Paul Shaffer spoke with LateNighter about the passing of Eric Gardner, his close friend and longtime manager, whom he described as “a professional to the very end.” Gardner died on July 19 at the age of 74.
The pair first connected in 1990, when Shaffer co-hosted the Billboard Music Awards with musician Morris Day. “Eric had approached me, and of course I was a big fan of Todd Rundgren’s,” Shaffer recalled. “He was a longtime manager of Todd’s, way before he started with me.” (Gardner was still representing Rundgren, his longest-running client, at the time of his passing.)
“There was a dinner that took place with Todd and me and Eric around 1990, which led to him saying, ‘Well let me just do this Billboard Awards thing with you and see how it goes,’” Shaffer explained. “That was sort of a test run. And it was so pleasant working with him that I signed on with him.”
By that point, Gardner was 20 years into his career as the founder of Panacea Entertainment, which began coordinating tours for bands like KISS, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead.
“By 1974, several of my clients realized that what I was doing for them went well beyond coordinating their tours, into what we now would consider artist management,” Gardner said in an interview on the podcast Don’t Sh— On The Bus in 2022. “Back then, there was no official profession [of] ‘artist management.’”
That’s when Gardner transitioned to more of a talent management focus, representing a wide range of artists including Max Weinberg, Steven Van Zandt, Donny Osmond, the Sex Pistols, Blue Öyster Cult, the Stray Cats, Gabe Kaplan, and Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones.
“Instead of just focusing on one career area for a lot of acts, we work with a handful of artists who are multidimensional,” Gardner told Billboard in 1985. “For me, it’s provided a high degree of experience covering a variety of different aspects of entertainment.”
For Shaffer, that was a profound quality of Gardner’s.
“He started in rock and roll obviously. We’ve all read that,” says Shaffer. “But he really could represent me in any area. Whether I got a little role in a movie or whether I had a song or something and needed to publish it. Whatever it was—not just music… He was very well-read and he really knew how to do a good job for me in any area.”
A pivotal moment for Shaffer came just a few years into his partnership with Gardner. “1990 was somewhere in the middle of our run at NBC, and he was with me, and did negotiate that deal for the CBS run,” Shaffer said.
In 1993, David Letterman departed NBC after hosting Late Night with David Letterman since 1982. Shaffer had been the bandleader of the World’s Most Dangerous Band, the show’s house band, since its debut. Letterman went to CBS to host Late Show, and Shaffer followed to lead The CBS Orchestra.
“That turned out to be quite a long-running deal,” Shaffer noted. “So he was certainly not above getting legal counsel when necessary, but often he did know enough to handle lots of things for me legally, even though he was not a lawyer.”
Gardner also led the way for Shaffer to set up a series of Las Vegas residencies beginning in 2017. Paul Shaffer and The Shaf-Shifters took over Cleopatra’s Barge, a popular lounge at Caesars Palace, and returned the following year to do it again.
More than a trusted business partner, Gardner was a dear friend to the musician. “He was the kind of guy that one would want to be friends with,” Shaffer says. “I certainly did. Our wives knew each other, and I knew his daughters.”
“That’s really what’s reverberating with me now is the loss of this dear friend,” Shaffer reflected. “One of my best friends.”
“He had a long run in show business, and he was just a terrific manager for me. He did everything for me,” the musician concluded. “I guess I have to be an adult now.”
Asked if there’s anything else he wants the world to know about Gardner, Shaffer pondered for a moment before landing on an answer.
“Just that when he shaved his head, it had nothing to do with the fact that I had shaven mine,” he told LateNighter. “It was an independent decision that he made, and I will defend his right to do so, even after the death.”
