MANHATTAN (CN) — The Eagles co-founder Don Henley told a New York court on Monday that manuscripts for the band’s 1976 hit album “Hotel California” had “no right” to be sold. But that didn’t stop portions from a legal pad, filled with roughly 100 pages of Henley’s handwritten lyric sheets, from hitting numerous online auction sites in the 2010s.
Henley testified in the Manhattan district attorney’s case against three men charged with selling those lyric sheets, which Henley claims were first stolen by writer and musician Ed Sanders.
“He was the one who had access,” Henley said. “No one else had an interest in those materials except myself, and I knew that he had looked at them.”
Sanders, a prominent counterculture figure in the 1970s, was appointed by Henley’s bandmate to write a biography about The Eagles — much to the displeasure of Henley, who said he was skeptical Sanders was the right man for the job.
“He didn't strike me as the right person to write a book about a West Coast band,” Henley said. “He seemed like a very eccentric character.”
Henley said he held his tongue, conscious of keeping his bandmates happy to avoid turmoil. But when he received the “corny” first draft, Henley said he felt the need to step in.
“I was disappointed,” Henley said. “There was a lot of semi-humorous stuff, some of the stuff was cartoonish. It was like a parody.”
An English major who told the court, “I know good writing when I see it,” Henley was less than pleased with Sanders’ first effort. Reluctantly, he said, he decided to give Sanders access to his Southern California barn to review some of the band’s memorabilia in order to put together a more substantial biography.
“I was desperate to make the book better,” Henley said. “I thought if I gave him access to our songwriting process, it would add substance to the book.”
Among the items Sanders got hold of was a lined yellow legal pad filled with handwritten notes and lyrics from The Eagles’ “Hotel California” record.
Sanders’ book was shelved eventually, and never released, but Henley claims he bore the brunt of Sanders' writing process years down the line. In 2012, decades after the botched biography, Henley said he found a chunk of the pages from that legal pad in an online auction site. He said he immediately suspected Sanders had stolen them from his barn years earlier.
“All those pads contained some of the stupid stuff we wrote down before we actually got to the final lyrics of the songs,” Henley said, likening the notepads to seeing how sausage is made. “It just wasn’t something that was for public viewing. It was our process, it was very personal, very private.”
But defense attorneys on Monday claimed Henley had sent the pages to Sanders with his blessing, going as far as to mail them to the writer’s Woodstock, California, home. Henley first claimed that would be impossible.
“I would have never allowed him to take them out of Los Angeles,” he said.
When confronted with a tape from a phone call in which Henley appeared to acknowledge Sanders’ having the manuscripts at his house, Henley changed his tune.
“It doesn’t matter if I drove a U-Haul truck across the country and dumped them on his front door,” Henley said. “He had no right to keep them and no right to sell them.”
Sanders isn’t a defendant in the unusual case, but in order for prosecutors to prove that the three defendants conspired to possess stolen property, they need to prove that Sanders stole the manuscripts.
Similarly, the defense attorneys must argue that Sanders was, at one point, a proper owner of the documents in order to clear the defendants of wrongdoing.
It was because of this that the trio of collector defendants — Glenn Horowitz, Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinski — were hardly mentioned throughout Monday’s proceedings.
Henley was particularly quippy toward Horowitz’s lawyer, Jonathan Bach, on Monday, telling him several times to speak more clearly into the microphone and responding “asked and answered” to a duplicative question, as if he were an attorney objecting.
The 76-year-old rocker was forced to confront some demons from his past, however. Prosecutors asked Henley to recount his 1980 arrest after authorities said they found cocaine, quaaludes, marijuana and a naked 16-year-old girl suffering from an overdose at his Los Angeles home.
It was a low point for Henley, who said he hired a sex worker in an effort to cope with The Eagles’ breakup.
“I wanted to forget what was going on,” he said. “I wanted to escape the depression I was in, so I made a mistake.”
Henley held that he didn’t have sex with the girl and didn’t know her age until first responders came to treat to her overdose.
“I made a poor decision, which I regret to this day,” Henley said of the incident. “I’ve had to live with it for 44 years. I’m still living with it today, in this courtroom.”
Henley will return to the witness stand on Tuesday.
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