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Lyrics to Hotel California and other classic Eagles songs should never have ended up at auction, Don Henley told a court Wednesday.
“I always knew that those letters were my property. “I never gave them away or gave them to anyone to keep or sell,” the Eagles co-founder said in the last of three days of testimony in the trial of three collectibles experts accused of a scheme to sell approximately 100 Handwritten pages of letters.
Judged are rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz and rock memorabilia connoisseurs Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinski. Prosecutors say the three circulated false stories about the documents’ ownership history to try to sell them and avoid Henley’s lawsuits over them.
Kosinski, Inciardi and Horowitz have pleaded not guilty to charges including conspiracy to possess stolen property.
Defense attorneys say the men rightfully possessed and were free to sell the documents, which they acquired through a writer who worked on an unpublished biography of the Eagles decades ago.
Sheet music with lyrics documents the making of a list of ’70s rock hits, many of them from one of the best-selling albums of all time: the Eagles’ Hotel California.
The case centers on how the notebook pages made their way from Henley’s barn in Southern California to the biographer’s home in New York’s Hudson Valley, and then to the defendants in New York City. .
The defense argues that Henley gave drafts of the lyrics to writer Ed Sanders. Henley says he invited Sanders to review the pages for research, but the writer was forced to give them up.
In a series of rapid-fire questions, prosecutor Aaron Ginandes asked Henley who owned the papers at each stage, from when he bought them at a Los Angeles stationery store to when they appeared at auctions.
“I did,” Henley responded each time.
Sanders is not charged with any crime and has not responded to messages seeking comment on the case. He sold the pages to Horowitz. Inciardi and Kosinski bought them from the bookseller and then began auctioning some sheets in 2012.
While the trial is about the sheet music lyrics, the fate of another set of pages, the decades-old manuscript of Sanders’ biography, has repeatedly emerged as prosecutors and defense attorneys have examined his interactions with Henley, Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey and Eagles representatives.
Work on the authorized book began in 1979 and covered the band’s breakup the following year. (The Eagles regrouped in 1994).
Henley testified earlier this week that he was disappointed with an initial 100-page draft of the manuscript in 1980. The revisions apparently softened his view somewhat.
In 1983, he wrote to Sanders that the latest draft “flows well and is very funny until the end,” according to a letter shown in court Wednesday.
But the letter went on to muse whether it would be better for Henley and Frey to simply “send these bitter pages to each other and let the book end on a slightly kinder note.”
“I wonder how these comments will age,” Henley wrote. “Still, I think the book has merit and should be published.”
It never was. Eagles manager Irving Azoff testified last week that the publishers made no offers, that the book never got the band’s approval and that he believed Frey ultimately rejected the project. Frey died in 2016.
The trial is expected to continue for weeks with other witnesses.
Meanwhile, Henley returns to the road. The Eagles’ next show is Friday in Hollywood, Florida.