Welcome to the Hotel California trial
Legendary singer-songwriter Don Henley claims notebooks on which he wrote the Eagles’ biggest hit were stolen.
“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” Don Henley sang of guests at the Hotel California, that strange establishment on a dark desert highway, which gave the Eagles their greatest hit.
The same was not apparently true of the yellow legal pads on which Henley drafted those lyrics. They left Henley’s home in Malibu in the late 1970s and found their way to New York, ending up in the hands of a memorabilia collector and a curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now Henley wants them back.
In this quest he has the assistance of prosecutors in New York who have, to the amazement of many, charged the collector, Edward Kosinski, and the curator Craig Inciardi, with criminal possession of stolen property, and a third man, Glenn Horowitz, a famous book dealer, with aiding them in the crime. All three have pleaded not guilty.
Nicholas Penfold, for the prosecution, said the defendants were “criminal actors”, handling stolen goods worth millions of dollars.
At the opening of the trial, being held without a jury, Penfold said the case revolved around a hundred pages of notes that showed the creative process behind what “became the third highest selling album of all time and contained songs that defined the era”.
“Although Henley and the Eagles embraced the decadence (of the time), living lives of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, Henley was deeply committed to his craft” and “laboured over every word and line of his lyrics”, refining them on legal notepads, Penfold said. “Mr Henley considered his lyric notes private. He never displayed, sold or gave away any of the lyric manuscripts.”
In 1979 “at the height of their fame”, the Eagles agreed to allow a writer named Ed Sanders to make a book about the band “and furnished him with materials”, including the lyric notes, Penfold said. “The contract plainly stated that all the materials that the Eagles provided to Sanders for the book remained the property of the Eagles.”
He said Sanders had “betrayed” that contract by “keeping them as his own”. Though his biography never found a publisher, the notepads remained at his house in Woodstock until 2005 when they were bought by Horowitz’s company. Penfold said Sanders explained that they had come from Henley’s home and “expressed concern about Henley’s possible reaction” if they were sold. Sanders has not been charged in the case.
Matthew Laroche, a lawyer for Kosinski, said there were many things that the Eagles shared with people that they now wish they had not. “Team Henley is trying to get stuff back that they gave to Mr Sanders 44 years ago,” he said. Lawyers for all three men argued that Henley had initially claimed that the items were stolen in a burglary, a claim that proved false.
Henley is expected to testify next week. In 2002, he told CBS’s 60 Minutes that Hotel California was about “the dark underbelly of the American dream”. The case will bring him to another dark underbelly when he appears in a Manhattan criminal court.
The Times
