You can view all of our Valley Week stories here.īy that point, Hoobastank wasn’t just playing house shows and backyard parties in Agoura Hills anymore. This story was part of Curbed LA’s Valley Week, a celebration of culture, real estate, architecture, and neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley. “I felt at the time like, by ’97, ’98, ’99, like holy shit, now you can’t throw a rock out your window and not hit a kid in a band,” says Robb.

As Incubus’s Southern California sound gained a cult following, record executives looked to its tony hometown as a breeding ground for young, unsigned talent.

Heavy metal was experiencing a mainstream resurgence, thanks in part to Ozzy Osbourne’s Ozzfest, which launched that same year, and so-called nu-metal bands that remixed the genre with turntables and rap verses were reaping the benefits. Incubus-a hard-rock band that had formed years earlier at nearby Calabasas High School-landed a seven-album deal with Sony Music Entertainment in 1996. In fact, the opposite turned out to be true. “I think there was a lot of camaraderie back then because it wasn't so much like if one band gets popular then we’re screwed, or whatever,” says Robb. What could’ve easily been just another house party thrown by bored kids in a wealthy LA suburb turned out to be the beginning of a rock-music scene that was on the verge of making it big. Among them were the then-unknown members of Incubus and Linkin Park-bands that, along with Hoobastank, would go on to produce some of the biggest hits of the next century. Robb eventually returned the stages to the school, but not before using them during a massive rager that attracted teens and 20-somethings from all over the area. The next day, they set up the foldout stages in Robb’s parents’ backyard to play their first show as Hoobastank, a metal-influenced band they’d formed about six months prior. Dressed in all black, they found the set of portable stages their alma mater used for its commencement ceremonies and wheeled them through a dirt track and onto the beds of pickup trucks they’d borrowed for the occasion. In the summer of 1995, Doug Robb and his friends snuck into Agoura High School in the middle of the night.

Incubus band members