Days in the life of Incubus have their slow moments. Drummer Jose Pasillas hasn’t done much other than download songs with his iPod MP3 player by the time he gets on the phone, and it seems the long hours spent in a tour bus have zapped his energy as he sleepily reminisces on 10 years of Incubus, art and friendship.

Each person in the bus has a distinct personality. Pasillas knows better than most, as he is a childhood friend to three of them. The band’s singer, Brandon Boyd, met Pasillas in fourth grade. Slight, curly haired guitarist Mike Einzinger came into the picture in the sixth grade. By 1991, they were in 10th grade in Calabasas, Calif. The spirit of Incubus was awake and the boy known as Alex Katunich to his teachers and Dirk Lance to his fans was playing bass.

“Everyone is very different from one another so we all complement each other in that sense,” Pasillas says. “I guess I would be the joker who would be the chill mellow guy. Mike is more of the business head and Brandon is more of the philosophical head. Dirk is a little bit of all of that. We are all different, which makes it all work.”

Within a few years, Incubus was up and running the show circuit in Los Angeles, sometimes opening for local glam rock acts and sometimes playing with another familiar face in modern music — Hoobastank.

“We grew up playing with them,” Pasillas says. “They were a neighbor band. We grew up playing gigs. They were in the city right next to us, about five or 10 minutes from us, and we’d always be in L.A. with each other.”

Like Incubus, the early incarnation of Hoobastank was a hardly recognizable shadow of the band as it is today, complete with a horn section and goofy lyrics about Pee Wee Herman and gym shorts. By the time success had caught up with Hoobastank, who today bears more than a slight resemblance to its former neighbors, MTV encountered a changed band.

“It didn’t just happen overnight. It was years of evolving,” Pasillas says. “I think they just outgrew it and slowly turned from that.”

Evolution is an important part of the music for Incubus as well. While it was gaining steam, a DJ who went by the tag of Kid Lyfe approached Einzinger at a performance about trying something new. If only Einzinger had known what he was getting into.

“He came up to Mike at a show and was like, ‘I make beats,’ and at the time, no one had DJs. That was in ’95, I think,” Pasillas says. “It was just something different — he threw in weird sounds and we thought it was cool.”

Within a couple of years, a band without a DJ was like a mall without an American Eagle Outfitters, but a good group with a bad DJ was just asking for trouble.

“We kind of tolerated him for a few years until we couldn’t tolerate him any more, then we got rid of him,” Pasillas says. “He was just a pain in the ass all-around, always complaining and never appreciative of where he was and what he was doing. That kind of mentality with what we are doing just contrasts with everyone else and just doesn’t jell.”

The drummer, seemingly waking up, continues firing.

“He just was an idiot and sucked at what he did, which was — I wouldn’t even call him a turntablist — but, scratching on records, he wasn’t even good at that,” he says. “We kicked him out of the band, and we sought a replacement who completed the band. He just kind of broke the band up and we found someone who actually complemented [our style], and completed our group and who was absolutely amazing at what he does. That was eye-opening for us and we haven’t been the same ever since.”

The man he speaks so highly of is DJ Kilmore, who came to the group in 1997 to help finish the group’s first major label full length, “S.C.I.E.N.C.E.”

Its sound jumps from funk metal to space romance music, and it got the attention of the right people, as Incubus suddenly found itself on the second stage of the 1998 Ozzfest, surrounded by backward red baseball caps and the newest fads in metal.

“It’s not really our crowd but we pulled some people from there,” Pasillas says. “It did us good and, even though we were sticking out like a sore thumb because we weren’t heavy metal, we were definitely remembered whether it was good or bad because we were the odd band out. We actually did really well, and it was surprising to us.”

The tour wasn’t what the decidedly non-rap metal band had envisioned, but who can turn down the Ozzman with a face like that?

“You can’t be too picky when it comes to that so early in the game, so we just took it and we were all kind of apprehensive but it turned out good,” Pasillas says. “We can pretty much acclimate to any sort of vibe. We can go out with Ozzy, then we can turn around and go out with Dave Matthews.”

Hanging out with Ozzy is one thing, but Pasillas says fitting in with the nu-metal crowd is something the band strives against. With its early albums being constantly compared to the Deftones and Korn — both friends of the band — Incubus distances itself as far as possible from the legions of rap-metal emulators.

“We were inundated with that sort of music and 99 percent of it was bad,” Pasillas says. “We try to be more musical and more melodic; we actually have a singer who can sing, so that’s definitely a focal point for us. We saw where the music was at that point and we didn’t want anything to do with it.”

Now that two albums, “Make Yourself” and “Morning View,” and a string of hits, including “Pardon Me,” “Drive” and “Wish You Were Here” have propelled Incubus to the arena, it has been able to do things its own way, touring with opening acts such as 30 Seconds to Mars, Hometown Hero and Har Mar Superstar. Old friends still come knocking once in a while, though, and Sharon Osbourne recently came to Pasillas with an idea — Sharon’s daughter Kelly singing “Papa Don’t Preach” by Madonna with Incubus backing her.

“Sharon asked me to see if we were into it, and me and Mike talked about it and did it,” he says. “It was just a demo that we did with her and they ended up getting someone else and going to New York and doing it over, but they kept the arrangement and everything the same. It was cool. We did it in a few hours.”

The conversation draws back to the present and begins to wind down. Before it ends, Pasillas has a few fatherly words of wisdom to share.

“Run fast and jump high.”