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RALEIGH-When Hootie and the Blowfish came calling the first time, Gus Gusler wasnt interested.
The then-obscure band needed a lawyer, and manager Rusty Harmon approached Gusler. The two men had first crossed paths in Raleigh nearly a decade earlier, and Harmon knew that Gusler had experience both as a concert promoter and band manager, and as an entertainment lawyer.
Only by then, Gusler had grown weary of trying to give legal advice to musicians, many of whom found business a bother.
So Gusler twice refused to meet Harmon and Hootie and focused on his criminal defense cases.
The third time, Harmon called from outside Gusler's law office and had the band in tow.
The meeting that followed proved fateful for all. Gusler immediately noticed that the band members were not fame-intoxicated musicians. They asked questions about setting up retirement funds and buying liability insurance. "I had never heard musicians talk like that," Gusler says.
He became the band's lawyer in 1989, a post he still holds. During the mid 1990s, when Hootie and the Blowfish moved from playing small clubs to filling 15,000-seat amphitheaters, Gusler teamed with Harmon as a kind of co-manager. Together, they negotiated contracts with Atlantic Records, which released Hootie's blockbuster "Cracked Rear View," and with concert promoters.
"Gus was there to guide them and protect them through a lot," says Michael Reinert, senior vice president of business and legal affairs for Universal/ Motown Records Group. Reinert, who worked for Atlantic Records in New York in the early 1990s when Gusler come calling, admits his first thought...