Successful punk artist, former music industry executive-turned-law-student earns accolades in new arena

By Carla Cantor

Growing up in Washington, D.C., Lyle Preslar had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, but he knew what he didn’t want to become – a lawyer. Preslar, the son of an international business consultant, spent his childhood surrounded by attorneys. During high school summers, he chased faxes and copied legal briefs at district law firms.

“The last thing I wanted was to be another suit on K Street,” said Preslar, who started playing in bands at 15. So he took a different path, gravitating toward the D.C. music scene and becoming lead guitarist for the seminal, 1980s hardcore punk band Minor Threat.

“My parents were horrified,” Preslar said.

Not today. On May 25, Dorothy and Lloyd Preslar couldn't have been prouder of their son and his hard-earned degree from Rutgers’ School of Law–Newark. At 43, Lyle Preslar has an executive wife, a new baby, and a recently published article in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law  that earlier this year won an award in a writing competition cosponsored by the Grammy Foundation and American Bar Association. Preslar’s article analyzed the issues surrounding a suit brought by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against XM Satellite Radio, claiming copyright infringement.

As a recording artist who has made money from copyrighted music – Minor Threat, early advocates of the anti-substance, straight-edge movement, would have a profound impact on the punk music scene – Preslar admits he approached the case with some ambivalence. “When I read the RIAA’s complaint, I thought the case was a slam dunk,” Preslar said. But something was gnawing at him – something remembered from Rutgers–Newark law school professor John Kettle’s intellectual property law class. “I realized that the RIAA was ignoring potentially substantive law,” Preslar said. “When I read XM’s answer, there it was. These were two briefs passing in the night.”

Preslar joined Minor Threat with friends Ian MacKaye, Jeff Nelson, and Brian Baker while in high school. The band became popular regionally and released its first self-titled record and the EP “In My Eyes” in 1981. Preslar left to begin his freshman year at Northwestern University, but shortly afterwards “In My Eyes” started to take off, and Preslar got a call: His band needed him, and it didn’t take much to convince him to leave college that spring and go on tour.

Minor Threat proved to be short-lived. “We made a few records, went on tour, then egos got big, and we broke up,” Preslar said. While the other members continued to pursue music, Preslar enrolled at Georgetown and graduated with a degree in English in 1988. Preslar then spent a year in New York as a paralegal, and decided to try the record business.

He got a job as an A&R (“Artists and Repertoire”) rep, signing and working with artists like Peter Gabriel and Ben Folds, and later switched to marketing and label management, working at times for Virgin Records, EMI, Elektra Records, and Caroline Records, where he negotiated artist and distribution deals. “I realized that the company was spending 20 percent of any record deal we made on law firms, so I took over the contracts,” Preslar said. “Basically, I practiced law for four years.”

Though he swore he’d never do it, Preslar decided to take the LSAT in 2003. Living in Hoboken and married to Sandy Aloutte, an executive at VH1, he could afford law school with income from the Minor Threat LPs; although the group had broken up 20 years earlier, its music continued to sell steadily. “The band has sold 100 times as many records in the last two decades as we did when we were together,” Preslar said. He enrolled at Rutgers’ School of Law–Newark in 2004, telling everyone who wanted to listen, “I’d never do entertainment law.”

He proved himself wrong again. All it took was a stint at the Rutgers Community Law Clinic doing pro bono work for a few singers and songwriters in New York and New Jersey. One client, an older gentleman from Newark, stopped into the clinic, saying he’d written a song when he was 16 that had been recorded by a local doo-wop group, and he’d never gotten paid. Preslar found proof that the copyright ownership had been ignored and negotiated a settlement with the publishing company. “It wasn’t a lot of money, but enough to justify in this man’s mind that he had been treated fairly,” Preslar said.

Last summer, working in the legal department at MTV Networks, a direction began to crystallize. “I realized that my real love is working with creative people,” Preslar said. “The ‘business of creativity’ can be a real minefield for creators. They need help to accomplish their goals.”

Since graduating, Preslar has been casting about for the next step. “My wife fantasizes about me standing up in a courtroom like Clarence Darrow, but that’s only because she’s heard me do it at home so often,” Preslar said. “I suspect it’s going to be a world of contracts for me. So, let’s just hope that at least once in a while I’m working on the right side of the fence – and that I get some free tickets.”