Disturbed [ tickets ]'s frontman David Draiman realizes that his band isn't among the world's most significant cultural figures, but given that it sold more than one million records, Draiman knows there are a few people who recognize him. Despite that, he never felt as unimportant as when he was placed next to professional wrestler "Stone Cold" Steve Austin at New York's WWF Cafe.

"When we played the WWF Cafe for that MTV thing ["Sunday Night Heat"], I might have not even been there on stage," Draiman said. "'Stone Cold' walked in and everyone just went apes--t. They lost their mind. You begin to realize just exactly what kind of magnitude of superstardom these wrestlers achieve."

The hard rock band and the World Wrestling Federation hooked up in late summer when the organization asked Disturbed to rewrite Austin's entrance music to mark the wrestler's return from a year-long break to recover from surgery.

"It was f-----g hard," Draiman said of the task. "You're limited in terms of what you ... can say because it has to be somewhat in the theme of this wrestler. But I still wanted it to be something that Disturbed would do. [Also, you] don't want to take the recognition of [the song] away from the fans. It was similar, but we definitely chunked it up quite a bit."

Disturbed doesn't play that song live, but it goes along with just about any other request, especially "Stupify," the first single from its debut, "The Sickness." That song helped push the band past the platinum mark. Draiman's unmistakable growl--coupled with Dan Donegan's chunky guitars, Fuzz's bed of basses and Mike Wengren's pounding drums--fill "The Sickness."

Despite the band's early success, fronting a hard rock band is still a relatively new experience for Draiman.

"I didn't really know how to do this before this band," he said. "It's not like I mimicked anybody else. When I joined the band, the other three guys had been playing together for three months, just trying to find a singer. I answered an ad in the Illinois Entertainer. I didn't know if I would be able to rise to the occasion, so to speak, with the aggressive nature of this music.

"I had been in punk rock bands and funk bands. It's never been anything that extreme. So I had to learn to do what I do. Slowly over time, through improv and jamming with the other guys, I developed this style with them. It was really the music that brought it out of me."

Draiman's musical career has been a constant learning process. But when Disturbed traveled with the metal summer camp Ozzfest in 2000, not all of the lessons he learned were related to music.

"I learned from Pantera [ tickets ] how to develop liver disease," he said with a laugh. "A lot of the lessons that are learned over Ozzfest are not necessarily learned from other bands. You learn your own limitations, let's put it that way. You learn just how far you can push yourself before you're not functional the next day. You learn how to stay out of the sun for ridiculous periods of time so that you don't develop sunstroke or something like that."

Seriously, though, he said he tried to "absorb what I can in terms of the vibe and how they capture the crowd or how they command the audience and just their stage presence. I just try and see how I would do it in my own way just looking at what they're doing. I'm still learning. I'm certainly not an expert at this. We recently got our arena legs with the Stone Temple Pilots tour that we just did," said Draiman, who performed STP's "Dead and Bloated" with the band.

Nevertheless, music has been a struggle for Draiman, who was raised as an Orthodox Jew, and whose parents envisioned that he would someday becoming a rabbi. "I'm the antithesis of everything that they tried to raise me as. I'm the lead singer of Disturbed. If I was Neil Diamond or Tom Jones or some s--t like that, I think they'd feel better about it."

Even though they weren't supportive of his efforts, Draiman is planning to give his parents one of his platinum records, "which is ironic because they really don't deserve one," he said. "They never really supported me in doing this. They somewhat accept it, but they still never see me play. They're very religious, conservative people. You think it may have had something to do with the way I am now?"