A biography of the Eagles that was never published is at the center of a criminal trial that opened Wednesday and involves hand-drafted lyrics to “Hotel California” and other Eagles hits. The defendants include rare-books dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski. They obtained the documents via Ed Sanders, a noted poet and nonfiction writer who also co-founded the avant-garde rock group the Fugs. The question is whether Sanders had the right to sell the lyrics pages he obtained while researching the biography.
Manhattan prosecutors say Horowitz, Inciardi, and Kosinski peddled the pages while knowing their ownership history was shaky at best. Then, prosecutors say, they schemed to thwart band co-founder Don Henley’s efforts to reclaim what he says are stolen pieces of his legacy.
Irving Azoff, the Eagles’ manager, testified that the lyrics are very personal to Henley and are a part of musical history. He said Henley never parted with any of the legal pads on which he, alongside Glenn Frey, worked out some of the best-known lyrics in the rock songbook. Defense lawyers say Henley voluntarily gave away the documents and leveraged prosecutors to try to take them back.
The documents include lyrics-in-development for tracks from 1976’s “Hotel California,” the third-biggest selling album ever in the U.S. Frey and Henley crafted them in a Beverly Hills house rented for the purpose, since the tidy Henley’s tendency to pick up after Frey “would drive them crazy” if they worked in their own homes, Azoff testified.
The case was brought in 2022, a decade after some of the pages began popping up for auction and Henley took umbrage. He bought four pages for $8,500 but also reported the documents stolen, prosecutors said.
At the time, the lyrics sheets were in the hands of Kosinski and Inciardi, who had bought them from Horowitz for $65,000. His company had purchased them for $50,000 in 2005 from Sanders.
A friend of Frey’s, Sanders was hired in 1979 to write a band biography for $25,000 and enjoyed extensive access. But Azoff testified that the co-founders disliked the resulting manuscript and that, “for me personally, all the stuff about the Eagles’ breakup was unacceptable.”
As the project stalled, a frustrated Sanders asked Azoff in a 1982 letter for “a substantial amount of money,” saying he’d “behaved with great reserve” by not approaching a major magazine with a story about the Eagles’ split. They ultimately paid Sanders about $75,000 and agreed to let him look for a publisher, comfortable that any book still would need the band’s approval under his 1979 contract, Azoff said.
Sanders hasn’t responded to a phone message seeking comment about the case. Emails sent to him bounced back. Sanders told Horowitz in 2005 that Henley’s assistant had mailed along any documents he wanted for the biography, though the writer worried that Henley “might conceivably be upset” if they were sold, according to an email shown in court.
“Hotel California” is still a touchstone on classic rock radio and many personal playlists. The entertainment data company Luminate counted more than 220 million streams and 136,000 radio plays of “Hotel California” in the U.S. last year.
Prosecutors say once Henley’s lawyers asserted the documents were stolen, Inciardi and Horowitz gave evolving accounts of how Sanders obtained them. According to emails recounted in the indictment, those explanations ranged over the next five years from Sanders finding them abandoned in a backstage dressing room to getting them from Frey, who died in 2016.
Kosinski forwarded one of the various explanations to Henley’s lawyer, then told an auction house that the rocker had “no claim” to the documents, the indictment says. He also asked the auctioneers not to tell potential bidders about the ownership dispute.
Henley is expected to testify. Defense lawyers have indicated that they plan to question how clearly he remembers his dealings with Sanders and the lyric sheets at a time when the rock star was living life in the fast lane himself.
