for a meeting. Next Kenna made a music video for next to
nothing for one of his songs and took it to MTV2, the MTV
channel for more serious music lovers. Record companies spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars on promotion, trying to get
their videos on MTV, and if they can get them broadcast one
hundred or two hundred times, they consider themselves very
lucky. Kenna walked his video over to MTV himself, and MTV
ended up playing it 475 times over the next few months. Kenna
then made a complete album. He gave it to Kallman again, and
Kallman gave the album to all of his executives at Atlantic.
“Everyone wanted it,” Kallman remembers. “That’s amazingly
unusual.” Soon after Kenna’s success opening for No Doubt, his
manager got a call from the Roxy, a nightclub in Los Angeles
that is prominent in the city’s rock music scene. Did Kenna want
to play the following night? Yes, he said, and then posted a
message on his Website, announcing his appearance. That was
at four-thirty the day before the show. “By the next afternoon,
we got a call from the Roxy. They were turning people away. I
figured we’d have at most a hundred people,” Kenna says. “It
was jam-packed, and the people up front were singing along to
all the lyrics. It tripped me out.”
In other words, people who truly know music (the kind of