Legend says it's an evil spirit of the night, but today this former high school garage band is converting thousands of enthusiastic fans to its unique musical experience - whatever they call it.
Can You Define Incubus
Photographs by Brian Smith
Incubus singer Brandon Boyd takes a quick survey of his New York City hotel room.
“There’s three people in my room right now on phones,” he says with a hint of a laugh. “It looks like we’re all young stock brokers.” Though it’s unlikely that the other folks in his room are shorting tech stocks, Boyd and his bandmates are frenetically busy. The Southern California-based band-which includes Boyd, guitarist Mike Einziger, bassist Dirk Lance (who until recently went by his original name, Alex Katunich), drummer Jose Pasillas, and deejay Chris Kilmore rocketed from near underground status to rock-star elite when three songs from their 1999 offering, Make Yourself, shot to the top of the charts.
But this is not a Johnny-come-lately story of music-business success. There is no artifice to the Incubus story. No gimmicks, no makeup, not even a bevy of backup dancers in belly-baring T-shirts. Ten years ago, while the members were still in high school, the first Incubus seeds were sown. All but Kilmore grew up surfing, hiking, and playing music together in Calabasas, California, just north of Malibu. “It’s a really cool place,” Einziger says of their hometown, “but there’s not a lot to do. It takes you 45 minutes to get into Hollywood, and when you don’t have a car, you’re kind of stuck out there. So the only thing to do is sit around and play music or go to the beach.
That’s how we started our band, sort of out of boredom.”
At first it was Einziger and Pasillas, though Pasillas couldn’t really be called a drummer. “My stepfather had a drum set that we stole out of the house and took over to Jose’s house while his parents were out of town one weekend,” Einziger says. “We played all weekend.” Then Lance came into the equation, with Boyd next. “He was a good friend of mine,” Einziger says of Boyd. “[He] kind of decided he wanted to sing. He was an artistic, talented guy, and all the chicks thought he was hot and wanted to fuck him, so it was perfect.”
Asked if Boyd possesses that rock-star sex appeal, Einziger counters, “He is the least rock star of any person I know. He thinks he can’t get girls; it’s hilarious. I’m just like, ’Man, what’s wrong with you?’ “
When the guys were asked to play at a party, they looked for a name and happened upon a definition of incubus, an evil spirit. As Boyd has said, “We were like, cool!”
The year was 1991, and the fledgling band wanted to get some music down on tape. What the guys came up with-a blend of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Primus-became their first independent release, Fungus Amongus. Boyd laughs when asked about that collection. “In my opinion, it’s like a joke we played on ourselves,” he says. “We released our first recordings so they could always haunt us and remind us to never do that again. In our defense, we were still in high school. It could have been worse-not much, but it could have been worse.”
The record companies kept their distance, but the band started to play a handful of shows, which adrenalized them. Boyd and Pasillas, both artists, drew fliers in the style of Rick Griffin and Stanley Mouse, and distributed them to every high school within 30 miles. “We were basically the entertainment for our neighborhood [during] our high school years,” Boyd says. “The first couple of shows were real rough. The first one I was totally hoarse, I couldn’t sing a note. People were making fun of us. Jose ran around his drum kit and knocked everything over. It was just like you’d expect.”
But the energy was addictive and the band continued. “I remember feeling like everyone was tapping into something that we weren’t really conscious of yet,” Boyd recalls. “We’d come offstage soaking wet and laughing. I remember feeling like I had just woken up. I remember little spurts of what happened. I remember lifting my head up and seeing kids just thrashing and destroying the bars we’d play in. It was the coolest fucking thing in the world; I can barely explain it. We all definitely found something there. It was a beautiful release and exchange of energy between friends and the kids who were showing up.”
Einziger is equally effusive about the band’s early dates. “All we ever wanted to do was play shows,” he says. “Once we started playing in clubs, there would be a crowd of people and they’d start dancing. There was so much energy that I just kept wanting more of that. I just wanted to keep playing shows, and then we’d play bigger shows and it was the biggest rush ever.”
Their jump from garage band to party band to Hollywood club act took a grand total of three years. By the time the classmates graduated from high school in 1994, making music had become their passion and their calling. Even after Boyd and Lance went off to college, they were close enough to stick with the band. After a number of Hollywood showcases, a stint on the Disney Channel’s Hollywood Lives (where they were referred to as “the band” to avoid airing the name), and a new collection of demo recordings, the guys inked a record deal in 1996. They had already thrown a deejay into the mix, which was a relatively unusual addition to a rock band back then. DJ Lyfe was with them until 1997, when he was fired after a disastrous show in Germany. Chris Kilmore signed on with Incubus after leaving the deejay collective Jedi Knights.
Make Yourself was the band’s calling card to stardom, but Incubus boasts a handful of CDs. After it signed with Immortal/Epic Records, the Enjoy Incubus EP was released in early 1997. Later that year came the full-length S. C. I.E. N. C.E. The band joined the Ozzfest tour that summer and also hit the road with Korn, 311, Limp Bizkit, and Sugar Ray.
Thanks to the association with many of those bands, Incubus has been lumped into the nu-metal scene. Part of the reason, Boyd says, is the group’s own reticence in finding an appropriate tag. “I think we’ve had a hard time defining ourselves, so it’s interesting for us to see how other people perceive us,” Boyd says. “The only thing we haven’t enjoyed is the association with nu-metal. Anytime we’ve seen that we’re one of the new wave of nu-metal bands, we’re like, ’What?’ Or people associate us with bands but we’re not in the same genre. We’re like, ’Have you heard “Drive” before?’
“Or people will say we’re one of the new wave of rap-metal bands,” Boyd continues. “It’s almost like an inside joke now. [Journalists say, ] ’Brandon, you’re such a good rapper.’ Before I learned to sing, I was kind of barking; I wouldn’t call it rapping. Everything since then, which has been years and years, has been singing. So our little thing is that whenever someone says that or writes that about us, we’re going to send them our record and then a piece of metal in a ribbon. So it’s like, ’Here’s wrapped metal, and here’s our record.’ “
Once Make Yourself hit stores there was no doubt where Incubus was situated musically. “When we recorded it, all of us were kind of in a place where we were really, really, really tired of where heavy music was going,” Einziger says. “There was an influx of rap-metal bands, and none of us are really into that. We made a conscious effort to steer away from that type of sound. From my own artistic perspective, I strive to do something a lot different than that and go against the grain of what’s popular. We try to always do something different, branch out in a different direction and carve our own path as opposed to using somebody’s formula.”
Part of what makes music fun for Einziger is conjuring up a cool idea. “If nobody has done it before, it makes it that much cooler,” he says. “It’s kind of impossible to completely do something that nobody has done before. It’s difficult to be that original, and once you’re trying that hard to be original, you’re taking away from the point of just being creative. So it’s not like we sit around and say, ’Okay, what can we do that nobody has done before?’ We just try to think of cool and interesting things to do, and if it’s something groundbreaking it makes it that much better.”
They mined that cool ingredient for Make Yourself. Placing three songs in the Top 5 kept the band from dreaded one-hit-wonder status, even if it took some time for each of the songs to climb the charts. “Pardon Me” was the first to hit the airwaves, eventually rising to the No. 3 position, thanks in part to an acoustic rendition that Boyd and Einziger recorded. “Stellar” eventually hit No. 2, but “Drive” put them at the top of the charts for eight weeks straight. “None of us knew what to expect with any of this stuff,” Einziger points out. “It just happened slowly and gradually … which is good. It kind of keeps everybody’s feet on the ground and it keeps us wanting to work harder.
“It’s a really great feeling that you wrote a song and you created something that people really enjoy,” Einziger continues. “If we don’t like something, it’s not going on an album. We really enjoy all of these songs, and the fact that a lot of other people like them too is really cool.”
Fans got a chance to show Incubus just how much they like the songs over the past two years of touring. And those fans weren’t just reacting to whatever was the current song on the radio, Einziger says. “It was amazing to see thousands of people singing the words to every single song …. Our fans seem to really know a lot of our music, inside and out, musically and lyrically. That’s one of the most gratifying things for me, to know that it’s not just about one song. People are really understanding what we do musically.”
Nor are these guys content to play the songs note for note. “We have a lot of spots in our set where we just kind of go off into oblivion and bring it right back to where it was,” Einziger says. “There’s something amazing about improvising music in front of a live audience, as opposed to a live recording situation where you can go back and redo something. It’s the magic of the moment.
“I think we challenge our listeners a little bit,” Einziger adds. “We ask a lot of our fans, because we invite them to come on our weird musical journeys with us, and sometimes our music is not the easiest thing to swallow.”
The way Boyd sees it, Incubus is still finding itself after a decade together. “The interesting part is that we’ve grown up together in this band, and it’s like we learned to play our instruments together,” he says. “I feel like we’re still learning how to be us, how to be this band. What’s fun about it is that it keeps changing. We haven’t found our formula yet. We’ve got little things we know we like doing, but new faces pop up every time we go to write and record, and that’s probably why we still enjoy doing this as a band. I guess what’s next is us continuing to grow up and take little snapshots of ourselves. We’re like kids holding the camera out in front of us, taking that snapshot every two years.”
The newest snapshots have been developed for Incubus’s fourth release, Morning View, named for the street where it was recorded, in a mansion in the Malibu hills. The location was quite a change from the dubious neighborhood where Make Yourself was written and recorded. Boyd refers to that earlier spot as oppressive: “We locked ourselves away in a studio in Reseda, so there was definitely a feeling of wanting to transcend that environment. Our records are very polar too. The last record was wanting to transcend this crack haven where we were making our record, and at the same time I was falling madly in love, so there’s that kind of polarity there.” (Asked if he’s still in love, he says, “Ahhh, to that I will say no comment.”)
During the Morning View sessions, Boyd was influenced in a different way. “There’s still the teen angst going on that all those kids seem to enjoy …. I’m joking right now,” he deadpans. But the new scenery did change his outlook. “We recorded in the most beautiful place I’ve ever been, with a view of the ocean the entire time I was singing. So there are lyrics coming from a place of joy, which is a lot more difficult to write from, but once it sort of happened I think my writing was better as a result.”
Boyd garners lyrical inspiration mostly from his perspective on life. “I observe my life and the lives of my friends, and I purposely and not purposely put myself in situations that are going to be interesting or destructive to me. I’m just writing about my experiences,” he says.
One of the band’s more off-kilter experiences, which inspired the song “Nice to Know You, came at the last stop of the Make Yourself European tour. During the flight across the pond, Boyd took a sleeping pill and fell asleep on his pinky, which was strangely bent. “Half of my hand was asleep for almost three weeks, and I thought I’d destroyed my nerves,” he says. “I got scared. Then my hand started waking up. I’m kind of an idiot sometimes, and I [got] divine inspiration from my hand waking up. So I created a lyric around that.
“That was one where I was writing from a place of perspective and joy, as opposed to frustration constantly,” he continues. “It’s very different attempting to write music when you’re feeling like you have a bird’s-eye view of your life, as opposed to being just down in the shit all the time. It’s a lot easier to write when you’re frustrated. You just go to the computer and start hammering away. When you’re happy you don’t want to sit down and take the time, you want to go frolic.”
Boyd’s artistic interests-he and drummer Pasillas drew the animation for the band’s “Drive” video-also contribute to his observational lyrical approach. “I’ve always said that the music writing and the creative process are coming from the exact same place,” he says. “The only difference is, this part of the artistic process is more audio, and that’s kind of cool because I will sometimes tailor lyrics to a vibration I get from a guitar riff. I can see things in a riff and it will fill my head with imagery… It’s almost like I can create the closed-eye visual to what Michael is bringing.”
“Aqueous Transmission,” an ethereal track on the new album, is an example of how lyrics can be affected by a riff. Einziger came back to the Malibu mansion with a stringed Chinese instrument after visiting famed guitarist Steve Vai. “Steve told me I could borrow it if I promised to write something really, really cool with it,” Einziger says. “So we wrote this song that is a beautiful Chinese-sounding song with strings and a bamboo flute. I would love to make a video to a song like that. It almost sounds like an old Disney cartoon, something like Jungle Book. It’s weird, but it’s interesting. It’s one of my favorite things that we’ve ever done.”
Einziger played Boyd a guitar riff on Vai’s instrument over a sparse breakbeat drum track. “The first thing that popped into my head was that it sounded like we were rowing down some Asian river and there were red glowing eyes in the bushes,” Boyd says. “Mike laughed at me. I don’t know if he saw the same thing or if he thinks I’m a complete idiot, probably a little bit of both. But with that one image, I started this line-’l’m floating down a river’and then this whole song came out of it.”
Einziger is thrilled with the new album. “I think it’s slightly more sophisticated in certain ways, but musically it’s all over the place, like Make Yourself is,” he says. “In a constructive way. It’s not musically all over the place just for the sake of doing so; each song is very different from the next. That is how we always like to do things. All of us will get bored if we play the same-sounding thing over and over again. It’s some of the heaviest music we’ve ever written, and at the same time some of the most beautiful, mellow music we’ve ever written.”
Asked what makes Incubus successful, Einziger says, “I don’t know, to be honest. We just play our music. Whether or not a band is successful on a commercial level is really up to the people that buy it. I guess a lot of people like our shit, and I think people can relate to the songs …. I think that’s primarily why people go and buy records, because they either like the way something sounds or they like the way it makes them feel or they can relate to something or they can take away something from listening to it. At least that’s what I do when I listen to music. I guess that might explain why we’ve been doing so well lately.”
Einziger pauses, then adds, “I’ve got great hair too.” Then, reminded that that’s what a lot of eighties bands had going for them, he says, “Yeah, I know I’m not afraid of that. You might as well go with it. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”
