Keanu Reeves recalls '90s band Dogstar's shambolic early gigs opening for Weezer and Bowie: 'The nerves for me are making sure I don't f*** up'

Chatting with Yahoo Entertainment the day after their sold-out show at fabled Sunset Strip club the Roxy, ’90s rock trio Dogstar — singer-guitarist Bret Domrose, drummer Robert Mailhouse, and the bassist perhaps better known for his day job (or for his other band, Wyld Stallyns), Keanu Reeves — are in good spirits. They’ve just released a comeback single, “Everything Turns Around,” and announced that Dogstar’s first album in 23 years, Somewhere Between the Power Lines and the Palm Trees, will be released Oct. 6.

According to Reeves, the Roxy gig was Dogstar’s “third show in 20-some-odd years” — following a private showcase for “a hundred of our friends and relatives and family and neighbors” at Hollywood’s Gold Diggers compound in December 2022 and a surprising appearance at this year’s Bottle Rock festival — and this reunion truly seems to have come out of nowhere. Reeves, well aware of the skepticism and measured expectations that come with being a famous actor moonlighting in a band, confesses that he’s been nervous to be back on a stage.

“I love performing live, and I love playing in the band and playing with Robert and Bret, so really the nerves for me is not the audience. The nerves for me are making sure I don't f*** up in support of the band,” Reeves chuckles humbly. “I even feel that pressure when I'm rehearsing. But it’s a really great pressure, you know? It’s like, you want to do your best for your loved ones. We haven’t been here for a while, and there’s excitement — and then nerves with the ‘don't f*** up.’”

“Passion project” Dogstar formed after a 1991 chance encounter between Reeves and fellow actor Mailhouse in an L.A. supermarket, just as Reeves’s star was rising with iconic roles in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Point Break and My Own Private Idaho. And while the band’s early shows were well-attended thanks to Reeves’s marquee-worthy name, they weren’t always that critically well-received. Reeves even once self-deprecatingly said that their decision to play publicly was a “huge mistake,” a statement he now regrets.

“I think that comment of we ‘weren't very good’ came from me, which wasn’t a really nice thing to say,” Reeves admits sheepishly. “We’ve always been super-sincere in doing what we do, in terms of creatively. We’ve never really chased anything. We’ve never chased a sound. We’ve never chased, you know: ‘This is popular.’ And I think especially in the early days, for me it was, ‘Yeah, man, we’re a garage band!’ I think there was… a little self-consciousness. I mean, when you go out and set your sail, you want to conquer the world. You want to do the best you can. And sometimes as you start out, you want to change the world — and you can’t.”

But overall, Reeves says Dogstar’s shambolic “early gigs were fun,” starting from when they “couldn’t even f***ing find a band name” (earlier unfortunate monikers were BFS, which stood for either “Big F***ing Shit” or “Big F***ing Sound,” and Small Fecal Matter) and they were “like children playing with pots and pans.” Eventually the newly christened Dogstar, which at the time consisted of Reeves, Mailhouse and frontman Gregg Miller, realized they had to get out of the garage. Their historic first gig took place March 19, 1992 at a now-defunct Hollywood Boulevard basement dive called Raji’s. As alt-rock history would have it, that night also marked the first show for the other band on the bill: Weezer.

“That’s history for us. But I don’t know if it is for them,” laughs Reeves, whose strongest and fondest memory of that evening is “a friend of mine bringing an apple pie.”

“I remember that night so vividly,” says Mailhouse. “We got booked on a show and we weren’t ready yet. And when you’re not ready yet, you don’t have a band name. That’s how not ready we were — we didn’t even have a name! … Somehow this gig came to us and I remember getting there and meeting these [Weezer] guys, and I thought, ‘We’re gonna open up for them?’ I didn’t know who they were, but they were really confident and calm, and they were great. Like, if that was their first show, they were great. I just remember going, ‘My God, that was good.’ I didn’t know at the time that that was their first show. It looked like they were kind of seasoned. Meanwhile, I was scared shitless.”

Fast-forward to 1994, when Domrose, who is now the band’s sole frontman, was recruited as Dogstar’s fourth member and additional singer. “My first show with them was, I believe, two days after I met them at the Troubadour,” Domrose laughs. “And that’s been the Dogstar way ever since. You know, like: ‘Let’s just do it and figure it out as we go.’” But soon Dogstar became a serious entity. A year after Domrose joined the lineup, he found himself onstage at the Hollywood Palladium, at a one-off 1995 Halloween show on a bill with none other than David Bowie. The fact that Bowie had handpicked Dogstar as his opening act was the ultimate real-deal seal of approval.

“We don’t really know!” laughs Mailhouse, when asked how this life- and career-changing gig came about. “They contacted us, our manager at the time, and she thought it was a crank call; I think they had to call her a few times. He wanted to play Halloween night, and he wanted to play a [smaller venue]. … I think he just wanted a fun night on Halloween and he wanted a local band. We don't know why he chose us, but when we got there for soundcheck and got to meet him and everything, it kind of made sense. Like, I kind of felt like he was just really curious about us, you know? And he watched our soundcheck and was a gentleman. He was everything you’d ever want in your dreams that David Bowie would be in real life. It was exactly like that: a gentleman, professional, gracious, brilliant, just all those things you could think of. He was just lovely, and he just wanted to help us. He was just really supportive. Like, he saw something in us.”

“We were having a little bit of trouble with the monitors at soundcheck, trying to get them to sound good, and he came over on the stage and said, ‘Do you need more time? I can hold the doors for you,’” Domrose recalls. “And I was like, ‘David Bowie just talked in my ear. Did that just happen?’ I don't even think I answered him. I think I was, like, frozen.”

“Somehow I played Gene Simmons’s axe bass,” Reeves chuckles. “I think there’s a friend of mine, I forget who it was, who had the connection, but it was Halloween night, so somehow I ended up with Gene Simmons’s — the rock legend’s — axe bass! The thing is, I play a passive pickup on my bass, and I didn’t during the soundcheck — I didn’t quite check his bass. And he has an active pickup. I remember I played one song with it and it was just, ‘Here comes the thunder!’”

“That Carpenters cover we did sounded so different!” quips Mailhouse, recalling how Dogstar played the Carpenters’ “Superstar,” as well Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” on that surreal evening.

One cover that Dogstar have never attempted to play live — “Well, not yet!” Domrose stresses — is Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” even though Reeves once told Stephen Colbert in a now-viral interview that that is his favorite song of all time. “The yearning of the song is beautiful. The melody, the vocal, the lyrics and the bassline just really resonated with me,” says Reeves, who expresses his admiration for Joy Division/New Order bassist Peter Hook’s “chordal playing” (“His melody is very unique and special”) and another “remarkable” ’80s post-punk bass legend, the recently departed Andy Rourke of the Smiths. But once again, Reeves remains humble.

“But no, I couldn’t play those [bass lines]. They didn’t fit our music that we played in Dogstar. I would say my nature is more kind of straight ahead punk rock in that way,” says Reeves with a shake of his head, citing Hüsker Dü’s Greg Norton and the two Kims — the Pixies’ Kim Deal and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon — as more direct influences.

While their careers and lives have veered in different directions since the last Dogstar album was released in July 2000, Reeves, Mailhouse and Domrose have remained “best friends” over the years. And this band reunion has been longer in the making than most people realize — after what Reeves calls a “full-circle moment” where the three met up at the San Francisco premiere for The Matrix Resurrections, nerded out over amps and gear just like they did in the ’90s, and “it seemed like that day was kind of a call to action.”

“We kept trying to work, but nothing cohesive, just having fun and just getting the cobwebs out. So, we had a plan, but it took a few years,” says Mailhouse. “And then after that San Francisco thing we just said, ‘You know what? Let’s huddle for two weeks. Let’s all live in the same house and do eight hours a day and see what happens.’ And we did. It was like camp, like you’re going to bring your sleeping bag. We’d eat together and write together. We didn’t know what we were going to come up with, but the intention was to write a new record. We didn’t know if it was going to be any good, but once things got rolling, it was kind of like magical fairy dust. To this day I can’t even comprehend how it all happened, but I’m not going to question it.”

“From my point of view, it seemed that it was easier this time, because there were no expectations, other than, ‘Let’s see if it's fun and let’s see what sounds come out of the amps and out of the drums. Let’s just show up,’” says Domrose of the making of Somewhere Between the Power Lines and the Palm Trees, much of which was debuted onstage at the Roxy last month.

Things went so well in the home studio and at Bottle Rock and the Roxy that the Dogstar guys are certain that it won’t be another 23 years before they release another album. In fact, Mailhouse reveals that they’re “halfway through the next record already,” with five songs written so far.

In the meantime, Dogstar will be hitting the road this month, getting used to playing live again. They’ve obviously come a long way since that low-key night when they played the Raji’s 175-capacity basement with Weezer 31 years ago, but Reeves is up for another full-circle moment to celebrate Dogstar’s triumphant return to the scene.

“Hey, Weezer, we’ll open for you again!” Reeves jokes. “We’ll play the Greek.”

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