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As Don Henley sat on the witness stand in a Manhattan court Monday, he did his best to control himself and his emotions. But every now and then, the bold-faced witness in a trial involving allegedly stolen handwritten song lyrics from the Eagles' Hotel California couldn't help himself.
Consider the moment when Henley was asked if he remembered sending notepads containing draft texts to writer Ed Sanders more than 40 years ago to research the group's planned Eagles biography. “I don’t remember offering to send him text blocks,” Henley shot back, white-haired and dressed in a dark suit, tie and white shirt. “You know what? It doesn't matter if I drove them across the country in a U-Haul truck and dumped them on his doorstep. He had no right to keep them or sell them.”
The moment was one of several harrowing moments in the criminal trial that began last week in New York Supreme Court involving three men accused of conspiring to sell those allegedly stolen poetry notepads. The defendants – Glenn Horowitz, Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinski – pleaded not guilty and claimed they had no idea the blocks had been taken. The indictment accuses the men of making up stories about the pads' origins and that Sanders (who has not been charged) violated a contract with the Eagles by failing to return the materials to the band after he never released his completed the book.
In the '70s, the Eagles were known for selling enough albums to fill a fleet of Volkswagen campers and for being perfectionists in the recording studio. All of that – plus a glimpse into the hedonistic lifestyle she and her fellow LA rockers enjoyed at the time – collided in court on the fourth day of the trial.
During initial questioning by Assistant District Attorney Aaron Ginandes, Henley (accompanied by three bodyguards on the way into the courtroom) was asked how many albums the Eagles had sold (“over 150 million albums worldwide”) and explained in detail the process which he and his partner Glenn Frey worked on writing songs together. The two rented a house in Los Angeles, woke up mid-morning, made coffee and began exchanging ideas, pictures and guitar or piano chords. The two also used yellow or white pads (which they purchased at a stationery store on Ventura Boulevard, Henley recalled) to shape lyrics and melodies.
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When asked about the Eagles' dissolution, which was announced in 1982, Henley said he was “devastated” and denied it when Frey (the band's founder and, according to legal filings, its “president.” “) called him and told him it was over. “The band meant everything to me,” Henley said. “We tried to keep it a secret,” he continued, adding that he and Irving Azoff, the band's manager, “held out hope that Mr. Frey would change his mind.”
That confession led to another surprising moment of the day when Ginandes suddenly asked Henley, “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” Ahead of the trial, defense attorneys had pleaded with Judge Curtis Farber for the right to ask questions about Henley's less flattering aspects to include the past. In an apparent attempt to neutralize the story, prosecutors brought it up first. In a measured tone, Henley recounted a particular night in 1980 that had received only sporadic coverage in the past. “I wanted to escape the depression I was in, so I made a mistake,” he said. He then recalled calling a woman after a meeting at his home with members of the Eagles crew, who then left. A few hours later, a young woman (who he said was “20 or 21”) arrived at his home in Los Angeles.
Speaking slowly and deliberately, Henley said the two talked, did some cocaine and eventually fell asleep. A few hours later, the young woman began having seizures, and Henley said he called 911, although “she was fine when they came.” Police later returned and arrested both Henley and the woman: “They have drugs found in my house,” Henley replied when asked why. Because the woman turned out to be “16 or 17 years old,” as Henley had heard, he pleaded no contest to the charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, was sentenced to two years probation and fined $2,500 sentenced. “I made a bad decision that I regret to this day,” he said. “I had to live with it for 44 years. I live with it in this courtroom today. Bad decision.”
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With that confession seemingly out of the way, at least for now, respondents turned to the unpublished Sanders book. For anyone who wondered how the leader of East Coast performance art rock band Fugs came to write a book about a band that was the polar opposite, Henley filled in the blanks. He explained that Sanders met Frey when the writer moved to Los Angeles in 1969 to write a book about Charles Manson.
Henley said he didn't know what to think of Sanders, especially when Sanders stayed at Frey's apartment for a time and asked her to stay up all night, in shifts and with a gun, in case crazy members of the Manson family would come “through the window.” Henley said he still had doubts about Sanders' suitability for the project: “He described himself as an old-school beatnik and again claimed to have been at the founding of the counterculture. He didn’t seem like the right person to write about a West Coast band.”
In 1980, Sanders submitted about 100 pages of the in-progress biography to the band for review and approval, according to testimony. Henley admitted he was “disappointed” by what he read. “I didn’t think it was substantive,” he said. “Some of it was cartoonish” and contained “beatnik jargon that sometimes seemed anachronistic and cheesy.” Henley was keen to “make a better book of it” and said he agreed to give Sanders access to the text blocks so that the author could to delve deeper into the band's creative methods. The pads were then stored in a barn on Henley's organic farm in Malibu, along with, he said, gardening tools and record sales plaques.
What happened next is the crux of the trial. According to a contract signed between the band and Sanders in 1979, the Eagles owned any materials they gave him for his research. As for the text blocks, Henley claimed: “These materials were private and personal and should not be viewed by the public or anyone else… The text blocks represent a work product.” They are, if you will, essentially the trash, that's left over from songwriting, and those are the things that no one should see.” He claimed he never gave Sanders permission to “keep” them.
Henley claimed he only became aware of the missing text blocks in 2012, when several pages on Kosinski's Gotta Have Rock and Roll website were put up for auction. Kosinski and Inciardi had purchased the pads from the respected rare book dealer Horowitz, who in turn paid Sanders for them. This discovery prompted Henley to call his lawyer and file a police report. “I believe a theft crime was committed on my property,” he said, adding, “and that Ed Sanders stole them.”
Thinking it was “the most practical and expedient way to get this over with,” Henley said he bought these pages for $8,500. However, Henley said he declined to purchase additional pages that appeared on Sotheby's website in 2014 and 2016, which some of the defendants helped broker. While Henley admitted he could afford the $90,000 to purchase the second, larger property, he said, “I had already been blackmailed once and had no intention of doing it again and buying back my own property… I started to realize that this had to be the case, there’s a lot more material out there.”
During defense cross-examination, Henley was not questioned about that night in 1980 – at least not yet – but was shown copies of an encouraging letter he had sent to Sanders in the early 1980s (“The book has merit and should be published will be.” it read in part). He was also given headphones to listen to a recording of a telephone conversation between him and Sanders. “I'm hearing impaired, but because of my job, I'm going to do the best I can,” said Henley, 76. On that tape, seized by authorities from Sanders' home, Henley was heard telling the author that he had “a lot of “this shit” of blocks for Sanders to examine.
Henley was also shown pages of edits he made to Sanders' draft book, which defense attorney Jonathan Bach said countered Henley's earlier claims. “Nowhere do you say these are not for public consumption, don’t include them in the book,” Bach said. “You don't say, 'These can't leave my property – give them back.'”
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Henley was also shown a receipt for a supposedly £21 box sent to Sanders' house, although the contents of that box were not disclosed. Henley said he wanted to send Sanders a collection of articles and reviews about the Eagles' work for his research. The musician was also repeatedly asked by Bach whether he or anyone in the Eagles camp had ever asked Sanders to return the materials once the book work was completed. Henley said he had “no recollection” of such requests.
This back-and-forth clearly articulated the prosecution's arguments (that Sanders allegedly kept and sold the papers without the Eagles' permission) and the defense's (that the papers were not “stolen” because no police report was filed, among other things). 40 years). Henley's testimony is expected to continue Tuesday, so those in the courtroom may get further insight into his guarded statement. When shown a draft of Sanders' work on Monday, Henley replied: “The second half of the manuscript is upside down. “You need a secretary.”