Stryper guitarist Oz Fox provides details of personal issues plaguing bassist Tim Gaines

Stryper guitarist Oz Fox provides details of personal issues plaguing bassist Tim Gaines

Stryper guitarist Oz Fox was recently interviewed by Ms. Mishap of the Vinyl Mishappenings and the former talked about the Christian group taking a break in the new year and the reasons for that.

Fox stated: “Well it’s a number of things. A lot of it is Michael [Sweet] 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 and 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 and he also just released a solo album and he wants to go out and tour that album a little bit and we (Stryper) are going to be playing on the Monsters of Rock Cruise the first week of February.”

In terms of whether Stryper will have their original line-up at the upcoming Monsters of Rock Cruise, Fox stated: “As far as I know yes, but Tim our bass player is going through some personal issues and were 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 and 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 and 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 and these things do happen in the Christian world and I want to reference back to a lot of those really hardcore conservative Christians; it’s very taboo to see somebody, especially in the lime light, going through that kind of thing and so a divorce is one of those kind of bad words. Now there are a lot of Christians who understand. I understand the situation because I went through a divorce myself in 2006 with my first wife. It’s very difficult it really is, but we’re going to give him time to do that and go through and deal with his issues and as far as I know he’s going to be on the cruise with us and then the only other thing I can say after that is there are plans to do another Stryper album so well see how that goes later on.”

In terms of the impact of Gaines‘ divorce on the new Stryper album, Fox opined: “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 and after everything is already healed over have a solid time of being able to work together.”

You can read the rest of the interview with Fox at Vinyl Mishappenings.