In the 1980s, concert promoter Brian McKenna entered the music scene by managing his friends' band in high school.
McKenna started booking the band at different venues around Sacramento, which ultimately led him to promote shows himself at the age of 17.
By 19, he was booking national, international and local acts at the Cattle Club, an old venue on Folsom Boulevard near 65th Street, along with fellow concert promoter Jerry Perry in 1989 under New View Productions.
After five years, he left the Cattle Club and New View Productions and started his own company, Abstract Entertainment.
McKenna has now promoted and booked shows in Sacramento for 35 years, at venues such as the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, Harlow’s, Arco Arena, and Ace of Spades.
He has booked bands like Nirvana, Blink-182, Green Day, No Doubt, Tool, Korn, and many more. He also booked Sacramento’s Deftones, Cake, and Phallucy in their earlier years.
At 55, he still keeps up with music and book shows in the city.
“I really like just bringing people together,” McKenna said. “You bring together an artist and the audience, and the connection that you can feel at a show where the audience and the band or artists on stage just connect in a way where you can just feel the excitement and energy between the two.”
McKenna said he’s probably promoted nearly 5,000 shows over the last 35 years, sometimes more than 200 shows yearly. He used to do shows all over California and Nevada, but now he does around 50 shows yearly because it’s much easier to manage.
“Traveling up and down the state and everything, it's kind of a young man's game,” McKenna said. “But right now, I'm pretty much focused on just doing stuff in Sacramento and occasionally somewhere in the outlying areas.”
Bands booked over three decades
McKenna said there are a lot of memorable moments from his time booking shows in Sacramento.
He said he started with Nirvana, booking them three times in town, once at the Cattle Club and twice at the Crest Theatre. Mckenna began working with the Deftones in 1989 and booked their shows at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium in the early to mid-2000s.
One of the concert flyers where McKenna booked Nirvana and Tad in February 1990 at the Cattle Club. It was the first of three shows with Nirvana while they were touring on the 'Bleach' record.Photo courtesy of Brian McKenna He also recalled booking Green Day when their third album, Dookie, came out in 1994, and Tool opened up for the local band, Phallucy, for $100.
“A lot of bands that are now household names played shows for us when they were [the] opening band,” McKenna said. “I mean, bands like Blink-182 and Incubus had their first shows in Sacramento or in this market.”
McKenna has booked shows at Arco Arena with bands such as No Doubt, Cake, The Vandal, Korn, and Rob Zombie.
Longtime journalist and writer Chris Macias in the Sacramento area said McKenna has always had his way of booking bands that he enjoys. He thinks they’re going places, and many of them have.
“He's been one of the city's great taste makers for over the years,” Macias said. “He introduced Sacramento music fans to so many great bands. But he's really influenced just the landscape of the local live music scene.”
Macias said Primus, the band from San Francisco, is a good example of a band that McKenna championed early on.
“The point is that they got major label deals and they kept doing more shows with Brian at bigger and bigger places,” Macias said. “I mean, he's kind of the embodiment of local music, as far as just getting people exposed to cool bands. He just kind of lives and breathes live music.”
Macias wrote a story for the Sacramento Bee that highlighted McKenna's impact on the music scene.
According to Macias, McKenna needed help with medical expenses. So, last year, a couple of days before Christmas, a benefit concert was put together with many bands McKenna has booked over the years.
“It became really clear just how much people were really eager to give to Brian and give back once the word came out that he was facing this big medical challenge, and there were the insurance problems and whatnot,” he said.
McKenna said 20 bands played three songs each.
“It was kind of overwhelming, the support and it definitely showed me that people do care, musicians and fans and friends alike,” McKenna said. “[To] do a sell-out show on a Monday, two days before Christmas, is a pretty good feat, and I was just happy that people came out and were supportive, and that helped a lot.”
Concert promotions changes
After three decades in the concert-promoting business, McKenna said an obstacle he faced is the “corporate consolidation” of the live music industry that books shows with artists from independent promoters.
Brian McKenna has been promoting shows in Sacramento for three decades, including acts like Deftones, Cake, Korn and Rob Zombie.Photo courtesy of Brian McKennaMcKenna said he started seeing SFX around 25 years ago, which morphed into Live Nation over time.
“For some people, it probably works quite well. But like anything else, I think having independent people out there doing what they do is a good thing,” McKenna said. “A lot of them got swallowed up by Live Nation or AEG. I just chose to remain independent all these years. If it were the right situation, I'd certainly consider it. But I turned down some job offers over the years from larger companies.”
McKenna said there used to be much more loyalty between agents, booking agents, and promoters.
“A lot of that has certainly changed with the corporate consolidation of the live music business because the larger companies are battling it out amongst themselves to see who can buy the whole tour of a band, instead of, just like I said, the network of independence,” McKenna said.
He said there are still good independent companies out there, mentioning Another Planet Entertainment of Berkeley, which puts on a few festivals like Outside Lands and has a new mid-size venue Channel 24, which opens in Sacramento this month.
Although the industry has changed over the last three decades, McKenna still loves booking unknown artists and building them up to the point where almost everyone in town knows them.
“That's a good feeling being able to help develop an artist from the ground up,” McKenna said.
