NEW YORK (AP) – In the mid-1970s, the Eagles were working on a spooky, cryptic new song.
On a lined yellow pad, Don Henley, with input from band co-founder Glenn Frey, jotted thoughts about “a dark desert highway” and “a lovely place” with a luxurious surface and ominous undertones.
The song Hotel California became one of rock’s most indelible singles. And nearly a half-century later, those handwritten pages of lyrics-in-the-making have become the centre of an unusual criminal trial.
Rare-book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock and Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski are charged with conspiring to own and try to sell manuscripts of Hotel California and other Eagles hits without the right to do so.
The three pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers said the men committed no crime with the papers, which they acquired via a writer who’d worked with the Eagles. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office said the defendants connived to obscure the documents’ disputed ownership, despite knowing that Henley said the pages were stolen.
Clashes over valuable collectibles abound, but criminal trials like this are rare. Many fights are resolved in private, in lawsuits or with agreements to return the items.
“If you can avoid a prosecution by handing over the thing, most people just hand it over,” University of Illinois law professor who studies rare document disputes Travis McDade said.
Of course, the case of the Eagles manuscripts is distinctive in other ways, too.
The prosecutors’ star witness is indeed that: Henley is expected to testify between Eagles tour stops. The non-jury trial could offer a peek into the band’s creative process and life in the fast lane of ‘70s stardom.
At issue are over 80 pages of draft lyrics from the blockbuster 1976 Hotel California album, including words to the chart-topping, Grammy-winning title cut. It features one of classic rock’s most recognisable riffs, best-known solos and most oft-quoted – arguably over quoted – lines: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Henley said the song is about “the dark underbelly of the American dream”.
It still was streamed over 220 million times and got 136,000 radio spins last year in the United States (US) alone, according to the entertainment data company Luminate. The Hotel California album has sold 26 million copies nationwide over the years, bested only by an Eagles’ greatest hits disc and Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
The pages also include lyrics from songs including Life in the Fast Lane and New Kid in Town. Eagles manager Irving Azoff called the documents “irreplaceable pieces of musical history”.
Horowitz, Inciardi and Kosinki are charged with conspiracy to possess stolen property and various other offences.
They’re not charged with actually stealing documents. Nor is anyone else, but prosecutors will still have to establish that the documents were stolen. The defense maintains that’s not true.
Much turns on the Eagles’ interactions with Ed Sanders, a writer who also co-founded the 1960s counterculture rock band the Fugs. He worked in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s on an authorised Eagles biography that was never published.
Sanders isn’t charged in the case. A phone message seeking comment was left for him.
He sold the pages to Horowitz, who then sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski.
Horowitz handled huge rare book and archive deals, and he’s been entangled in some ownership spats before. One involved papers linked to Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell. It was settled.
Henley told a grand jury he never gave the biographer the lyrics, according to court filings from Kosinski’s lawyers. But defence lawyers signalled that they plan to probe Henley’s memory of the time.
“We believe that Henley voluntarily provided the lyrics to Sanders,” attorney Scott Edelman said in court last week.
Sanders told Horowitz in 2005 while working on the Eagles book, he was sent whatever papers he wanted from Henley’s home in Malibu, California, according to the indictment.
Then Kosinski’s business offered some pages at auction in 2012. Henley’s attorneys came knocking. And Horowitz, Inciardi and Sanders, in varying combinations, began batting around alternate versions of the manuscripts’ provenance, the indictment said.
In one story, Sanders found the pages discarded in a backstage dressing room. In others, he got them from a stage assistant or while amassing “a lot of material related to the Eagles from different people.” In yet another, he obtained them from Frey – an account that “would make this go away once and for all,” Horowitz suggested in 2017. Frey had died the year before.
“He merely needs gentle handling and reassurance that he’s not going to the can,” Horowitz emailed Inciardi during a 2012 exchange about getting Sanders’ “’explanation’ shaped into a communication” to auctioneers, the indictment said.
Sanders supplied or signed off on some of the varying explanations, according to the indictment, and it’s unclear what he may have conveyed verbally. But he apparently rejected at least the dressing-room tale.
Kosinki forwarded one explanation, approved by Sanders, to Henley’s lawyer. Kosinski also assured Sotheby’s auction house that the musician had “no claim” to the documents and asked to keep potential bidders in the dark about Henley’s complaints, the indictment said.
