David Draiman Reveals Rare-Known Moments About His First Joining To Disturbed
In a new appearance with Billboard, David Draiman, the lead singer of the American heavy metal band Disturbed, has recalled his first meeting with Disturbed and his joining to the band.
“I was in college, at the Loyola University of Chicago, and jamming with a couple of guys,” he said. “It was okay, but they had their own commitments… I started trying to, instead of putting together my own thing, to complete someone else.
“So I started auditioning. It must’ve been like 30, 40, 50 auditions. It was a lot. A bunch of them were interested in working with me, but I just didn’t see anything standing out with them.”
David mentioned that the band was just a cover band, but he was not interested in that. He touched that he wanted to write and do original materials.
“These guys would just learn a whole bunch of covers. I wasn’t really interested in becoming part of a cover band. I wanted to do original material, I wanted to write original material – and a lot of these guys would be able to do covers really well, but the minute that they pulled out a piece of original material, it wasn’t worth the time of day.
“Disturbed was a nice little breath of fresh air. I saw the ad that Danny [Donegan] and the guys had put out in the Illinois Entertainer [magazine],” he continued. “They were bragging that they had their own studio time already, and a deal in the works, and made it sound a lot closer to being already established and signed than they actually were.”
“They were smart about what they did have, though, and that impressed me. What was most impressive was walking in the door, we couldn’t have been more different from each other. I walked in, I was a total Loyola college student, North-side stoner mode: jean shorts, a white T-shirt, and sandals.
“These guys had on – I mean, they looked like Skid Row, with the flannel open to their belly buttons, the frayed jeans, acid-washed, and the Converse with the tongue thing out. I mean, the whole look.
“We looked at each other very wearily. They were used to doing the usual spiel, ‘What covers do you know?’ I said, ‘I know all kinds of covers, but with all due respect guys, I didn’t think you guys were a cover band – can we try and jam something together?” They said “We need to play something that we all know.’
“I’m, like, ‘Well, you have original material, right? Well, then why don’t you just play it, and let me just try something.’ They didn’t really know how to react to it – nobody had ever asked them to do that.
“I’m like, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll come up with something. Just give me a couple of minutes and let me hear what you guys have.’
“They started playing a piece of music, and it really was just heavy and rhythmic, it instantly grabbed me. I took a couple of minutes, and I figured out a melody that was appropriate, and a cadence that was appropriate – and I had a lyric that I had written for another song that I could kind of use for it.
“And a song that nobody expected to happen happened that day. We wrote the very first song during our very first time auditioning with one another, and that was ‘Want,’ one of the songs on ‘The Sickness.’”
The 46-year-old singer, David Draiman, has joined Disturbed in 1996.
Also, Disturbed released its debut album The Sickness, which was released on March 7, 2000, via Giant and Reprise Records.
