Eric Gardner, a producer and talent manager whose famous clients included Todd Rundgren, Cassandra “Elvira” Peterson, Paul Shaffer and many others, died July 19 at age 74. Family members said he died in his sleep at home in Camarillo, Calif., from complications of pneumonia.
Gardner was the chairman-CEO of Panacea Entertainment, which most recently had been representing Shaffer, the former “Late Night” band leader, and Gardner’s client of many decades, Rundgren, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (despite the artist’s own indifference to the honor) in 2021.
“I lost a dear friend. My long-time manager, Eric Gardner, passed away at his home outside of Los Angeles,” Shaffer posted on social media. “He has represented me since 1990, and was everything one might have hoped his manager would be — smart, beautifully spoken, could represent me in any area in which I wanted to dabble, his counsel always wise and true.”
Gardner was inducted into the Personal Managers Hall of Fame in 2017.
“Negotiating for me is a great joy, it’s a dance,” he said at a conference of personal managers in 2018. “My favorite negotiations are with people across the tables who are smart and funny. I am of the school that if two rational parties want something to happen, there is always a way.”
But he was not above coming from a position of power. “I was asked 20 years ago what my negotiating style was,” he said. “I had never thought about that. There was a billboard campaign in the 1960s in central Florida, the Florida Highway Patrol. In the ’60s when things were so tense, and there was a friction between the law and young people, the Florida Highway Patrol put up a billboard of a patrolman looking very beneficent and non-confrontational and the copy was: ‘Florida Highway Patrol. Courteous Intimidation.’ That came into my head years later when I was being interviewed. It worked great.”
Of his style in negotiations, Gardner said, “I’m pleasantly aggressive. I try to make people laugh as often I can, which is how I avoided fights in junior high. And I think the most important thing is I never compose anything in negotiation that I cannot immediately defend. I don’t cavalierly suggest something just for the sake of suggesting it. I’ll suggest it then say, ‘Here’s why my client deserves this’ or why it is appropriate for the deal.”
Gardner started his career as a graduate student at Columbia in 1970, coordinating tours for artists including the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead, which he parlayed into the founding of Panacea Entertainment in 1973, still with a tour production focus.
A year after founding the company, he made the transition into management. He followed that path for the next 50 years, with detours into film and TV and Las Vegas residency production.
When he was getting his start in the business, in rock ‘n’ roll, “there wasn’t personal management,” Gardner said in a 2018 interview with Clinton Billups at a conference of personal managers. “In rock ‘n’ roll, it was your next-door neighbor, your friend’s brother or drug dealer. That worked in my favor. When I got into it, nobody could contradict me that I was doing something wrong.”
Although he primarily worked in the music world, Gardner helped establish the career of Peterson, whom he signed in 1982, shortly after Panacea moved from New York to Los Angeles, working with her on her “Elvira” projects for the next 26 years as that character’s international stature grew, including serving as producer on her 1988 “Elvira: Mistress of the Dark” feature film.
Musicians he represented at different points in his career included Timothy Leary, Richard Belzer, Bettye LaVette, Grace Jones, Richard Chamberlain, the Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman, Kenney Jones (of the Who and Faces fame), John Lydon and the Sex Pistols, Jefferson Starship, Donny Osmond, Pink Floyd’s Rick Wright, Steven Van Zandt and Max Weinberg of the E Street Band, the Stray Cats and Blue Oyster Cult.
Film and TV projects on which he served as an executive producer ranged from Julien Temple’s Sex Pistols documentary “The Filth and the Fury” to the David Hasselhoff reality series “Hoff the Record.”
He also was the spark behind Donny and Marie Osmond’s Flamingo residency, beginning in 2009, and the Las Vegas residencies of Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band, as well as Shaffer’s stint at Caesar’s.
Gardner had been at work developing several projects in recent years, including a “Blues Brothers” animated TV series and Broadway musical, a “Sharknado” musical for Caesar’s in Las Vegas, a “Hellraiser” TV series and a feature film about his late client Timothy Leary.
Gardner is survived by his wife and Panacea business partner, Janis, and three daughters, Cameron, Madeleine and Nathalie.
