It's only rock'n'roll.

• Author: Hetzer, Michael
• Position: North Carolina economic aspects

IT'S ONLY ROCK'N'ROLL

In the summer of 1982, law student Richard L. "Gus" Gusler went to New York to visit his college roommate, Wayne Forte. The two went to dinner and a play, but Forte, who was a booking agent for rock acts, couldn't stop raving about a new album by British singer Joe Jackson. The two went back to Forte's place to listen to it, and Gusler was impressed.

A month later, Jackson's song Steppin' Out made the Top 10. Gusler was studying for a test when he got a phone call from Forte. "He was looking for someone to do a Joe Jackson concert in the area," Gusler recalls. "I said, 'What the hell, I'll do it.' I had no idea what I was getting into."

As undergraduates at State - Gusler was student body president and Forte was student union president in 1971-72 - the two had booked concerts there.

At that time - long before the Dean Dome and the new Charlotte Coliseum - booking agents didn't consider North Carolina among the top spots for concerts. Most arena-sized acts bypassed the state entirely. As late as 1987, North Carolina was viewed mostly as "a place to gas up" between Atlanta and Washington, Gusler says.

But the 1982 Jackson concert was a success for Gusler. He and five friends put up $1,000 each, rented Duke's Page Auditorium, and when all the receipts were counted, each came away with $500 profit. "It seemed like easy money at the time," Gusler recalls. He started ProMotions Concerts Inc., planning to capitalize on his connection with Forte, while he was still in law school at N.C. Central University.

The tide really turned in 1987 when the Dean Smith Center opened on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus. Gusler booked a string of sold-out concerts at the 20,300-seat venue. They included a David Bowie date, three Genesis shows and back-to-back Pink Floyd concerts.

"[North Carolina] went from a tertiary market to a strong secondary market almost overnight," says Long Island native Forte, who took a strong sampling of the William Morris Agency's rock roster with him when he started International Talent Group in 1981. He's still surprised by the state's rapid rise as a concert stopover.

"I was talking to a British band, and they said, 'Well, how about North Carolina?' It blew me away. I was amazed they'd even heard of North Carolina."

But North Carolina economic-development types haven't caught up in their awareness of the rock scene. When asked about rock'n'roll's bottom-line impact, the deputy director for public affairs at the N.C...