Gallagher Rep Wins Festival Lawsuit

The three-day festival attracted 12,000-13,000, featuring Warrant, Slaughter, Quiet Riot, Georgia Satellites, and Gene Loves Jezebel with Gallagher as master of ceremonies, according to Florida Today.

Craig Marquardo, Gallagher’s manager at the time, sued promoter Richard Hendry for allegedly not paying the comedian’s $5,000 appearance fee. Marquardo says the appearance was a “train wreck.” Marquardo’s other client at the event, Tommy Tutone, was also owed $3,600. Hendry paid Tutone’s $1,000 deposit and wired $400 after the event but stopped paying, claiming he planned to but “there’s absolutely no way we can give Marquardo a dime” while the lawsuit was ongoing, according to Florida Today.

In March Brevard Circuit Court Judge David Dugan awarded Marquardo $17,200 in damages and $32,159 in attorney’s fees, the paper said. The promoter equated handling performers including Gallagher to “herding cats.”

“You make a talent mistake. And for us, it was a novice mistake – choosing the wrong person and not knowing what was going to happen. “It was too big and it was too much to deal with, and he just got out of our control,” he said. Marquardo said he gave Hendry a break on Gallagher’s price because the comedian wanted to test the marketability of a fan-interactive “Sledge-O-Matic Experience” in advance of a Vegas performance and “provided 10 times the audience interaction and service than he would have, had he simply performed his duties onstage.”

Marquardo added that Gallagher, unlike other performers at the festival, signed free autographs and posed for free photographs. Hendry has a different recollection.

“It was a complete nonperformance,” the promoter told the paper. “He spent most of his time backstage. He didn’t do his job at all,” he said, adding that Gallagher “only was on stage three times for less than two minutes over the two days and 16 bands.”

Hendry told Florida Today the court case won’t affect this summer’s festival at Melbourne Auditorium in August.