Keanu Reeves’ favourite bands: “What I cut my teeth on”
Keanu Reeves is fast becoming a Hollywood legend. Star of Bill and Ted, My Own Private Idaho, The Matrix and more recently, John Wick, he’s an all-around nice guy who’s long been regarded as the “internet’s boyfriend”. Part of that connection is his casual nature, providing a boy next door image that you might actually meet next door. Or, perhaps more likely, down your local music venue.
Like stars Christopher Walkem, Bill Murray and Harry Dean Stanton, Reeves exists in a world outside of his work. There is nobody willing to claim he is the leading actor of his generation, but with a gentle affability and authenticity that feels comforting to outsiders peering into the Hollywood elite, Reeves stands out as a breath of fresh air.
Another critical facet of Reeves’ persona is how much of a massive music fan he is. Much like with Ted, music has played a key part in Reeves’ life since he was born. Aside from acting, he also made a foray into the world of music with his band Dogstar in the mid-1990s. Active between 1991 and 2002 and now back on the circuit, the band actually found moderate success in their heyday before enjoying another bump of buzz in 2023 with their record Somewhere Between the Power Lines and Palm Trees receiving a ripple of applause from music critics.
In 2017, reflecting on his creative exploits, Reeves told Jimmy Fallon: “You know, we started in a garage, and then you end up starting to write songs, and then you’re like ‘Let’s go out and play them!’, and then you’re like ‘Let’s go on tour!’, and then…you’re playing.”
Dogstar, named after the brightest luminary in the sky, didn’t always have such a run-of-the-mill name. They were initially called Small Fecal Matter before changing their name to BFS, which stood interchangeably as Big Fucking Shit or Big Fucking Sound, depending on time and place, which is the most Bill and Ted name you could possibly imagine. However, they finally settled on Dogstar after reading Sexus by Henry Miller.
“Keanu just loves playing bass,” said guitarist Gregg Miller to The Orlando Sentinel in 1995. “He’s not the frontman of the band, although he’s the focus of the band. We’re faced with that, but I’ve been doing (music) my whole life, and Rob and Bret have been doing it for a while. We’ve had this opportunity, but it’s not like we have this break, and we don’t deserve it. We feel that we can put on an entertaining show. Otherwise, we’d just play in the garage for our friends.”
The band released two albums over their career, 1996’s Our Little Visionary and 2000’s Happy Ending, which were both received to moderate fanfare. Even more interestingly, the band had a handful of opening acts that went on to become huge, including Rancid and Weezer. In fact, Weezer’s first show was opening for Dogstar.
Back in 1996, before the release of Our Little Visionary, Reeves sat down with EW to discuss all things music. ”Our songs are kind of deceiving. They have a pop aspect to them, but the lyrics are not poppy,” he said. ”We’re not trying to copy anyone’s sound: We’re doing our own thing. Hopefully, people will like it.”
After the discussions of Dogstar had ended, it then moved on to Reeves’ music taste. Asked which bands he liked at that moment in time, he explained: “I like this band Plexi I’ve seen in LA And Lifter — I just got their album (Melinda (Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt)) a few weeks ago.”
Then it got super juicy. The interviewer asked Reeves who his favourite bands of all time were. He said: “I’d say Fugazi, The Ramones, Exploited, Discharge, early Elvis Costello, The Clash, Violent Femmes, Joy Division, Minor Threat, and Bad Brains. That’s definitely what I cut my teeth on.”
There are flecks of all these bands in Reeves’ work with Dogstar, from the thrash of Ramones and hardcore punk bands Fugazi and Exploited to the more melodic plodding of Joy Division. The latter has also been long regarded as Reeves’ ultimate favourite, with their song ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ ranked among his most cherished, labelling the song he could listen to for the rest of his life.
While a list of anybody’s favourite bands is relatively arbitrary to the work they create, there’s something particularly enjoyable about Reeves’ tastes being akin to that of pretty much any humble rock fan of his generation. With these bands, he once again proves that he may just be the most famous everyman of all time.
Keanu Reeves’ favourite bands:
- Fugazi
- The Ramones
- Exploited
- Discharge
- Elvis Costello
- The Clash
- Violent Femmes
- Joy Division
- Minor Threat
- Bad Brains
