Dogstar
with The Backfires
Tulsa Theater
October 14, 2026
For all the catty particulars about the history of Dogstar, the SoCal rock band formed in Hollywood in 1991 by two young actors who met in a grocery store, read Alex Pappademas’ GQ piece, in which he calls bassist Keanu Reeves “old enough to know better” re: starting a band.
In 1991, Reeves was post-Bill and Ted, and this is also the year Point Break was released. As an eight-year-old in 1991, even I knew who Keanu Reeves was: the love interest in Paula Abdul’s “Rush, Rush” music video. He was teetering on the edge of inevitable megastardom, and thus, Pappademas feels right positing that the band’s origin story is, for Reeves, more of a distraction from his acting career than in any way remotely related to it.
“We’re terrible,” Pappademas quotes Reeves as saying in 1993. “We’ve played about ten times now and though we’re getting better, we play better in a garage.”
Opening gigs for David Bowie and Jon Bon Jovi ensued; you can guess why. There is no threshing Dogstar from Reeves’ fame here. Dogstar cannot escape its bassist, and nobody knows if the band would have ever reached anyone if they did. For comparison, Trivium, performing at the Tulsa Theater in December for tickets half the price of Dogstar’s, has 123 million streams on its top-performing song on Spotify. Dogstar has just over two million on theirs. The band went on hiatus in 2002 and announced its return 20 years later. Dogstar has released two albums since then.
It’s not a small feat to corral the absurdity surrounding an A-list celebrity into something authentic to me, a person who gets angry when presented with unabashed sincerity when there is ample contrary evidence. I went into Wednesday night’s Dogstar concert at the Tulsa Theater with the preconceived-est of notions (dad rock vanity project and I wanna see what the famous guy is doing). For this to work, I needed it abashed just a little, please—give me a wink and nod to let me know we’re all in on the same thing. If you don’t do that, the whole thing kind of falls apart. This is why Chris Gaines didn’t work.