Keanu Reeves by Alex Pappademas

Author:Alex Pappademas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

18|

QUATTRO FORMAGGI

What makes a man start a band? Let alone a man who’s already famous for doing something else? Let alone a man who’s basically as famous as you can conceivably be for doing that other thing? It’s an almost impossible landing to stick. For every Drake or Jenny Lewis or Miley Cyrus—all child performers who changed tracks in early adulthood and never really tried to have it both way—there’s a Shatner, a Seagal, or a Bruce Willis, and for every “Party All the Time” there’s every other Eddie Murphy song. It’s hard enough to write one song, let alone one good song, let alone twelve songs good enough to convince people you’re not just a preening dilettante who craves more direct access to an audience’s adoration and/or doesn’t hear the word “no” often enough.

And yet: in 1991, when he’s somewhere between Point Break and Dracula and old enough to know better, Keanu starts a band. The way it happens is simultaneously totally normal and totally Hollywood. One day Keanu’s in the supermarket. He sees a guy in a Detroit Red Wings jersey and starts talking to him about hockey. The guy in the jersey is an actor named Robert Mailhouse. When he meets Keanu he’s in the middle of a two-year run on Days of Our Lives as a police officer named Brian Scofield, a performance that will win him the Soap Opera Digest Award for Outstanding Comic Relief Role in 1992. Chances are you’ve seen Mail-house on TV, whether you know it or not—he goes on to play a philandering hospital administrator on Melrose Place and a detestable network executive on Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night and the gay man Elaine tries to convert to heterosexuality on Seinfeld, and by the mid-2000s he’s earned TV’s most distinguished working-actor merit badge by guest-starring on three different shows in the CSI universe. But after hockey brings them together, the thing Mailhouse and his fellow actor Keanu Reeves bond over isn’t acting. It’s music. Mailhouse plays the drums. Keanu has been known to fool around on the bass. At this point in his life Keanu has finally abandoned his hotel-hobo lifestyle and rented an actual house in Los Angeles; he and Mailhouse start jamming there with Gregg Miller, a singer and guitarist who’s also a part-time actor.

So begins the story of Dogstar, a professional rock band that forms and eventually tours the world and puts out two major-label albums, all because it’s really hard to make new guy friends in your thirties, even if you’re Keanu Reeves. Especially in Los Angeles, where you kind of have to take up a hobby—it’s why people play street hockey, which is another thing Keanu starts doing around this time. Whatever the other guys are thinking, for Keanu this is just a hang, at least at first, and even once it becomes more than that, he approaches the whole situation in an admirably un-Thirty Seconds to Mars-esque fashion. He’s not the lead singer, for one thing—he’s just the bass player.

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