Former Stryper bassist Tim Gaines is working on his autobiography. In the book, which does not currently have a tentative release date, Gaines will write about his experience with chronic lyme disease, with which he was diagnosed more than a decade ago.
He says: “I was infected by a tick in 2008. Ten days into the infection, I was sent to the ER, being told by an urgent care doctor that I was having a heart attack. In the months that followed, one of the first indications that something was desperately wrong with my system was I started having fatigue and night sweats. As the fatigue came and went, I experienced unusual body sweats while playing on stage. I would become embarrassingly ‘soaked’ in sweat after only a few songs.”
Gaines was fired from Stryper in August 2017 and was eventually replaced by ex-Firehousebassist Perry Richardson.
The musician’s exit from Stryper had been rumored for months, ever since guitarist Oz Foxrevealed that Tim was going through a divorce, forcing the group to take a hiatus and possibly consider a future without the bassist.
Gaines told KNAC.COM that “all hell broke loose” after he split up with his previous wife, “which is taboo as far as Christianity, I guess.” He added: “I’m not the only guy in Stryper to have gotten a divorce. Everybody in the band is married to divorced people. And I’m the bad guy, but everybody else has done it too, so? Whatever. Live in glass houses and everything will be exposed at some point or another.”
A few days later, the remaining members of Stryper released a statement denying that Gaines‘s divorce was a factor in their decision to part ways with the bassist and blaming Tim‘s “erratic and hostile behavior” for his dismissal from the group.
In an interview with music writer Joel Gausten, Stryper frontman Michael Sweet claimed that “things were going terrible” prior to Gaines‘s dismissal from the group. “It was a nightmare, to be honest,” he said. “That was just based on a lot of stuff going on internally within the camp and whatnot — things that were being said online and done, tarnishing the brand and the name and all that stuff. It was a real bummer. We’ve parted ways; we let Tim go, and we really had no choice.”