...Y&T and Stryper are all big faves of mine but their 1985 albums I rate either their weakest or close to.
Agreed. BUT in Y&T's defense, I completely understand why that album is the way it is. Did they completely "sell out" and abandon musical integrity for the sake of trying to get a more commercially acceptable sound? Yeah, they did. But they are also a band that had at that point tried to "do it their own way" for over a decade and 6 albums while getting shafted by the music industry the entire way, whether it be Herbie Herbert booking them to second-rate gigs in the early days so he could devote more time and energy to his other pet project (some obscure band called Journey, featuring some Santana reject on guitar, apparently), to London records going under and retaining
all the rights to the band's first two albums, to A&M never generating any promotion whatsoever for Earthshaker, Black Tiger, Mean Streak, or In Rock We Trust.
By the time 1985 came around, they were a band that was always just one small step and one missed opportunity away from being huge at every turn, and they were tired of it and desperate to try anything to try to break through. That must have been especially painful when you consider all the bands that were previous openers for Y&T that had gone on to hit it big (Van Halen, Ratt, Motley Crue, Dokken, and on and on).
By 1985, the label basically told the band they were on their own and had revoked any support whatsoever. The band were desperate to get anybody's ear, so when they were mixing their new soon-to-be-released live album, Open Fire, they parked the mixing van in the label's parking lot and let whatever they were working on blare through the speakers. At those shows where the live tracks for that album were recorded, they had debuted a new tune that was still rough around the edges called "Summertime Girls." One of the label execs heard it blaring from the van in the parking lot and said it sounded awesome, demanded that they immediately cut a studio version to go on the live album as the next single, and demanded that the next album sound like that. And, viola! That's how we got Down For The Count.