OMAHA, Neb.—The organizers of a blues concert held last summer at Lincoln’s Haymarket Park are suing a Lincoln-based minor league baseball team, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and its baseball stadium for fraud and breach of contract.
Tim Tucker, owner of a Colorado entertainment company who proposed last summer’s Bluesmasters Concert, filed the lawsuit Wednesday in Nebraska’s U.S. District Court. Tucker’s company and event group, Blues Events LLC, were among the production partners for the Aug. 31 concert.
The lawsuit accuses Charlie Meyer, president of the Lincoln Saltdogs baseball team and representative of the concert’s venue partners—the baseball team, university and ballpark—of surreptitiously adding a clause to the event contract requiring a $100,000 upfront payment to the venue partners weeks before the concert was held.
Tucker and Meyer worked for several weeks on an agreement to divvy up the proceeds from the concert, which featured the Allman Brothers Band and other acts, the lawsuit says. The sides had agreed that the venue partners would receive a flat fee of $1 million, with $500,000 going to UNL’s Haymarket Park, $250,000 going to the UNL Alumni Association for a scholarship program and $250,000 to the Lincoln Saltdogs.
However, the two initially disagreed on when that $1 million would be paid, with Meyer wanting the fee before all the tickets were sold.
By June, Tucker and Meyer had agreed to nix advance payment to the venue partners. Instead, concert artists and vendors would be paid first on the day of the show from ticket sales, then the venue partners’ costs—estimated at $100,000—would be reimbursed before the production partners’ costs were covered. The agreement also said UNL would get all proceeds from concession sales, and that the name and logo of the university would be used in marketing and promoting the concert.
But Tucker was out of town the week the contract was finalized, the lawsuit said. Tucker agreed to have Meyer read him the terms of the contract over the phone, line-by-line, before Tucker would agree to have his manager sign it.
But in reading the contract, Meyer left out language he had added requiring an up-front $100,000 payment to the venue partners, the lawsuit says.
“So, when Mr. Tucker gets back from his trip and sees this added language, he immediately challenged it,” Tucker’s attorney, Michael Maloney of Altoona, Mass., said Thursday.
Meyer responded by threatening to cancel the concert if the demand for $100,000 up front wasn’t met, the lawsuit said.
Meyer declined to comment Thursday on the lawsuit or its accusations.
The lawsuit also says the venue partners did little to promote the concert and that they kept all of the money collected from the concert’s ticket sales, leaving Tucker’s group with only the bill to pay the concert performers—including the $350,000 to the Allman Brothers Band—vendors and other expenses. Tucker’s group spent hundreds of thousands to cover those costs out of its own pocket, Maloney said.
In fact, the venue partners—who sold the tickets and collected the money—have never accounted for how many tickets were sold or how much money was made, Maloney said.
“Essentially, they absconded and called it a day,” he said.
University officials did not immediately respond Thursday to requests for comment.
Tucker and his production group are seeking an unspecified amount in damages and have asked for a jury trial.
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