[ad_1]
YUKI IWAMURA/AFP via Getty Images
Sitting on the witness stand in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, Don Henley was doing his best to contain himself and what he was feeling. But every now and then, the bold witness in a trial over handwritten lyrics allegedly stolen from Eagles songs Hotel California he couldn’t help it.
Take the moment Henley was asked if he remembered sending notebooks of draft lyrics to writer Ed Sanders to research the Eagles’ planned biography more than 40 years ago. “I don’t remember offering to send him lyric notebooks,” replied Henley, white-haired and dressed in a dark suit, tie and white shirt. “You know what? It doesn’t matter if he drove them across the country in a U-Haul truck and left them on his doorstep. He had no right to keep them or sell them.”
That moment was one of several jarring moments in the criminal trial, which began in New York Supreme Court last week and involves three men accused of conspiring to sell those allegedly stolen lyric notebooks. The defendants, Glenn Horowitz, Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinski, pleaded not guilty and maintained they had no idea the sanitary pads were stolen. Prosecutors maintain that the men made up stories about the provenance of the pads 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 finished his never-published book.
In the 1970s, the Eagles were known for selling enough albums to fill a fleet of Volkswagen campers and for their extremely perfectionist ways in the recording studio. All of that, plus a glimpse of the hedonistic lifestyle associated with them and their Los Angeles rock peers during that time, collided in court during the trial’s fourth day.
During initial questioning by Deputy District Attorney Aaron Ginandes, Henley (accompanied by three bodyguards on his way to the courtroom) was asked how many albums the Eagles had sold (“more than 150 million albums worldwide”) and He detailed the method he and his partner Glenn Frey employed to write songs together. The two rented a house in Los Angeles, got up mid-morning, made coffee and began exchanging ideas, images and guitar or piano chords. The two also used yellow or white pads (bought at a stationery store on Ventura Boulevard, Henley recalled) to shape lyrics and melodies.
When asked about the Eagles’ breakup, which was announced in 1982, Henley said he was “devastated” and in denial when Frey (the band’s founder and, in legal documents shown, its “President”) called him to tell him that everything 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, “were hoping Mr. Frey would change his mind.”
That confession led to another of the day’s surprising moments when Ginandes abruptly asked Henley, “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” In the run-up to the trial, defense attorneys had argued before Judge Curtis Farber for the right to include questions about less flattering aspects of Henley’s past. In what seemed like an attempt to neutralize the story, the prosecution brought it up first. In a measured tone, Henley recounted a particular night in 1980 that he has only sporadically reported on in the past. “He wanted to escape the depression I was in, so I made a mistake,” he said. He later recalled how, after a meeting at his house with members of the Eagles crew who later left, he called a lady. A few hours later, a young woman (who she thought was “20 or 21,” she said) arrived at her house from Los Angeles.
Speaking slowly and deliberately, Henley said the two talked, did some cocaine and eventually fell asleep. Several hours later, the young woman began having seizures and Henley said she called 911 even though “she was fine when they arrived.” Police later returned and arrested both Henley and the woman: “They found drugs in my house,” Henley responded when asked why. Since the woman turned out to be “16 or 17 years old,” as Henley says he heard she pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, he was sentenced to two years of probation and a $2,500 fine. “I made a bad decision, which I regret to this day,” he said. “I’ve had to live with it for 44 years. I am living with it today in this courtroom. Bad decision.”
With that confession seemingly out of the way, at least for the moment, the questioning turned to Sanders’ unpublished book. For anyone wondering how the frontman of East Coast art rock band The Fugs came to write a book about a band that was the polar opposite of him, Henley filled in the blanks. He explained that Sanders had 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 do with Sanders, especially when Sanders crashed for a time at Frey’s apartment and asked them to stay up all night, in shifts and with a gun, in case crazed members of the Manson Family They would enter “through the window.” .” Henley said he still harbored doubts about whether Sanders was a good fit for the project: “He described himself as an old-school beatnik and, again, claimed to be present at the founding of the counterculture. He didn’t strike me as the right person to write about a west coast band.”
In 1980, according to testimony, Sanders presented about 100 pages of the biography-in-progress to the band for their reading and approval. Henley admitted that he was “disappointed” by what he read. “I didn’t think it was substantial,” he said. “Some parts were cartoonish” and contained “beatnik slang that sometimes seemed anachronistic and cheesy.” Desperate to “make it a better book,” Henley said he agreed to give Sanders access to the lyric notebooks so the author could delve deeper into the band’s creative methods. The pads were then stored in a barn at Henley’s organic farm in Malibu along with, he said, gardening tools and record-selling plates.
What happened next is the crux of the trial. According to a 1979 contract signed by the band and Sanders, the Eagles owned all the materials they gave him for his research. Regarding the letter pads, Henley maintained: “These materials were private and personal and were not intended to be seen by the public or anyone else… The letter pads constitute a work product. “It’s basically the detritus, so to speak, that’s left over from songwriting and those are the things that no one is supposed to see.” He maintained that he never gave Sanders permission to “keep” them.
Henley claimed he only became aware of the lyric pads’ disappearance in 2012, when several pages were offered for auction on Kosinski’s Gotta Have Rock and Roll website. Kosinski and Inciardi had purchased the pads from esteemed rare book dealer Horowitz, who in turn paid Sanders for them. That discovery led Henley to call his attorney and file a police report. “I believe that a burglary crime had occurred on my property,” he said, adding, “and that Ed Sanders robbed them.”
Feeling it was “the most practical and convenient way to get over the matter,” Henley said he purchased those pages for $8,500. But Henley testified that he refused to buy any more pages that appeared on Sotheby’s website in 2014 and 2016, which some of the defendants had helped arrange. While he admitted he could afford the $90,000 to buy the second-largest lot, Henley said, “I had already been extorted once and I wasn’t willing to do it again and buy my own property again… I began to realize that I had to There is much more material available.”
Under cross-examination by defense attorneys, Henley was not asked about that night in 1980 (at least not yet), but was shown copies of an encouraging letter he sent to Sanders in the early 1980s (“the book has merit and should be published. reads in part). He was also given headphones to listen to a recording of a phone call between him and Sanders. “I’m hard of hearing, but because of my profession I’ll do the best I can,” said Henley, 76. On that tape, which was seized by authorities at Sanders’ home, Henley was heard telling the writer that he had “a lot of that shit” in terms of sanitary pads that Sanders could examine.
Henley was also shown pages of editing he had made on Sanders’ draft of the book, which defense attorney Jonathan Bach said countered Henley’s earlier claims. “Nowhere do you say they are not for public consumption, do not include them in the book,” Bach said. “You don’t say, ‘These aren’t supposed to leave my property; give them back.’”
Henley was also shown a receipt for a purported £21 box sent to Sanders’ home, although the contents of that box were not revealed. Henley said he wanted to send Sanders a collection of articles and reviews of the Eagles’ work for his research. Bach also repeatedly asked the musician if he or anyone in the Eagles group had ever asked Sanders to return the materials after work on the book was completed. Henley said he “did not remember” such requests.
Those back-and-forths clearly laid out the prosecution’s case (that Sanders allegedly kept and sold the documents without the Eagles’ permission) and the defense’s case (that, among other things, the documents were not “stolen” since they were not filed no police report for more than 40 years). Henley’s testimony is expected to continue Tuesday, when those in the courtroom may get more glimpses of his restrained irritability. When shown a draft of Sanders’ work on Monday, Henley responded: “The second half of the manuscript is backwards. “You need a secretary.”