Eric Gardner is a producer and expertise supervisor whose notable purchasers embody Todd Rundgren, Cassandra “Elvira” Peter Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson, Paul Shaffer, and so forth. He died on July 19 on the age of 74. illness.
Gardner is chairman and CEO of Panacea Leisure, which has most just lately been representing former “Late Evening” frontman Schafer and Gardner’s decades-old shopper Rundgren, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Corridor of Fame (though the artist personal indifference to honor) in 2021.
“I misplaced a pricey buddy. My long-time supervisor Eric Gardner handed away at his house exterior of Los Angeles,” Schafer posted on social media. “He has represented me since 1990 and is the whole lot one may hope for in a supervisor – sensible, well-spoken, capable of characterize me in any space I need to enterprise into, and his recommendation is at all times smart and truthful of.
Gardner was inducted into the Particular person Managers Corridor of Fame in 2017.
“Negotiation is a superb pleasure to me, like a dance,” he stated at a personal managers assembly in 2018. I feel if two rational events need one thing to occur, there’s at all times a means.
However he’s not ready of energy. “I used to be requested 20 years in the past what my negotiating type was,” he stated. “I had by no means considered it. Within the Sixties, there was an promoting billboard marketing campaign in Central Florida known as the Florida Freeway Patrol. Within the sixties, when issues have been very tense and there was friction between the legislation and younger folks, the Florida Freeway Patrol put up a billboard that includes a really benevolent-looking, non-confrontational patrolman with the textual content: ” Florida Freeway Patrol”. Well mannered intimidation. The concept got here to me a number of years later once I was being interviewed. good outcomes.
Speaking about his negotiating type, Gardner stated: “I am very aggressive. I attempt to make folks chuckle as a lot as I can, and that is how I prevented fights in junior excessive. I feel the largest factor is I by no means Write something down in a negotiation that I am unable to instantly defend for the sake of creating a suggestion. I am going to counsel it and say, ‘Here is why it is value it to my shopper’ or why it is a good match for the deal. .
Whereas attending graduate college at Columbia College in 1970, Gardner started his profession coordinating excursions for artists akin to Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Lifeless, and in 1973 based Panacea Leisure, nonetheless with a deal with touring manufacturing.
A yr after the corporate was based, he moved into administration. He adopted that path for the following 50 years, with detours into movie and tv and a Las Vegas manufacturing residency.
In an interview with Clinton Billups on the 2018 Private Managers Convention, Gardner stated that when he first began getting concerned within the rock music trade, there was “no private administration.” “In rock music, it is your next-door neighbor, your buddy’s brother, or your drug supplier. That labored in my favor. After I bought into it, nobody may argue with me and inform me I used to be doing one thing improper.
Though he labored primarily within the music trade, Gardner helped set up Peterson’s profession, signing him in 1982, shortly after Panacea moved to Los Angeles from New York, with whom he would spend the following 26 years. She collaborated on her “Elvira” mission.
Musicians he represented at varied factors in his profession embody Timothy Leary, Richard Belzer, Betty LaVitt, Grace Jones, Richard Chamberlain, Invoice Wyman of the Rolling Stones, Kenny Jones (of Who and Faces fame), John Lydon and the Intercourse Pistols, Jefferson Starship, Donny Osmond, Pink Floyd’s Rick Wright, E Road Band’s Steven Van Zandt and Max Weinberg, the Stray Cats and Blue Oyster Cult.
Movie and tv initiatives on which he has served as govt producer embody Julien Temple’s Intercourse Pistols documentary The Filth and the Fury and David Hasselhoff actuality present Hoff the Document.
He was additionally the driving pressure behind Donny and Marie Osmond’s residency on the Flamingo, which started in 2009, Ringo Starr and his all-star band’s Las Vegas residency, and Shaffer’s residency at Caesar’s.
Gardner has been growing quite a few initiatives lately, together with a “Blues Brothers” animated TV sequence and Broadway musical, a musical “Sharknado” for Caesars in Las Vegas, and a “Hellraiser” TV sequence and a characteristic movie about his late shopper Timothy Leary.
Gardner is survived by his spouse and Panacea enterprise associate Janis and three daughters, Cameron, Madeleine and Nathalie.
