It is midnight in Las Vegas. Do you know where Incubus are? Jose Pasillas II, the drummer, is lying on a couch at the club Rain. "Hey, will you take a picture of me?" he asks. I turn around, and his shirt is off. There are seven girls around him, each with a hand stroking his bare chest. One of them is his girlfriend, Shyama. I snap the photo and walk away, but within minutes Shyama is fighting with two men who insulted her brother. Towering over one, she pushes him hard with both hands and he stumbles backward. The bouncers arrive and eject Pasillas, his seven women and fifteen of his family members from the club. The party is over.

Meanwhile, bassist Dirk Lance (real name: Alex Katunich, though he's used the stage name since high school) is on the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel. He has just ordered two Canadian girls to perform a dildo show for a friend's bachelor party. The dildo show, however, never happens, due to a dispute over money, and the party adjourns to a strip club.

In just a few hours in Vegas, Incubus have done all they can to completely trash their reputation as nice guys. "Some guys, like Kid Rock, get the girls who just want to sleep with the band," Lance had said earlier that night, "but we get the girls who want to talk intensely about the music. And then you feel bad if you want to sleep with them, because they're there for the music." Sure, but shouldn't he feel lucky that these women are actually into the art of it all as opposed to the pretty-boy pop glamour? "Yes, that's true," Lance admitted, "but sometimes you just want a girl who will sit on a bottle."

There are two ideas that have haunted Incubus since their domination of rock radio began two years ago: The first is that they are nice guys; the second is that they are a metal band. Incubus' members first met in elementary and middle school in Calabasas, an affluent suburb north of Los Angeles. The band formed in high school, and except for DJ Chris Killmore (who grew up outside Philadelphia), they all graduated from Calabasas High in 1994. At first they jammed on Megadeth and Metallica covers; then they discovered magic mushrooms and listened to a lot of Phish and Primus. Along the way, they shared everything. And I do mean everything: One evening on the tour bus, three of the guys (excepting singer Brandon Boyd and Killmore) confessed to having circle-jerked while watching a porn film together in eighth grade.

After nine years of performing around Southern California, they broke through to the Ozzfest crowd with 1997's eclectic funk-metal album, Science. Its five-hit-strong follow-up, Make Yourself, and 2001's Morning View ensured the band its place in the lockers of high school girls everywhere. The new album has sold a million and a half copies, and this month the band launches a fifty-city U.S. tour with Hoobastank and Phantom Planet.

Of the members, Lance is probably the hardest, the baddest, the crassest. Yet that night, as he prepares to go to sleep in the tour bus, Lance puts The Sound of Music on the VCR. Darren Boyd, brother of Brandon and assistant tour manager to the band, nods his head sadly: "He's watching nuns sing about how much they love life. If that's not a mama's boy, I don't know what is."

As for Brandon, there are few more classic mama's boys in rock. A highly literate, soft-spoken singer with a spiritual bent, a heart of gold and an inability to keep his shirt on while performing, Boyd is often called the sexiest man in rock & roll today. Girls must throw themselves at him all the time.

Boyd: What do you mean when you say, "Women throw themselves at you?" What does that actually mean? I don't think I've experienced that.

RS: Really? That's surprising.

Maybe I'm not paying attention, but I don't think I've actually experienced a woman just handing out vagina. I've never experienced that yet.

It's when a woman just lets you know that she wants to do you now.

I've been hit on a couple of times. And it's extremely flattering. But it's never been like, "Would you like to go up to your room and have sex right now?"

That's strange.

I've been in situations where a girl will be looking at me, and I'll approach her and I'm a little nervous. So I'll make motions and get so nervous it's a lost cause. I almost feel like apologizing. Maybe I weird girls out. Maybe I should stop talking about quantum theory in a bar.

That's better than talking about what most people talk about in a bar.

The girl I find who wants to talk about quantum theory in a bar is the one I want to marry.

The next day, in Phoenix, Boyd stands onstage, trying to think of one word that will make the audience erupt in hysterics. He decides to yell, "Ozzy!" The response is tepid at best. Struggling for another word, he yells, "Marijuana!" and the crowd explodes. On the tour bus after the show, guitarist Mike Einziger tells Boyd that he should have yelled, "Heavy metal!" But today, the group is a full-on pop-rock band, with female fans who get very upset when Boyd doesn't take off his shirt by three songs into the set. In fact, Boyd was a little taken aback at a show the other night when a girl yelled for him to take his "@#%$ shirt" off.

"There was, like, a viciousness in her voice," he recalls.

Talking about the experience of playing on Ozzfest, Boyd says, "We could have milked the whole new-metal thing. But we saw the same formulas over and over again and quickly tired of it. I said to myself, 'There is definitely enough of this music out there now.'

"It's funny, because I can look at our band with a mildly detached point of view, and we have all the elements of being the worst band in the world: a bass player who's got some funky slap @#%$, heavy riff guitars, a DJ scratching on the songs, a crazy drummer and a singer who is in touch with his feminine side. Even our band name is the worst name ever: It evokes imagery of 'Incubus' in death-metal writing, with bullet belts crossing our chests.

"Theoretically, we are the worst band ever, in my opinion," he continues. "But just to stroke ourselves for a second, we've done pretty good in transcending the appearance of things and making music that is actually a little more than it may seem at first glance."

For seven years, Boyd dated his high school sweetheart (and essentially his first girlfriend). While recording Make Yourself, he was falling in love with her; on Morning View, he was breaking up with her. Ten days after returning from a European tour, he noticed that things had changed. Truth be told, he says, the relationship was ready to end. "The only thing I wasn't prepared for was the actuality of it," he adds. "The feeling of, 'Oh, @#%$, she @#%$ hard-core cheated on me while I was gone.' What made it harder was that she very slowly admitted it. She'd say, 'OK, we did this,' but my friends would tell me it wasn't what they heard. Then she'd say, 'OK, we did this, too, but that was it.' It was like that for a month.

"I'm at a point right now where I'm afraid to feel those feelings for a while," he says. "It was a very vivid, difficult experience, because I was honest with her. I didn't cheat on her, I didn't push her away. I would like to learn a lot more about myself and my limitations before I enter again into a relationship, because I have a feeling the next one I enter into will hopefully be the one that lasts."

With the band, Boyd struggles to be one of the guys, lusting, for example, after Cindy Crawford backstage at The Tonight Show. But locker-room talk doesn't come naturally to him. "I probably sound like an idiot talking about this," he says during a conversation on casual dating, "but it's hard for me to end it after one encounter. Maybe I'm more feminine in that sense. I don't really know."

At almost every major Incubus show, his mother, Dolly Wiseman, a highly spiritual woman who almost glows with positive energy, makes a grand entrance with his stepfather. "I got used genes," Boyd says. "No facial hair or anything. Look at this. Supposedly I'll get an ass when I'm twenty-eight."

Boyd's musings on women, spirituality and song take place as the band travels from Vegas to Phoenix to Los Angeles. In the dressing room of the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, a conversation is cut short by the ever-affable Einziger (looking perpetually like a cross between Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel), who barges in with a photograph of himself and Boyd in sixth grade, displaying a report they prepared on Tahiti for a school travel fair. "Mike, look at you," Boyd says. "You look like a little mouse." The two reminisce about preparing the report and about the time Boyd tried to chase away a rattlesnake by squirting it with a water bottle.

Lance comes in and crumples into a chair: a tender moment about to be ruined. "We went to an in-store once," he begins, "and this kid asked, 'What's it like being in the most homoerotic band around?' "

Was he surprised that fans think of Incubus as homoerotic? "Well, we are pretty homoerotic," Lance admits, "but not that homoerotic."

Moments later, Pasillas joins the group. Seeking to have his handwriting analyzed, he writes in my notepad, "My name is Jose Pasillas, the second. I love women and all else about women. I may be gay but not sure."

"Jose peed on my hand yesterday," Boyd blurts.

"Yes, it was great," says Pasillas. "Our relationship is thriving right now. It's at an all-time high."

"We've known each other all our lives, and it's gone beyond that brother thing," Boyd says. "After one show, the showers were like locker-room showers, and Jose just @#%$ pisses on me, and so I did it back. And then everyone's all like, 'You guys are @#%$ up,' but him and I are like, 'It's just pee. We're in a shower.' "

The way Boyd sees it, Incubus are like yin and yang. He and Einziger "dull the band up a little," he says. "If some of the other guys were in a different band, I guarantee there'd be pyrotechnics and chicks dancing onstage. Full-on."

"Yeah," Einziger says, responding to Lance's comment about wanting to see a girl sit on a bottle. "I have no desire to see that thing. But I know we have that option if we wanted."

"No, you don't," his girlfriend, Cameron, says matter-of-factly. "You're dorks."

Boyd soon proves her point. He tells a story about when his brother bought a Run-D.M.C. record. "There were a bunch of swear words on it," he says. "And my brother and I fought all the time. So I told my mother."

And what happened?

"She took the record away."

That's it? That's the end of the story?

"Yes." He smiles, content, almost proud, even.

-Rolling Stone

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