Keanu Reeves is Getting His ’90s Band Back Together

Do you remember Keanu Reeves’ band Dogstar? Perhaps you do, perhaps you don’t, but for band member Rob Mailhouse, their experiences were damn near unforgettable.

Talking with VICE, Rob goes into superbly entertaining detail about their first gig, chilling with Bon Jovi in New Zealand, and peeing in a bottle.


“Keanu calls it the “exuberance of youth” where we were full of piss and vinegar, and you’d think you could do things. We were more interested in the emotion of it, rather than actually listening to what we were doing at that particular time. It was just that period of the ’90s where you just wanted to smash everything. We were a little too aggressive in that way.”

“I remember we were in New Zealand, and the Queen of England was ‘in town’, and we got kicked out of our hotel. I guess we had to change hotels because the Queen was there. So they put us all, including Bon Jovi, out on this vineyard somewhere near Auckland. We had a couple days to kill, so we just sat around there, playing tennis and drinking wine with Bon Jovi. We had a lot of fun.”

“But I think the top moment for me was when we were in India and we were asked to do this Bollywood award show. We were there and it was such a magical place, to be in Mumbai and to play for a television audience of millions of people… it was such a crazy week. I remember before the gig, we were going to go on, and Keanu needed the bathroom really bad and he was saying ‘THERE’S NO BATHROOM ANYWHERE AROUND HERE’ so he pissed in a water bottle and hid it behind a chair. Then we went on and we played. It was really spiritual and mystical. It felt like we were doing well. After the gig, Keanu was like ‘I’ve got to go and get the water bottle and throw it out’, but some guy told him that some girl had ran in and stole his pee.”


Read the full VICE interview with Rob