In 2020, Disturbed had been set to do a 20th anniversary tour to celebrate their 2000 album “The Sickness” before that got shelved by the covid-19 pandemic. Now five years later, they’re marking their landmark album with a 25th anniversary tour instead.
“We’re excited to get back out and play some of these songs, which a bunch of them we haven’t played in quite some time,” guitarist Dan Donegan said in a recent phone call. “So to be able to play the full album and then some, it’s been awesome.”
The metal band kicked off their The Sickness 25th Anniversary tour last month in Idaho, and it hits PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on April 5, with Daughtry and Nothing More as openers.
Their album, which sold more than five million copies in the U.S., spawned such hits as “Down with the Sickness,” “Stupify” and “Voices.” Those will be featured, of course, as will the full album including lesser-played songs like “Want” and “Conflict.”
It’s exciting because obviously we’ve had such a long career and a deep catalog, and we can’t play everything so we have to pick and choose,” Donegan said. “Now that I’m playing these again, I’m really enjoying going back to them so hopefully in the future, maybe even after this anniversary tour, we start getting them a little bit more into the rotation.”
In March, the group released a 25th anniversary edition of the album, in a variety of formats, including B-sides, unreleased demos, live cuts and more. And on March 8, the band welcomed original bassist Steve “Fuzz” Kmak back for just one show in Chicago, where the group got its start.
In a call earlier this month from Louisville, Donegan discussed the one-night reunion, the music landscape in 2000, their new single and more:
What was it like to play with your original bassist Steve (Kmak) for one night in Chicago?
It was great. We felt like it was definitely something that we wanted to pay our respects to him and his contribution to the band and for the fans to be able to see it, for those who were there from the beginning, and the new fans who have never seen us in that lineup. We had some distance between us, obviously after we let him go late in 2003. But me and him, we were best friends back then. It was a tough time to have to make that decision, and it created some distance and the friendship suffered for a bit there.
But it was good, we reconciled a few years back, I think probably more so during covid. I reconnected with him and had just been hanging out a lot more. When this opportunity came up, me, David (Draiman) and Mike (Wengren) were talking about it. We wanted to also pay respect to John Moyer, our current bass player, and make sure that he was OK and understood, which he was, totally gets it. He’s just a classy, classy guy and totally gets how important this was, and paying our respect to him as well. So it was good, we just did that show. We had Steve play that whole first set, and then John came out to play the second set.
What was your vision for the live show? I read that there was a lot that you wanted to do, but there was some stuff you couldn’t make happen because it was too expensive.
Well, everything’s expensive nowadays with production. I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining because we’re in a great position. But I think a lot of things that happened since covid, I think a lot of these vendors, their prices have tripled since then because they suffered during covid too when they were out of work and nobody was touring. The pyro companies and the sound companies, lighting companies were all suffering with their business as well.
Then we all finally come back to normal — or whatever the new normal is then — and they’re trying to make up for their losses so their prices skyrocketed, and here we are. We’re just trying to put on the best show we can visually as well, so when we’re talking about these production ideas, I dream up these ideas of what it would be like. It’s easy to feel like a little kid going into a store and just picking out every toy you want. I’m just naming all these things that I envision and then we present it and then they reel me back in and say, OK, well you can’t have everything. You can, but you’re gonna be paying for it. So it was just a couple things that we had to peel back a bit, but nothing is hurting the show. It’s just wanting to give the best visual experience.
With the anniversary album, did listening to the demos bring back a lot of memories?
Yeah, absolutely. I had to dig through — I’m the guy in the band that saves everything — so I have all the memorabilia and all the old posters and ticket stubs and old demos and cassette tapes, if anybody remembers what those were. It was cool to go back. I talked to management and said, I think it would be really cool for the fans to hear the demos that we did when we were still a local band out of Chicago and those are what we used to shop around to record labels. They were just quick two-, three-day sessions. It was probably two days in the studio and then the third day was a mixing day because that’s all we could afford back then.
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We didn’t have a whole lot of money. We all had good jobs leading up to that, but back then, it was still a bit pricey to try to get a good quality demo. We thought it would be cool to share with the fans a more raw version of it, and it’s pretty true to form though. If you hear those demos, there’s really hardly any changes at all between the demo and the album, other than just one is a demo version and then the album is just a more refined, better quality version of it.
I think I noticed on “Down with the Sickness,” David may have added a couple of “oh ohs” on the album version vs. the demo version.
That could be the case. I think some of those little animalistic grunts might have come out a little bit more.
Yeah, I didn’t want to try to do my impersonation of that…
I can’t do it either, so… (laughs)
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What stands out about the music landscape when that album was first breaking out in 2000? Is there anything in particular? Ozzfest had to have helped out a lot for Disturbed.
Ozzfest was a huge stepping stone in our career, and I think at the time when we were writing these songs — we got David in 1996 — so at that point, we all came from whatever our backgrounds of music were. There are a lot of similarities, too, with some of the metal bands and hard rock bands that we listened to, but there was still a variety of other artists that we also were influenced by. And I think, us just getting in a room and just improvising, we didn’t really talk about a direction that we wanted to go. We just kind of naturally played the way we played, and I would just play a riff of what came naturally to me, and we would work on a beat around that, and then David would just kind of improvise on top of that, and it just came naturally.
Of course at that time, there were a lot of these nu metal bands that were out, so there were some common bands that we were into, like Korn and Tool and Sevendust, and some of those bands that came out in the mid to late ‘90s. So there was definitely some influence from those current bands at the time, but we also came from the old school metal bands of Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica, Pantera. In the grunge days, I was big into Soundgarden and Alice in Chains, Faith No More.
So we had a long list of artists that we were into, and it just came naturally as we started improvising. After we got a record deal, and like you mentioned being on OzzFest 2000, that really was a big platform for us. It was the opportunity to be put in front of those large audiences every day. Even though we were on the second stage set up in the parking lot, we knew we had to make a statement. It was a lot of great bands that were on that tour and coming out, and everybody’s trying to make their mark. I think our first show was in West Palm Beach, Florida, and it was probably at like 10 a.m. in the morning. But it was great. We knew the opportunity was there, that even that early in the morning, the fans were starting to show up, and it was a great opportunity.
The band also released a new song, “I Will Not Break,” in February. Is that a one-off or is that a precursor of an upcoming album?
“I Will Not Break,” it kind of came last fall when we were out in L.A. just working on new material, getting the ideas going. It came late in the writing session. We had a bunch of material already tracked and ready to go and then I was just feeling really inspired after digging up some old demos. I was in that mindset of some of the feel and the vibe of the old-school, early Disturbed. I just picked up the guitar one day in the studio and told my producer — I had a day of tracking guitars already set up for that day — I’m like, let’s put that on hold. I want to go with something new. I want to work on something new.
I just felt really inspired. I said, I want some just heavy groove and old-school vibe and build on this long intro. I always wanted something with a longer buildup, like a Metallica kind of intro, a little longer extended version. And it was just coming together really good. And I presented it — David wasn’t there that day — but when he came back in, I don’t think he was, at the time, I think he had his plate full and didn’t really want any more material because I already had a lot that he had to catch up on. And I’m like, dude, here’s another new one. You got to listen to this one. And then I think once he heard it and the heaviness of it and the groove of it, he just started scatting ideas, and we knew it had to be a priority.