my French, an ‘oh’ moment for me, that’s the only way to put it,” Sweet said. “That’s literally what I thought at the time, is when I turned on MTV and our video was number one and Bon Jovi was number two or three.”
“Because Bon Jovi was as big as it got, right? And then under that, you know, was Poison, which they were huge,” Sweet continued. “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.”
Sweet also noted that neither the band nor their record label expected this level of success, which eventually led them to headline arenas.
“And I think the label felt the same way,” Sweet said. “I don’t think they ever expected that for us to beat out bands like that on charts and we moved into arenas. 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.”
He went on to reflect on the band’s spiritual state during that peak period compared to the years that followed.
“We kind of like turned to the old man and went the other way and had a couple really bad years spiritually speaking,” Sweet added. “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.”
Sweet’s memory of that era points back to a record that quietly reshaped the boundaries of Christian rock. Released by Enigma Records on October 24, 1986, “To Hell with the Devil” became the band’s third studio album and their commercial breakthrough. The timing of its rise matched Sweet’s account of switching on MTV and finding Stryper ahead of the biggest names in hard rock.
“To Hell with the Devil” peaked at No. 32 on the Billboard 200 and went on to sell over one million copies in the United States, making it the first Christian metal album to achieve platinum status. The album also earned the band a Grammy nomination, cementing its place as the best-selling Christian metal record of its era.
The MTV success Sweet described is backed up by the numbers. The music videos for “Free” and “Honestly” both ranked No. 1 on MTV’s list of most-requested videos throughout 1987, while “Calling on You” reached No. 2. That run kept Stryper among the most visible hard rock bands on the network during the genre’s commercial peak.
Those figures help explain why the comparison to Bon Jovi and Poison felt so surreal to Sweet at the time. Bon Jovi’s “Slippery When Wet” sold over 28 million records worldwide, more than any other album to emerge from the hair metal era. Stryper’s platinum milestone was smaller in scale, but it was unprecedented for a band of their genre.
The gap between those two worlds is precisely what made the moment stick with Sweet. A Christian metal band from California was sharing MTV’s top spot with the biggest pop-metal acts of the day, and neither the group nor its label had anticipated it. For a brief stretch in 1987, Stryper’s videos were the most requested on the network, and the band was headlining arenas alongside the artists Sweet had once watched from the other side of the screen.
