This Grand Strand Native enjoys life in the spotlight
Ask a handful of rock fans to describe Stryper. Chances are you’ll get different answers, but the most common description for the band is Christian heavy metal. Everything else is semantics. It might be better to borrow a Jack Black phrase from the 2003 film, “School of Rock,” and simply state that much of Stryper’s guitar-driven “heavenly metal” will melt your face.
Stryper was the first such band to enjoy mainstream success, and now boasts more than 10 million album sales globally. Its third record, “To Hell with the Devil,” released in 1986, was the first Christian metal album to go platinum and has long since achieved multiplatinum status. More than a dozen studio albums followed, including “In God We Trust,” “The Final Battle,” “When We Were Kings” and many more.
In November, Stryper finished up its 40th Anniversary Tour with a show at House of Blues Myrtle Beach, the culmination of 37 dates across the U.S. – and for bassist Perry Richardson, who joined the band in 2017, this meant that he could sleep in his own bed a short drive away. He was home.
Richardson’s current situation with Stryper follows a long association with country recording artist Craig Morgan, with whom he toured for many years – as well as a two-year stint with Trace Adkins. But he is perhaps best known as a founding member of FireHouse. Signed by Epic Records in 1989, FireHouse is arguably the last group from the hair band era to enjoy success as grunge began to dominate the rock sector.
CROSSROADS
Richardson grew up on a tobacco farm 10 miles outside of Conway.
He worked that family farm as a youngster, so did his only sister, Sheri Richardson Richard.
“Cropping tobacco is torturous. It’s some of the hardest work any human would probably have to do,” Richardson says, but he admits that working in tobacco instilled in him a solid work ethic – a trait that stood him in good stead for the rest of his life.
Early on, music factored into Richardson’s life, thanks to his father, Clayton Richardson.
“At 8, my dad got me interested in music,” he says. “He played in a country/bluegrass group, and they cut an album. They had a TV show in Wilmington (N.C.) on Sundays. We started a family gospel quartet and sang in churches.”
At this point, the only music Richardson was exposed to was country and gospel. One day when he was in the farm truck, everything changed. His uncle left an 8-track tape in the player – a Sly and the Family Stone album.
If there was a “crossroads” moment in his life, this was it.
“It changed my life,” Richardson says. “I never heard anything like that. I just went crazy, getting all the rock I could.”
This meant listening to all of his uncle’s albums and soaking up everything like a sponge. He also picked up his father’s bass, and this became his instrument of choice.
By age 14, Richardson was already putting bands together.
“I’d play bass and sing,” he says. “My dad played bass and acoustic guitar. Everybody on earth played guitar, so I thought I’d just play bass because it was hard to find a bass player.”
When he attended Conway High School, Richardson and a few friends formed a band and played their first real gig – the Miss Conway High Pageant.
“That was the start of it all,” Richardson says.
He earned a bachelor’s in business management at what is now Coastal Carolina University. Then called Coastal Carolina College, it was still under the umbrella of the University of South Carolina. His mother, Billie Mae Richardson, was strongly in favor of a college education for her son.
“She said, ‘I tell you what: You go to college and get your degree. If you decide not to enter the field that you graduated with, you can do your music thing and we’ll back you 100 percent and help you any way we can.’ Shortly after I graduated, I hit the road playing music.”
Proof of his father’s support came in the form of a practice studio.
“He built us a whole separate building from our house, man – put a stage in there and all this stuff. Of course, he was always on my case that I needed to quit rock ‘n’ roll and do country – but I told him I wanted to do rock, so he went along with it.”
Richardson had no idea then that he would later share stages with Morgan and Adkins.
“I wish he could have been there for my first time playing the Grand Ole Opry. It would have made his day.”
THE ROAD TO ROCK
In 1977, Richardson and a buddy went to the bygone Mr. Gatti’s Pizza in Myrtle Beach to check out a pay-per-view boxing championship. There they met a guy who was down from Pennsylvania for the summer, performing music at Gatti’s to make a bit of cash.
That musician was C.J. Snare, the eventual frontman for FireHouse.
Snare later returned to the beach with a band called Prophet – but he needed a bass player. Word got to Richardson through the music grapevine. Richardson and Snare had no idea they had met before – a realization that wouldn’t hit them for a long time.
“We met up and hit it off right away – and that’s when my dad built our rehearsal studio,” he says. Six months in, the band decided to take a heavier route. Richardson came up with the name Maxx Warrior – a nod to the film, “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.”
Maxx Warrior spent five years on the road and released an EP, but eventually disbanded because it became increasingly difficult to make ends meet, despite playing seven nights a week with only a week off each year.
Richardson was playing with Southern rockers Nantucket when he was contacted by members of a Virginia-based band called White Heat. He knew them well because they crossed paths several times on the road, playing the same bars. White Heat founder Bill Leverty and drummer Michael Foster wanted to join forces with Richardson and Snare – and that’s exactly what happened.
Richardson finished up his commitment with Nantucket and joined the others, who were already working on original material in Charlotte.
The band ultimately signed with Epic in 1989 under the name FireHouse.
FLASH FORWARD: FireHouse won the American Music Award for Favorite New Heavy Metal/Hard Rock Artist in 1992 and to this date has sold more than seven million albums worldwide, giving us hits like “Don’t Treat Me Bad,” “All She Wrote,” “Love of a Lifetime” and more.
In 2000, after the release of the band’s fifth album, “Category 5” on a new label – and after nearly a decade of touring in the U.S., Europe, South America and Asia – Richardson decided to move on.
“I was trying to give the band a different style or a little different sound – because we had done the same thing over and over,” he says. “We were butting heads a lot. They wanted to go back to what we were doing before, and it just didn’t feel like something I wanted to do at the time.”
FireHouse lives on but Snare passed away last year after a battle with stage 4 colon cancer.
“That killed me,” Richardson says. “It took me a while to get over that. We spent so much time together and if it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know if I’d ever have made it.”
GONE COUNTRY
For years, Richardson entertained thoughts about moving to Nashville to start a country band in the vein of bands he admired like Diamond Rio and Little Texas. He also figured a change would do him good; he could enjoy a much-needed break.
But that’s not what happened. Months after he made the move in early 2001, he found himself running monitors and eventually playing bass for Craig Morgan. This came about through Mike Rogers, a longstanding friend from Myrtle Beach who was then playing drums and serving as bandleader for Morgan.
Rogers, a multifaceted musician who is currently on tour with Ricky Skaggs as a member of Kentucky Thunder, says he met Richardson at age 10 and that their fathers played music together long before he was born – and the families remain close to this day.
“Craig said he needed a monitor engineer and I told him I had somebody,” Rogers recalls.
Richardson took the gig – and this morphed into singing background vocals.
“We had more parts than we could cover onstage, so we put a microphone by his console and he’d sing every night with us. It was so good,” says Rogers.
When Morgan’s bass player put in his notice, Richardson stepped into that role.
According to Rogers, Morgan had no idea about Richardson’s history with FireHouse.
“He thought we were messing with him. I’m like, ‘Craig, look it up. Perry’s big time. He ain’t no joke – this is the real deal.’”
Richardson said he had it in his head to stay in the gig for a little while until he could get his name out in the Nashville community, but continued to play for Morgan for well over a decade.
Along the way, Richardson got an offer from the Trace Adkins team.
“Their bass player had been in a bus accident and they asked me if I wanted to come over and take his place,” he says. “It was more money. I hated to leave Craig. I told him how much they were offering me, and he said he couldn’t get close to that. So I took the Trace gig and stuck it out for two years. I’m not going to go into it, but it just wasn’t working out.”
Richardson told Morgan about this and asked him to let him know if he heard of any opportunities. Morgan called Richardson a week later and hired him back.
“It was a couple more years I was with Craig until the Stryper thing fell in my lap – and I had to quit him again. Craig is a great guy and I love him to death, and he understood. He’s like, ‘at least they’re good Christian boys.’”
LOVE COMES TO TOWN
The Country Radio Seminar is an annual event in Nashville for radio and music professionals. Richardson attended in 2004. At the bar, he was introduced to now wife Shelley Richardson, then the assistant music director of WMZQ-FM, a country station in Rockville, Maryland.
Richardson said a friend named Chris Palmer made the introduction. Palmer, a former Myrtle Beach radio professional, was then working for the now-defunct Lyric Street Records.
“He had been trying to get her to meet me for a while,” Richardson says. “We hit it off immediately and something just clicked.”
Shelley Richardson also recalls they hit it off immediately.
“One of the first things I said to him was that Chris had been trying to introduce me to him for years since he knew that I was a huge FireHouse fan and a hair band fan,” she says. “We had an instant connection and we both felt like we had already known each other for a lifetime.”
A romance ensued, and while they tried the long-distance relationship route, Richardson’s Nashville home burned to the ground.
“There was nothing left,” says Shelley Richardson. “It wasn’t much longer after that, we decided to move in together and I would make my move to Nashville in August of 2005.”
They tied the knot in a simple ceremony at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in 2007, during the Academy of Country Music Awards Week.
“No wedding dress or tuxedo for us,” she notes. “We got married in jeans. I was working for a company that managed Little Big Town and Perry was playing bass for Craig Morgan and both artists were in attendance at our wedding. It was simple and easy with friends and family.”
Also in attendance was old friend Mike Rogers.
“Mike played acoustic and sang us a song – and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” Perry Richardson says.
STRYPER CALLING
The opportunity to play with Stryper came to Richardson after a friend, the late promoter Marty Burns, dropped his name to Stryper co-manager Dave Rose, owner of Deep South Entertainment. Turns out, Rose knew Richardson well.
Richardson explains: “Dave had this band, and the very first gig they ever played was opening for FireHouse at The Switch in Raleigh. I gave him pointers – things that we had done to help get us signed – and it made an impression on him. He called the guys up and said, ‘I think I’ve got your guy. Let’s give him a shot.”
The first step was for Richardson to learn four songs and then meet with the band at co-founder/frontman Michael Sweet’s house in Plymouth, Mass.
Sweet says that after everybody met Richardson and played a few songs with him, they knew he was the right guy for the job.
“It was important for us to fly him in and spend a little time with him before we made a decision. But we knew right away within the first few hours of talking to him and playing with him. Perry is obviously a great bass player, but he’s also a great vocalist. Vocals have always been a very important part of our sound, so that’s something that is at the top of our priority list,” says Sweet.
As for the show in Myrtle Beach, Sweet notes that no special arrangements were in play to ensure that this happened in Richardson’s neck of the woods.
“Obviously it worked out perfectly – the way it should have been,” says Sweet. “We’ve played House of Blues in Myrtle Beach before and to close the tour, performing there again was very exciting and it felt like coming home. And in actuality, it was a ‘coming home’ for Perry. It was a very special night and one that we will always remember.”
HOME ON THE STRAND
Richardson has been home for seven years. He and his wife live in Longs with their beloved Frenchies, Izzie and Maxx.
“I love the area, but I just wanted to be close to my sister, especially,” he says.
Richardson also has a lot of cousins. He cites one in particular, fellow musician Daryl Anderson, with whom he also grew up and now gets the chance to see regularly.
“I got into playing golf, and this is the best place to be for that,” he says. “I lucked up and found a lot on a golf course. I designed my own house and built what I wanted, and we’re very happy living on the 18th fairway. I don’t have to pay for golf balls anymore because my house gets hit every day.”
WPDE Chief Meteorologist Ed Piotrowski met Richardson at a golf tournament 30 years ago and says they have been friends ever since. Because of their busy schedules, the men have not played golf together often, but when they do, it’s all about having fun regardless of the scores.
“He’s like the rest of us,” Piotrowski says. “Lots of good shots but just as many bad shots. As he and I always say, it’s not about how good or bad you play, but how good of a time you have with the people you play with.”
Piotrowski cites Richardson’s humility as a defining trait.
“For a guy who is known worldwide, he’s as down-to-earth and humble as anyone you’ll ever meet. His wife, Shelley, is as cool and as down to earth as he is. Just awesome people to hang out with. I love the stories he tells about all the people he’s met and the places he’s been.”
A Stryper fan since high school, Piotrowski was excited to attend November’s House of Blues show.
“It’s interesting that the 40th Anniversary Tour wrapped up in Perry’s neck of the woods. The show was incredibly high energy and they brought down the roof. You’d think they were still in their 20s with the energy they brought,” he says.
Sister Sheri Richardson Richard says she and her brother have never had a single argument. She remembers a simple childhood in the country, movie trips to Myrtle Beach and cheeseburgers for practically nothing at Brant’s Burgers.
As far as brothers go, Richard says Richardson is the best.
“If I ever needed anything, he was there,” she says. I didn’t get in his way and he didn’t get in my way. We never complained about each other. That was rare.”
Richard recalls the time she saw Richardson perform with Nantucket at a party for the employees of the bygone Santa Fe Station in North Myrtle Beach, and watching her brother on TV as he accepted the American Music Award with FireHouse in 1992 – the very same day she had her first ultrasound when she was pregnant with her first child.
Richardson is a proud uncle to his now adult nieces, Savannah Smith and Bailey Richard.
When she saw her brother perform at House of Blues with Stryper, Richard says she picked up on a sense of hometown pride.
“I know a lot of fans were Stryper fans from way back, but knowing that Perry was from here, I think a lot of people were there because of him. And you could tell that he still loved it after all these years. That made me so proud.”
Perry Richardson: Career at a glance
1980 – 1986: Maxx Warriors (founding member)
1987-1988: Nantucket (bass/background vocals)
1989-2000: Firehouse (founding member)
1992: Firehouse wins American Music Award – “Favorite New Heavy Metal/Hard Rock Artist”
1995: Inducted – South Carolina Entertainment Hall of Fame
2003 – 2011: Craig Morgan (bass/background vocals)
2012 – 2014: Trace Adkins (bass/background vocals)
2014 – 2017: Craig Morgan (bass/background vocals)
2017 – Present: Stryper (bass/background vocals)
Discography:
With Maxx Warrior:
“Maxx Warrior” (EP – 1985)
With FireHouse:
“FireHouse” (1990)
“Hold Your Fire” (1992)
“3” (1995)
“Good Acoustics” (1996)
“Category 5” (1998)
“The Best of FireHouse” (1998)
“Bring ‘Em Out Live” (1999)
“FireHouse Super Hits” (2000)
With Stryper:
“God Damn Evil” (2018) – Note: He did not perform
on the record, but his name and photo are in there
as a bass player.
“Even the Devil Believes” (2020)
“The Final Battle” (2022)
“When We Were Kings” (2024)
“To Hell With The Amps” (2024)
STRYPER AROUND THE WORLD
Sweden Rock Festival 2025: Sölvesborg, Sweden – June 5
Rock Imperium Festival 2025: Cartagena, Spain – June 27
Rock Fest Barcelona 2025: Barcelona, Spain – June 29
Spyglass Ridge Winery: Sunbury, Pennsylvania – August 16
Jergel’s Rhythm Grille: Warrendale, Pennsylvania – August 17
Riverside Festival 2025: Aarburg, Switzerland – August 24
For tickets, added dates and everything Stryper, visit stryper.com.
Photographs by Steve Friedman Photography; Pedro Blanco/Pedro Blanco Photography; Jerry Hines; Roger Yale; Sheri Rischardson Richard; Perry Richardson; Shelley Richardson; Mike Rogers; Alison Toon Photographer & Jason Ashmawi
