Disturbed are undoubtedly one of the biggest Metal bands around with album sales in excess of 11 million and counting, from their debut release ‘The Sickness’ in 2000 they have either been on tour or in the studio recording and there is truly no sign of them slowing down as they continue to become bigger and bigger. This can be witnessed on the amazing documentary ‘Decade of Disturbed’ that gives fans an insight into the bands beginnings and how they went on to be where they are today.
Continuing on with this tradition of relentless touring, they are currently in Australia in support of their fifth studio album ‘Asylum.’ We were able to sit down with guitarist Dan Donegan and drummer Mike Wengren to discuss the tour, Australian audiences as well as how they choose their trademarked cover songs and their possible plans for an Acoustic album.
So, come on get down with Disturbed…
I saw the show on Monday and thanks for the severe case of rock neck, but seriously, the show is amazing. How have you been enjoying the tour so far?
Dan – Unbelievable, yeah its been great, I mean we love and I’m not just saying it, we love coming here every time and each time it’s been getting bigger and bigger for us and now to be able to be at a level to be able to be playing in front of so many people and now be able to bring the production that we’re bringing for the first time, it’s exciting for us because this level of production has only really been seen in the US and Canada. So for us to be able to bring it for the fans over here is a whole new level.
Now as you mentioned in regards to the production, I thought the show was visually awesome, in particular the intro, even though you weren’t in it, how much fun was that to make?
Dan – No not really in it, I somewhat wrote the treatment for it for the beginning for the shoot and semi directed it, so we don’t personally we don’t really like to be in videos, or like to do them, it’s kind of the same thing over and over, usually every treatment you read says ‘The band is rocking out harder than ever before’ and its always something kind of cheesy. This whole thing this was the first time of actually trying to come up with the visual for the live show and do that so it was just kind of a do that and came up with the treatment for it to have David in this Asylum in this mental hospital, and you know, you’ve seen the rest of it so we thought it was just a nice way to build up the intro and instil that kind of anticipation for the start of the show.
Is there anything about Australian audiences that differ to those from elsewhere in the world?
Mike – I just think their level of energy is just amazing, I think we go in the States and we play tour after tour after tour and they’re used to getting us all the time so I think they’re a little bit spoiled, but here everyone realises we’re only going to come down once a record cycle maybe so they’re very appreciative and they make sure they come to the shows and make sure they sing every lyric and that’s just so awesome.
So, no cheating because we’re in Sydney, but who has been the best crowd so far?
Mike – Melbourne and Sydney I think, they’re pretty neck and neck
Dan – Yeah they’re pretty neck and neck, a lot of it is similar size in shows too, Sydney might have had a little bit more people, slightly, or is it the other way around?
Mike – I think it was Melbourne actually
Dan – Yeah Melbourne had maybe a couple of hundred more, but the energy level was great. I mean, all the audiences, we cant really just single one out but like Mike said, when you see them singing the words back to you and when everybody’s getting gig neck from rocking out, it’s great, we know that it’s translating.
Mike – If you had to compare, and maybe order what shows are the best and what shows are the worst, there really isn’t any worse shows out here, but I would rather play the worst shows out here, ten times over the States best show. Yeah, no B.S. I mean honestly, there hasn’t been one bad show, all the shows have been off the hook, the cities are great, the people are great, I keep saying to our management company, can we figure out other cities to play here? And they said ‘You guys are covering them all!’ ha ha
And a guilty pleasure of mine at a concert, I love fire so when that went off I was rockin’ and that shit is hot. I’ve always wanted to know, how hot is it for you up on stage?
Mike – Ours as well. You know, its definitely hot for a couple of seconds but it looks cool as hell so you just suck it up, but honestly when we’re up there and the adrenalin is flowing, it just feels so primal, the fire comes up and it’s just ‘arghhhh’ and you’re just getting into it so much more. I love it.
How hard did you have to fight to get a drum solo included in the set ha ha
Mike – I actually didn’t fight at all, the guys suggested, they recommended it. I’ve done one here and there, we think it’s a good way to end the set and it’s a good segue into our signature song ‘Down With the Sickness’ and just a nice way to space it out, it gives another element to the set. We, on this tour cycle we’ve been doing a lot of just one hour shows because we’ve been playing a lot of festival situations or other situations where there are just a lot of bands so you’re limited. So now this particular tour we have some more time and we can expand by adding some more elements, some more dynamics to the set and it’s been pretty cool.
How do you choose the set? Does it change up or is it pretty much the same?
Dan – Well because of the level of production we have to stay pretty true to the set because of safety reasons because of the pyro, so we need our crew and everybody to be in sync and on board and know when it’s coming and when it’s not. If we wanted to change when we woke up tomorrow morning and said we wanna change the set then lets change it, but we won’t do it on the spot, as our crew needs to be aware of any changes, we don’t need anybody stepping in the line of fire and any accidents happening.
How do you get such a full heavy sound out of just four guys up on stage? The sound is huge.
Dan – Well a lot of it sometimes we’ll have John our bass player will have a guitar amp AB’d with his bass rig so sometimes he’ll kick that on and it’ll be like if I go into a solo, he’ll kick on the distorted one and he’ll have a bass and a distorted one going, you know, keeping it full. And then maybe some underlying keyboard, some deep bottom end stuff.
Now are there any plans for a live concert DVD from this tour?
Dan – Not for this tour, we don’t have the camera crew out to get it. It’s definitely unfortunate that we’re missing some of this to be able to document it other than our own personal cameras and that, but it’s definitely something to consider down the road, we’re always trying to push something out and give to the fans to see live performances and it’s building to a level here now that it’s something we’d consider to doing down the line. You know, we’ve had home videos and stuff that we’ve released before and our Decade of Disturbed that we gave out free on the purchase of this last album because we wanted to give it to our fans for them to see us on a worldwide level and for anyone that has maybe never seen the band before or maybe we’ve never been to certain countries they’re able to see what we’re about.
So talk me through the concept of’ Music As a Weapon’… how did that all come about?
Dan – Basically during the success of our first album ‘The Sickness’ once we got to a level of headlining in the States, we wanted to put together a tour of picking some of our favourite bands and just putting together a strong bill. The term ‘Music As A Weapon’ was a lyric taken from one of our songs ‘Droppin Plates’ and it was just meant to join forces of this genre, these types of bands to just kind of stand up against everything else that dominates the charts, the pop music, the hip hop and everything else that dominates it, it’s us joining forces to show there’s a large Heavy Metal fan base out there that you cant deny. So over the years we’ve just picked bands that we’re fans of and just tried to put on a big bill.
Anyone that you want to work with that you haven’t played with yet?
Dan – God, we’ve toured and crossed paths with so many bands…
Mike – The chances are, if you name somebody, we’ve either met them or played a show with them in some capacity with them throughout the years and we’ve been really fortunate and everybody’s been great
Dan – Yeah we’ve played with just about every body ha ha
Mike – From new to old, to our peers, to our idols, I mean everybody in between, we’ve had the opportunity to play with just about everybody.
I’m also tipping from David’s comments the other night that the duet with Justin Bieber is not on the cards anytime soon?
Dan – Ha ha no plans for that
Mike – Who? Ha ha
Now, normally I’d ask about influences for your music but instead I want to know what album made you want to be a rock star?
Dan – I mean for me personally, I don’t know if I could single out just one album, I think the fact that at the time just the classic metal bands that I grew up to, I just remember I had to sneak to my neighbours house because my neighbour across the street, his parents were the hippies in the neighbourhood and they had Black Sabbath albums and stuff like that and I knew that was stuff that was never played in my house. So it made you want to see what else was out there. I just remember going over there and hearing ‘We Sold Our Soul For Rock and Roll’ and my first album that I bought though was Led Zeppelin 2, and that was pretty inspirational to me, but like I said, once I got into Sabbath and Iron Maiden and all these albums that, it’s not that they weren’t allowed in my house but my parents weren’t listening to that stuff ha ha and my neighbours parents were and it just seemed that we had to sneak it and it was just so wrong to do that and that’s what I loved about it.
Mike – Yeah it was a similar situation, I wanna say ‘Number of the Beast’ was probably, on vinyl was one of the first records I heard and one of my buddies had it at the time and it was the same situation, we used to go sneak into his room and put the record on and it was just like wow there’s really something here and from that point on I was pretty much hooked.
I want to ask about the cover songs as there’s always one that appears on the albums, how do you decide what to cover?
Dan – We’ve taken songs that we feel are a challenge to take them from that lighter rock original sound and just putting our stamp on it. When we did ‘Shout’ it’s something we were doing before we were signed and it started there, the lyrics in the song are kind of primal, we thought we could really just musically put our stamp on it so we started doing it around the clubs as we were coming up and the fans liked it and we ended up putting it on the first album and when we did ‘Land Of Confusion’ it was more or less that we already had the material written for the album, and John our bass player was his first album with us, we were waiting to get into the studio with our producer Johnny K and he was finishing up a previous project so I brought it up to the guys and said ‘What do you think about doing this song?’ Musically I thought we could put our stamp on it and make it syncopated and before we even really said anything to David, because we thought he might just shoot it down if we talk about it, let’s just do it musically and show him where we can go with this and that’s basically what we do. We just kinda demoed it, a real simple version of it and not the best quality but at least it got the message across, it was syncopated, it rocked so we just decided to do it. This last one with doing the U2 track, was more of a bonus, it was more of a hidden track, that’s why we didn’t number it on the CD or nothing. It was just another thing of here’s the biggest rock band in the world and sometimes that may seem sacrilegious with certain bands but we thought once again, its fun, it’s fun to be pushed and challenged and make it your own.
Have you ever gotten feedback from the artists you’ve covered?
Mike – With ‘Shout’ with Tears for Fears their original bass player Curt Smith, we happened to be in the studio just finished recording it and he was in town for a particular music conference and one of our managers knew him and invited him over to check it out and it was an amazing experience to have him sit behind the console and listen to our version of his song. He just turned around and looked at us and was just blown away. It was an amazing moment.
Now Dan you have producer credits on the album, but Mike you took a Co Producer role on Asylum, how was that this time around to have a say on the other side of the desk?
Mike – Well Danny really mans the helm when it comes to the production front, he really has a gift for it, and David and I are more there as so he can bounce ideas off and go back and forth, and we have our input but for the most part it’s usually up to Danny over here. I can’t take as much credit as he deserves it ha ha.
What about the possibility of doing an acoustic album, have you thought about putting a different spin on some songs?
Dan – You know, for the longest time, we’ve been asked that a couple of times before and for a while I thought oh these songs are just meant to be performed plugged in and be loud and powerful and heavy, but going back to that same thought on the cover tunes, I wouldn’t rule it out completely, I mean, we took one of our songs ‘Remember’ and we thought lets try a different version of that live just to spice it up and change it up and bit and I thought that turned out really cool. We started doing and acoustic version of it and then it went into the distorted part of it like half way through the song so I thought it was cool and good to challenge ourselves again and do something that’s a little bit different. Personally I wouldn’t rule it out, if we could come up with some cool versions of it and if the vibe seemed right and if it’s some that we felt was just a nice change for once then something to consider.
Watching the ‘Decade of Disturbed’ documentary is an amazing insight into the band. Are you still recording footage and what do you see the next ten years having in store?
Dan – I mean we try to record as much as we can, we were fortunate for the first ten years we were employing a videographer to document everything and he was all full time with us, and then over the past few years Warner Brothers started to employ them but they were being more selective on when they would come out as they didn’t want them out full time, so they’d pick and choose so we’ll see, I’m not sure, as long as we still have the fire and desire to keep doing it. I would imagine that we will, once its in your blood, even when we come off of tour and you’re looking forward to coming home at the end the whole cycle because you want to sleep in your own bed and actually put your clothes in a closet instead of living out of a suitcase, but then you’re home for a little bit and then you start missing it because we are addicts when it comes to music, it’s our drug of choice, you kind of get away from it and you want it, you cant be away from it for too long. I don’t know, I mean as long as the fans keep us hungry for it, when we can come half way across the world like this and the crowds have been getting bigger for us and the reactions have been getting bigger and they’re singing not just the old songs but the new songs then it seems to be working still.
And are you getting off the road and heading straight back into the studio or are you due for a rest for a while?
Dan – We’ll definitely take a rest this time, it’s been non stop for us for as long as we can remember, even before we were signed in 99, I’ve been together with Mike for the first time since 92 and we’re workaholics, so even as we were a local band we were working our asses off and just constantly promoting and trying to get the word out there and playing shows, and every album cycle has been tour, tour, tour and come off, write, go in the studio, record and go back out again. It’s been like that pretty much non stop with very little time off, so we’ll see, like I said, we’ll take that short break and we’ll see if we’re getting that itch again to get going right away then it will be quick.
Are you always writing though out on the road?
Dan – Here and there, I’ll either record it to my phone or in the States we bring a mobile pro-tools rig out with us, I’ll record a riff here and there and then we don’t do any full band writing until we get home, then I’ll go back and listen to the old ideas and see if they still do anything for me riff wise and I’ll piece together some of those ideas and Mike will start coming down to my house and we’ll just start throwing some beats around with it and kind of just vibe it out musically, and once we’ve got something that we feel good about then we’ll present it to David to see what that sparks out of him, like a ‘Here you go, do something with this.’ Ha ha.
So hopefully over the next ten years we’ll still see you around, still rocking out and selling out stadiums for us.
Dan – Sure, if the Rolling Stones can keep going strong then we’ll be feeling it too as we get older and aching, but we’ll say that and we’ll joke around like your back hurts or your knee hurts or whatever and we’re getting older doing it but music does also keep you young too, like I’ll look back at friends that we went to school with like they live like they’re old but we live like we’re teenagers, yes we have responsibilities and we have wives and kids but the music makes us feel young.
Essential Information
From: Chicago, IL, USA
Band members: David Draiman- Vocals, Dan Donegan- Guitar, Mike Wengren- Drums, John Moyer- Bass
Website: http://www.disturbed1.com
