Don Henley of Eagles testifies that stolen lyrics were very personal

Don Henley and Glenn Frey followed a routine while writing some of the most emblematic and enduring songs of the 1970s.

The men, who co-founded the Eagles, rented a house and brought a piano and guitars. The two would get up late in the morning — “musician time,” Mr. Henley testified in a Manhattan courtroom Monday. They made coffee, then had “philosophical” conversations and started trying out riffs and discussing “song titles, topics and concepts,” he said.

Mr. Henley paid particular attention to the lyrics, editing and refining them on legal pads. The pages took on a deeply personal meaning, and Mr. Henley said he kept them in a shed on his organic farm in Malibu, California.

Now they are at the center of an unusual prosecution by the New York State Supreme Court. A rare book dealer, Glenn Horowitz, is accused along with two other men of conspiring to possess stolen property — some 100 pages of Mr. Henley’s handwritten notes and drafts for hits such as “New Kid in Town,” Hotel California’ and ‘Life in the Fast Lane.”

Prosecutors say the notes were stolen decades ago by an author who signed a contract to write a book about the Eagles in the late 1970s. The author, Ed Sanders, has not been charged. He sold the documents in 2005 to Mr. Horowitz, who in turn sold them to the two other defendants, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which began an investigation after complaints from Mr. Henley.

During a break from what the Eagles have billed as their final tour, Mr. Henley said he was alarmed in 2012 when he first heard that a few pages of his “Hotel California” notes had been put up for auction online.

“They’re basically the waste, if you will, that’s left over from writing songs,” he said. “Those are things no one should see.”

Mr Henley, 76, dressed in a charcoal suit, white shirt and black tie, moved creaking at times and occasionally asked to repeat a question, saying his hearing had “deteriorated” because of his profession .

During his testimony, Mr. Henley spoke about how the Eagles operated and gave his impressions of Mr. Sanders, whom he called “an eccentric guy.”

Prosecutors have said that Mr. Sanders, who co-founded a New York counterculture band called the Fugs in the mid-1960s and later wrote a book about Charles Manson, obtained the lyrics as source material after agreeing with the Eagles to write about the band to write. .

Mr. Henley said the idea came from Mr. Frey, who had met Mr. Sanders while researching his Manson book in California.

Mr. Sanders’s book, the rights to which the Eagles controlled, was completed but never published. Mr. Henley said he was disappointed after reading a 100-page excerpt that Mr. Sanders provided in 1980.

“I didn’t think it was very substantial,” he testified. “There was a lot of beatnik jargon that seemed anachronistic and corny.”

That summer, Mr. Henley said, he gave Mr. Sanders access to the barn on his farm where he kept records, including songwriting notebooks, in the hope that they would provide insights about the Eagles that would strengthen the book .

Nearly two decades ago, according to a criminal complaint, Mr. Sanders wrote in an email that an assistant of Mr. Henley had sent him some of the material he had researched “at Henley’s home in Malibu.” Prosecutors said that in 2005, Mr. Sanders sold papers to Mr. Horowitz, a bookseller with offices in Manhattan and East Hampton, N.Y., who had placed the papers of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe in college libraries and had worked to acquire Bob Dylan’s books. to sell. archive.

Mr. Horowitz sold the material in 2012 to Craig Inciardi, who worked as a curator at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and Edward Kosinski, the owner of an online auction site, prosecutors said. The men tried to resell some of it through Mr. Kosinski’s site and the auction houses of Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

While on the stand Monday, Mr. Henley identified pages of song lyrics entered into evidence, some written in cursive and others in block letters. Certain sentences were scribbled across the page, as if written in haste. In some places red ink was used to annotate, and some passages were crossed out.

All of the handwriting was his, Mr. Henley testified, except for some of Mr. Frey’s handwriting that appeared at the top of a page.

Mr. Henley also testified about his emotions when Mr. Frey, his longtime collaborator, told him in 1980 that he was leaving the Eagles to pursue a solo career.

“Well, I was devastated,” he said. “The band was everything to me.”