Dogstar Return Built To Last

Robert Mailhouse and Keanu Reeves met each other at a supermarket 32 years ago in Los Angeles, and their lives changed forever. How long after that fateful encounter did Reeves and Mailhouse’s friendship vault into a creative partnership as bandmates? “We’ll call it a year,” Reeves says. “How about seven months? The fog of rock.” It was 1991, and he was coming off of an impressive three-film run (Point Break, Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and My Own Private Idaho), while Mailhouse had been in the midst of a recurring role as Brian Scofield in Days of Our Lives. But the two actors weren’t much interested in delineating their friendship into a Hollywood-bound bond; they were both musicians away from the screen finding roots in the Los Angeles DIY scene, Reeves being an apt, Peter Hook-inspired bass player and Mailhouse a certified wailer on percussion. They’d decamp with each other at Mailhouse’s Beachwood Canyon home, doing piano and bass jams until they begrudgingly needed something noisier and found it in a shiny, silver drum kit left behind by Michael Elgart, Reeves’ longtime friend and Permanent Record co-star.

Bands get started because folks have a passion to make music with people that they have immense chemistry with, but not everyone gets to hit it big or leave their basements. Dogstar came up at a time when alt-rock was dominating America; conversations cropped up, discussions were had about where they—along with original vocalist/guitarist Gregg Miller—were going next. Nirvana, Mudhoney, the Melvins and Sonic Youth were huge and Dogstar, if it was something they wanted, could become a part of that. And they did, in the most rock ‘n’ roll game of coincidence ever. “I remember that discussion we had early on,” Mailhouse says. “It was like, ‘Are we going to try to get out of here, out of the garage up in Beachwood?’ And we made the decision to do it, knowing full well that that’s what you’re supposed to do—you have to. And we did and, in typical Dogstar fashion—even before Bret was around—unbeknownst to us, we played with Weezer at this club called Raji’s.” The gig remains, at least according to the internet, the first show Weezer ever played; I’m still waiting on Rivers Cuomo to confirm one way or the other. “I remember them already being good,” Mailhouse adds.

Scour the internet for whatever you can about Dogstar and the information out there is lean and inaccurate. Wikipedia insists that the band had three names before the one they still carry today: Small Fecal Matter, Big Fucking Shit and Big Fucking Sound. Mailhouse doesn’t remember any of them being legit, though he and Reeves speculate that Big Fucking Sound might have been a winner—but only for one night. “We had one show in North Hollywood, it was one of those crazy things and we didn’t have a name yet,” Mailhouse notes. “We just had that name for one show and then, after that, we went back into the hole to keep woodshedding.” “We were really terrible at the name game [during] the first incarnation,” Reeves adds. “We went to some childlike, post-adolescent wish name. ‘We’ll be Big Fucking Sound.’” Mailhouse would eventually pull “Dogstar” from a passage in Henry Miller’s Sexus—and it’s stuck around ever since.

In 1994, Bret Domrose joined the band as an added vocalist and guitarist—filling out Dogstar’s sound greater than ever. They’d carry on as a four piece throughout most of the year, opening up for David Bowie at his Hollywood Palladium show on Halloween 1995. Dogstar toured almost exclusively in the US and in Asia, building out their sound and mobilizing a global audience. In 1995, before making a record together, Miller would exit the band and they’d get an offer to play in support of Bon Jovi and then, eventually, link up with Ed Stasium at A&M Studios. It seemed like, without a doubt, Dogstar were on the brink of unrelenting stardom. The Bowie show, though, was a game-changer—and a last-minute thing, as The Thin White Duke had been touring around his album Outside and Dogstar would put out their debut, Our Little Visionary, within the next year. It was a surreal convergence of worlds in the City of Angels.

“We got a call, and it was kind of an unbelievable call,” Domrose says. “You don’t ever expect something like that, and it was Halloween night. We raced over there to the Hollywood Palladium, we started our soundcheck and we were having some problems, technically, with our sound. We thought ‘We’re the opening band, we should probably get off the stage and let David Bowie come do his thing.’ As we were about to pack it in and admit the technical difficulties, David Bowie appears on the side of the stage and says ‘No, no. If you need more time, take more time. Take all the time you need.’” “He said, ‘Would you like me to hold the doors for you?’ with a cigarette in his mouth,” Mailhouse says, imitating Bowie’s posh English accent. “I guess he was watching our soundcheck, we didn’t even know it. And then we got to watch his soundcheck, too, which was pretty much a dream for me—or for us, rather—because, here we are. It felt like a private [show]. It was really lovely.”

The band would ride the momentum of a storied live reputation, taking their songs to India, Belgium and, even, Glastonbury in Somerset. Another album, Happy Ending, would come around in 2000—and the title wound up being more apt than anyone would have expected, as Dogstar would carry out their tenure together on overseas gigs and then call it quits in 2003. They didn’t know the band’s finale was imminent, though. “When we were finishing up in Japan, I don’t think we knew—at that point—that we were gonna hiatus,” Reeves says. “I think that evolved once we got back home.” The members took time away from Dogstar and then, by natural movements and busy schedules, the band was on the backburner—but their friendship remained. Reeves would go on to do two Matrix films in a year and play, occasionally, in a band called Becky with Mailhouse, while Domrose would get into film and television scoring.

In the 20 years that passed between Dogstar’s breakup and their reformation, there wasn’t much talk about getting back together—at least not formally. They’d come back together and play music, but the continuation of Dogstar didn’t become a feasible reality until COVID hit and the trio started jamming together again. The idea of putting out another record wasn’t an immediate end goal for their reunion; they were finding joy in carving out what their identity as a band would be in the 2020s while also putting the pieces of Dogstar’s sound back together, slowly. “[Talks about reuniting] didn’t happen until 2021, when we got together. Bret was like ‘Let’s play, let’s see if we can write.’ Then it was ‘Let’s see if we can make an album.’ It’s all been just step by step, just trying to have fun and see how it goes—which, I think, Bobby, you like, right? I like that idea.” “Reintroducing yourself to an instrument, it’s different,” Mailhouse adds. “I don’t know a lot of drummers that just sit down there and just play by themselves. It’s one of those instruments where it’s much more fun when you have other people to play with. For me, I was playing a lot of piano—so it was great to, over the years, get back into that. I only like playing drums with these guys, really, to be honest.”

Earlier this month, Dogstar put out their third album together, Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees. To no surprise, it’s the best thing they’ve made together—and such a strong, vivid deviation from the DIY ethos they cut their teeth on, all while harnessing the garage rock power that thrived in and around the band’s orbit 30 years ago. These songs are revelations in construction, boasting power pop sensibilities and alt-rock grit, along with the finesse of three guys who have never been more in-sync with each other. Reeves had a few bass riffs hanging around before they re-assembled in Mailhouse’s at-home studio, but the record was, largely, put together organically as three people jamming and workshopping ideas together in a room. “Things were just unfolding before our eyes, which was pretty cool,” Domrose says. “We came in there with pretty much nothing. We didn’t know what was going to happen. For all we knew, we were gonna come out of there with one song that we kind of liked. And it was like we lit the match and it just went. I couldn’t be more surprised by how quickly we wrote 15 songs.”

They got together with Chicago producer Dave Trumfio, who’s worked on records like Wilco’s Summerteeth and Grandaddy’s Just Like the Fambly Cat, and he helped bring Dogstar’s vision—or, simply, their evolved, aged sound—to the forefront. What makes Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees so special, too, is how completely unlinked to what they were doing 25 years ago it sounds—and it sounds positively beautiful. “For me, that’s everything. I think we were roaming around, listening to other producers’ work—just hearing their engineering and sound, not necessarily their arrangements, because how do you know what they do there?” Mailhouse says. “Keanu set up all of these appointments, all of these great places we visited everywhere. And we’re listening and listening and listening. And then, all of a sudden, one day, my neighbor Ryan said ‘You gotta get this guy, Dave Trumfio.’ And we went in there and he had played a sample of the work he had done with other artists. We heard something that sounded familiar—certain tones that I heard Bret already trying to achieve on a song called ‘Glimmer.’ It was deep and full and uncompressed. Then, we met him, and he, sonically, took us to that level.”

Dogstar didn’t have any agenda about whether or not, when going into Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees, that they would try to continue the story they left off on 25 years ago. But there wasn’t necessarily a motive to completely start anew, either. “I don’t think we had any preconceived ideas, other than ‘Let’s get together,’” Domrose says. “That’s all we had, ‘Hey, you got a drum set? Cool, I got a guitar. You got a bass? Let’s go.’ That was it, really, with the intention of actually writing songs. And that’s as far as we were thinking about it. We’ve grown considerably over the years, so I knew that we were, probably, going to sound a little different than the older days. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I’m certainly pleased with the outcome. It feels like a mature, natural progression for us.”

Every song on Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees has a different personality, which is a large part of why the record sounds so primitive. “Upside” conjures accessible chart-worthy alt-pop; the career-defining “Glimmer” has always been a special track for the band, and it pairs beautifully with the power-chord gem “Sunrise.” Reeves particularly adores “Sleep” and “How the Story Ends,” and “Overhang” boasts one of Domrose’s most visceral vocal outings on the entire project. “A fun studio day was when Bret did one take of the guitar solo on ‘Sleep,’ Mailhouse adds. “I remember that was the end of the day, I think it was the last thing we did that day. He didn’t write it down. There was no music, or anything, in front of him. He just played his guitar solo and then, I think he was like, ‘I’ll do another one.’ And we were like, ‘No!’—and then we just walked out. We shut everything down and left.” “We’d only heard Bret sing in the rehearsal room,” Reeves adds. “When we were tracking drums, we were going through the songs and hearing Bret do scratch vocals. And then Dave really gave you [Bret] all the opportunities and pushed you and, I think, you were pushing yourself. We’d made the record over a course of four weeks, but I think we were really struck by the vocals. [Bret] had to sing a fuck lot. It was cool to hear the vocals actually being presented not in the rehearsal room, but in the studio environment.”

Dogstar’s first inkling of a return came via an Instagram post of themselves 20 years ago with a simple caption: “We’re back.” They’d been missing the simple act of taking the stage together, as it was the one thing that had come to be definitive of the band’s collaborative brilliance. They were rowdy and electric, and that truth endured across two decades—even in their absence. “There’s nothing like playing live and I think, once we started writing the songs and then making a record, it was about [that],” Reeves says. “The band was like, ‘Let’s play live, let’s play a show. We did a warm up show in December, so we went from 100 friends and family to 10,000 [people].” Fast-forward to BottleRock Festival in Napa Valley in May 2023, and the band plays a surprise set—their first public one since 2003. Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees was recorded and ready to come out, but not even the best studio renditions can paint a picture of what a live atmosphere is going to be like. Dogstar hadn’t performed together in 20 years, and they had no idea how many folks were going to not just show up at their set, but also get hip to this new chapter of their career and the songs they spent nearly two years piecing together. What’s funny, though, is that they had reservations over the legitimacy of the invitation, initially.

“It was exciting to be asked,” Domrose says. “We didn’t believe it at first, because it came through Instagram. I was like, ‘Who’s this person?’ We realized it was legitimate and then we got pretty excited and decided, ‘Let’s do this.’ As the date got closer, I personally got really nervous. I was really surprised by how nervous I got, but totally excited at the same time. All good nerves. Going out there and playing—and there were so many people, we didn’t expect that many people to be at our stage. It was early in the day, people might be off eating and drinking and doing other things. But it was pretty busy so, the first three songs, I was freaking out a little bit. But then, after that, I settled in. Rob seemed like Captain Confidence.” “It felt really good,” Mailhouse adds. “Everyone there was so nice. We had our sound guy Todd Goldstein with us. I think that’s maybe why I felt a little at ease. It was just one of those perfect days. The temperature was beautiful, it was Napa. The crowd was good. Like Bret said, it was around 3 or 3:30; everyone wasn’t really drunk yet. We just locked in. We rehearsed a lot, after the record, so we were very used to the songs in a studio atmosphere. I felt we were pretty concentrated and then, of course, you look up and see all those people and you’re like, ‘Oh, wow.’ But they were very warm and they were inspiring. They helped us along, so it was great.”

The roots—the real beating heart and soul—of Dogstar still remain, however, in the dirty, smelly history of the Sunset Strip, of the floors and the walls of the Viper Room and the Dragonfly. And they love every second of it. They’re a true garage band still clawing around the West Coast and taking trips to Asia. At a place like The Roxy in LA, they get to absolutely shred in a small space. Their DIY appetite gets whetted, and they continue enduring as a raucous, unstoppable live act. “You get people right in your face, they’re right up against the stage, nowhere to hide. Everything’s good and loud,” Domrose says. “The bigger venues are fun, for me, because you’ve got this soundsystem that’s just like God is speaking. It’s just two totally different worlds, both amazing. The clubs are more intimate, in a sense that you can make eye contact with people right up in front of you. The bigger venues, having that many people blows your mind, too, if you let it.”

While it might have initially seemed like Dogstar’s return was just a product of the pandemic pushing three former bandmates back together for nostalgia’s sake, it must be said that this reunion is the real deal—and they’re going to continue churning out tunes together for as long humanly possible. So few trios over the last three years have built as cohesive an organism as Bret Domrose, Robert Mailhouse and Keanu Reeves have. From the soaring, weathered vocals pouring out of Domrose to the passionate, delectable basslines Reeves has been crafting for years to the unmissable purposefulness of Mailhouse’s precise, machine-like percussion, there’s no doubt where the Dogstar name comes from or where they band will take it. They’ve perfected the formula 30 years in; most groups don’t even get that long to make their magnum opus. Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees is exactly that, though, and it strengthens one truth that has never wavered: Dogstar were destined to make music together, and I think that’s a fate as good as any.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.