California
Welcome to the 'Hotel California' case: The trial over handwritten lyrics to an Eagles classic
NEW YORK (AP) — In the mid-1970s, the Eagles were working on a spooky, cryptic new song.
On a lined yellow pad, Don Henley, with input from band co-founder Glenn Frey, jotted thoughts about “a dark desert highway” and “a lovely place” with a luxurious surface and ominous undertones. And something on ice, perhaps caviar or Taittinger — or pink Champagne?
The song, “Hotel California,” became one of rock’s most indelible singles. And nearly a half-century later, those handwritten pages of lyrics-in-the-making have become the center of an unusual criminal trial set to open Wednesday.
Rare-book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski are charged with conspiring to own and try to sell manuscripts of “Hotel California” and other Eagles hits without the right to do so.
The three have pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers have said the men committed no crime with the papers, which they acquired via a writer who’d worked with the Eagles. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office says the defendants connived to obscure the documents’ disputed ownership, despite knowing that Henley said the pages were stolen.
Clashes over valuable collectibles abound, but criminal trials like this are rare. Many fights are resolved in private, in lawsuits or with agreements to return the items.
“If you can avoid a prosecution by handing over the thing, most people just hand it over,” said Travis McDade, a University of Illinois law professor who studies rare document disputes.
Of course, the case of the Eagles manuscripts is distinctive in other ways, too.
The prosecutors’ star witness is indeed that: Henley is expected to testify between Eagles tour stops. The non-jury trial could offer a peek into the band’s creative process and life in the fast lane of ‘70s stardom.
At issue are over 80 pages of draft lyrics from the blockbuster 1976 “Hotel California” album, including words to the chart-topping, Grammy-winning title cut. It features one of classic rock’s most recognizable riffs, best-known solos and most oft-quoted — arguably overquoted — lines: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
Henley has said the song is about “the dark underbelly of the American dream.”
It still was streamed over 220 million times and got 136,000 radio spins last year in the U.S. alone, according to the entertainment data company Luminate. The “Hotel California” album has sold 26 million copies nationwide over the years, bested only by an Eagles’ greatest hits disc and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
The pages also include lyrics from songs including “Life in the Fast Lane” and “New Kid in Town.” Eagles manager Irving Azoff has called the documents “irreplaceable pieces of musical history.”
Horowitz, Inciardi and Kosinki are charged with conspiracy to possess stolen property and various other offenses.
They’re not charged with actually stealing documents. Nor is anyone else, but prosecutors will still have to establish that the documents were stolen. The defense maintains that’s not true.
Much turns on the Eagles’ interactions with Ed Sanders, a writer who also co-founded the 1960s counterculture rock band the Fugs. He worked in the late ‘70s and early ’80s on an authorized Eagles biography that was never published.
Sanders isn’t charged in the case. A phone message seeking comment was left for him.
He sold the pages to Horowitz, who then sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski.
Horowitz has handled huge rare book and archive deals, and he’s been entangled in some ownership spats before. One involved papers linked to “Gone With the Wind″ author Margaret Mitchell. It was settled.
Inciardi worked on notable exhibitions for the Cleveland-based Rock Hall of Fame. Kosinski has been a principal in Gotta Have It! Collectibles, known for auctioning celebrities’ personal possessions — so personal that Madonna unsuccessfully sued to try to stop a sale that included her latex briefs.
Henley told a grand jury he never gave the biographer the lyrics, according to court filings from Kosinski’s lawyers. But defense lawyers have signaled that they plan to probe Henley’s memory of the time.
“We believe that Mr. Henley voluntarily provided the lyrics to Mr. Sanders,” attorney Scott Edelman said in court last week.
Sanders told Horowitz in 2005 that while working on the Eagles book, he was sent whatever papers he wanted from Henley’s home in Malibu, California, according to the indictment.
Then Kosinski’s business offered some pages at auction in 2012. Henley’s attorneys came knocking. And Horowitz, Inciardi and Sanders, in varying combinations, began batting around alternate versions of the manuscripts’ provenance, the indictment says.
In one story, Sanders found the pages discarded in a backstage dressing room. In others, he got them from a stage assistant or while amassing “a lot of material related to the Eagles from different people.” In yet another, he obtained them from Frey — an account that “would make this go away once and for all,” Horowitz suggested in 2017. Frey had died the year before.
“He merely needs gentle handling and reassurance that he’s not going to the can,” Horowitz emailed Inciardi during a 2012 exchange about getting Sanders’ “‘explanation’ shaped into a communication” to auctioneers, the indictment says.
Sanders supplied or signed off on some of the varying explanations, according to the indictment, and it’s unclear what he may have conveyed verbally. But he apparently rejected at least the dressing-room tale.
Kosinki forwarded one explanation, approved by Sanders, to Henley’s lawyer. Kosinski also assured Sotheby’s auction house that the musician had “no claim” to the documents and asked to keep potential bidders in the dark about Henley’s complaints, the indictment says.
Sotheby’s listed the “Hotel California” song lyrics in a 2016 auction but withdrew them after learning the ownership was in question. Sotheby’s isn’t charged in the case and declined to comment.
Henley bought some draft lyrics privately from Gotta Have It! for $8,500 in 2012, when he also began filing police reports, according to court filings.
Defense lawyers claim Henley found starstruck prosecutors to take up his cause instead of pursuing a civil suit himself.
The DA’s office worked closely with Henley’s legal team, and an investigator even yearned for backstage passes for an Eagles show — until a prosecutor said the idea was “completely inappropriate,” Kosinki’s lawyers said in court papers.
Prosecutors have rebuffed questions about their motivations as “a conspiracy theory rather than a legal defense.”
Last year, they wrote in court papers, “It is the defendants, not the prosecutors, who are on trial.”
OAKLAND, Calif. – With Tuesday’s primary election approaching, the race for California governor is coming into focus — and one candidate’s rise has surprised nearly everyone watching.
That’s according to Joe Garofoli, senior political writer and columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle, who broke down the latest polling and key races to watch with KTVU.
Who’s in the lead?
By the numbers:
The latest Berkeley IGS poll of 5,000 likely voters from May 19-24, shows former Attorney General Xavier Becerra leading the field at 25%, with Republican Steve Hilton at 21% and billionaire activist Tom Steyer at 19%.
Just two months ago, Becerra was polling at 5% and Democratic Party leaders were quietly urging lower-performing candidates to reconsider their campaigns. Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is now polling at 1%, was among those who suggested Becerra consider dropping out.
“This would be the greatest comeback since Lazarus,” Garofoli said.
He attributed Becerra’s turnaround primarily to the exit of Congressman Eric Swalwell from the race, saying Swalwell’s voters and Becerra share many of the same moderate positions.
Becerra, Garofoli said, has leaned into a steady, reassuring image on the campaign trail.
“He’s sort of portraying himself as Tío Becerra — Uncle Becerra, the kindly uncle,” Garofoli said. “This is not a guy who’s going to go to Sacramento and turn over the tables.”
The other side:
Steyer, meanwhile, has climbed from 15% earlier this month to 19% in the latest poll, powered by $213 million of his own money and a string of endorsements from major progressive organizations in California.
His support for single-payer health care and his pledge to not take corporate PAC money have resonated with the left, even as some progressives have historically been skeptical of billionaire candidates.
“Steyer’s a different type of billionaire than the tech billionaires who they traditionally oppose,” Garofoli said, noting that Steyer’s platform focuses on protecting and creating working-class jobs rather than advancing technologies that could eliminate them.
Ballots are slow coming in
Dig deeper:
Despite the competitive field, Democrats have been slow to return their mail-in ballots, with return rates sitting around 12%.
Garofoli said the hesitation reflects a broader dissatisfaction with the candidate pool.
“I can’t tell you how many people told me, ‘I don’t know who to vote for, none of these people appeal to me,’” he said. “Nobody in this field really has that outsized big personality, or at least has demonstrated it at this point.”
Local perspective:
In San Francisco, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi added a new variable to the congressional race to fill her seat, endorsing Supervisor Connie Chan over front-runner State Senator Scott Wiener. Garofoli said the endorsement was expected, though its timing surprised him.
Pelosi’s recent endorsement record in San Francisco has been uneven — she backed Dean Preston, who lost, and Joel Engardio, who was recalled — but Garofoli said this one may carry more weight.
“It is for her seat. She has tapped Chan on the shoulder and said, this is the person I want,” he said.
Chan is currently in a tight race with Saikat Chakrabarti, a former tech engineer and one-time aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, according to Chronicle polling.
The Pelosi endorsement, Garofoli said, could be enough to push Chan into the top two alongside Wiener.
The Source: Interview with Joe Garofoli, senior political writer and columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle, Berkeley IGS poll
It’s been quite the unexpected slog through a field of candidates so numerous that all of their names don’t even fit on a single page of the ballot. Democrats in California have held the governor’s mansion, state House, and state Senate for almost two decades and unrest about that trifecta out West is real. The traditional political alliances are frayed, at best, with socialists backing a billionaire and Trump supporting an immigrant. A sex scandal tanked the hopes of a leading candidate, Rep. Eric Swalwell, and Trump’s endorsement of Hilton all but sidelined tough-on-crime Riverside Sheriff Chad Bianco. It’s why Hilton, who moved to California in 2012, is in the mix in a race that is set to test assumptions about party loyalty, candidate partisanship, and money’s power. And it carries massive consequences about who will be the de facto CEO of the fourth-largest economy on the planet, between Germany and Japan, and a major player on the national political stage. This is not some backwater local election.
By Alejandro Lazo, CalMatters
This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
California air regulators on Friday approved a contentious overhaul of the state’s carbon market, creating a program that could steer billions of dollars in free pollution permits to oil refineries and other major polluters over the objections of environmental groups, key lawmakers and three of the board’s own members.
Ten members of the California Air Resources Board voted to adopt the changes to its cap-and-invest program after two days of lengthy hearings, including a full day dedicated to hundreds of public comments.
The overhaul followed intensive lobbying by the oil industry as well as pressure from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration to help keep refineries operating in the state amid rising gas prices.
The approval sets up a potential budget fight in Sacramento. The Legislative Analyst’s Office projects that quarterly auction revenue for state climate programs will drop from roughly $4 billion a year to about $2 billion under the new overhaul.
Such a shortfall would effectively zero out programs lawmakers spent last year fighting to fund: affordable housing, public transit, drinking water in low-income communities and pollution monitoring in California’s most polluted neighborhoods.
The governor’s office praised the measure as a compromise that balanced economic uncertainty with the state’s climate goals. Refinery closures and the Iran-Israel war have driven average California gas prices above $6 a gallon.
Newsom, in a statement, used the moment to draw a contrast with President Donald Trump.
“While Trump sows ongoing chaos and uncertainty, California is staying focused by protecting our economy, safeguarding public health, and doubling down on the clean energy future all Californians deserve,” he said.
Environmentalists warned the changes to the program amount to a giveaway to the fossil fuel industry that weakens California’s only program setting a firm cap on greenhouse gas emissions.
Katelyn Roedner Sutter, California senior director for the Environmental Defense Fund, called the decision “deeply misguided” for prioritizing polluters over communities.
“Newsom’s air regulators are handing billions to oil executives at the expense of our climate, health, and affordability for working families in a rushed process that has shortchanged meaningful public participation,” said Bahram Fazeli, policy director at Communities for a Better Environment.
How the program works — and what changes
California’s 13-year-old carbon market forces major polluters to buy permits while the state lowers the overall cap each year. Friday’s vote will reduce those permits – and creates a new subsidy program carved out of the market.
The program, which may still see changes, could make available a new pool of free pollution permits available to industry valued at as much as $4 billion. Companies that pledge to invest in clean energy and efficiency may qualify for the permits in exchange for investments in clean energy.
The pool will be capped at 118.3 million permits — the same number the air board has said must come off the market for California to hit its 2030 climate target. Environmentalists say the proposal risks wiping out those reductions.
Half are reserved for the fossil fuel sector. A recent Berkeley analysis, by the chair of an independent committee that oversees the carbon market, found refineries could end up with more free permits than they need to cover their emissions.
The air board has defended the design. Officials say the credits will go only to companies undertaking decarbonization projects, will be limited and temporary and can be clawed back if companies misuse them. The plan, they say, is meant to keep California refineries operating at a time of mounting closures and global market pressure. According to air regulators, the amended program will spur clean-energy investment as Trump cuts federal support.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
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