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Rock legend Don Henley said he can’t tell you what he had for breakfast last week, but he can easily remember two things: opening for the Beach Boys and Elton John at Wembley Arena in 1975 — and that he never gave away the lyrics he wrote to some of Eagles biggest hits.
An angry and chagrined Henley told a Manhattan courtroom Monday that lyric sheets he wrote decades ago for some of his band’s biggest hits were sold without his permission.
The Grammy winner said handwritten sheets for songs including “Hotel California” and “Life in the Fast Lane” were “very private” and “very personal” and never meant to be viewed by the public.
The defendants in a criminal trial over nearly 100 lyric sheets are three collectibles experts who bought the pages years later through a writer who worked with the Eagles on a never-published band biography.
Their lawyers maintain that Henley willingly gave them to the writer, who is not among the defendants.
Henley, 76, hotly disputed their version.
“It doesn’t matter if I drove a U-Haul truck and dumped them at his front door,” he said from the witness stand. “He had no right to keep them or to sell them. I have tapes where he admits he knew he shouldn’t have kept them.”
Henley, who kept the legal pad lyrics in his Malibu, Calif., ranch, said he could not recall whether he gave the writer Ed Sanders permission to take the documents off the property.
He said he told Sanders he could look at the pages at a breakfast table in an apartment upstairs from the barn.
Henley reported the lyric sheets stolen in 2012 after he learned they were being auctioned by the defendants, rare-book dealer Glenn Horowitz and rock memorabilia specialists Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinski.
The biography never made it to print.
One of the customers was Henley himself, who bought four pages back for $8,500 in 2012. He testified that he said he resented having to pay for his own property, but said he saw the purchase as “the most practical and expedient” way to get the auction listing, which contained photos of the lyrics sheets, off the internet.
Henley has been a fierce advocate for artists’ rights to their work. He previously sued a Senate candidate over unauthorized use of some of the musician’s solo songs in a campaign spot.
Henley’s anger turned to shame when the subject of his 1980 arrest surfaced.
He pleaded no-contest in 1981 to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor after authorities found cocaine, quaaludes, marijuana and a naked 16-year-old girl suffering from an overdose at his Los Angeles home months earlier.
He was sentenced to probation and a $2,500 fine and he requested a drug education program to get some possession charges dismissed.
“I made a poor decision which I regret to this day,” he said during his testimony.
Henley founded the Eagles with music partner Glenn Frey, 67, who died in 2016.
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