Host Abe Kanan recently welcomed frontman David Draiman of Disturbed for a special Audacy Check In, just before the band hits the road on their North American trek in celebration of 25 years since the release of their debut album, 'The Sickness.'

Looking back at 25 years of ‘The Sickness,’ Abe remembers vividly purchasing Disturbed's debut CD at Tower Records, which happened to have two concert tickets stuffed inside for the release party at Chicago’s Metro.

“We put ‘em in there,” Draiman admits. “We were trying to get people to come. It was kind of an important show, you know what I mean? So, giving them away, selling them… we weren't about making money at the time. We weren't about selling our own tickets, we’d give them away. We didn't care.”

"We just wanted bodies in the room and we were definitely our own street team in many ways,” he explains. “If there were four shows going on in Chicago at a given night, if there was one at the Aragon, one at the UIC Pavilion, one at United Center, we'd hit them all. The band would split up with all of our promotional materials and, to me, that was always the easiest way to get directly to the fans. Here are the fans coming out of another great rock show… ‘Well, here, if you want some more of this… different flavors, same kind of family, come on over and check us out. It fostered this great sense of community… this great sense of brotherhood and sisterhood, and I loved it. Those days were really, really magical days back then.”

Touching on the artists he’s looked up to over the years David tells us, “I definitely had a tremendous amount of inspiration from guys like Jonathan Davis. That first Korn record was massive for me. Chino Moreno from the Deftones, you know, both those guys wielding rhythm in their vocal deliveries the way that they did were hugely inspirational for me. Guys like Maynard James Keenan from TOOL, you know, those first couple TOOL records, his power, his resonance, his ethereal nature to his vocal delivery. All those guys were definitely huge influences, in addition to The Aussies, the Hatfields, you know, the Dickinsons, the Dios of the world. They definitely were a huge part of who we became and who I became, for sure.”

David also spoke about missing the adventure that at one time came with being a music fan; Traveling to record stores, searching for the album you wanted to buy, waiting in line for concert tickets -- “I feel that we have a generation of fans that unfortunately will never ever get to experience that,” he says. “We've become so detached and so disconnected from everything with the help of technology. You know, we don't have physical packaging anymore. I used to really get into getting records, opening them up, reading all the liner notes. Who were they thanking? Who was behind it, you know, what inspired them? What were the lyrics, what were they saying? What were they trying to make me think? Al of that. And I think a lot of that is now lost.”

“I think our tendency to consume faster and faster, and more and more rapidly and our attention span, which gets shorter and shorter over the course of time, in many ways, it's enabled so much more music to get on the table and to be heard,” he adds. “But on another level, there's so much that's getting missed, and there are opportunities that will never ever be able to be duplicated or replicated that really do feel bad that people won't ever get to experience.”

“I miss a lot about the old days. I missed the vibe of the old days. I missed the sense of rock community that we had back in the old days for sure,” David says. “Everything that we alluded to, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so excited about this 25th anniversary run. It's a ton of nostalgia in a bag… It's gonna be massive. I’m very, very excited about it, very excited about both halves of the bill. Incredibly strong, from Sevendust and Three Days Grace, to Nothing More a ...