What a nice surprise! Bring your alibis…
As reported by Ali Watkins, writing for the New York Times, the classic Eagles song, “Hotel California,” with its images of decadence and cynicism that rendered a trenchant verdict on the outcome of the fabled 60’s generation and its idyllic aspirations, has itself apparently fallen victim to the same type of grift and debasement that its own lyrics reflected.
Like most songwriters Don Henley wrote up his notes and drafts for what would become the hypnotic anthem of a generation coming to terms with its own excesses in longhand, well before the advent of digital media. And like other (sometimes less successful) Baudelaires of his age, Henley’s notes doubtlessly lay dormant after the final product was assembled in the glorious form that millions are familiar, as the title track to the album of the same name, released in 1976.
But those notes, like many artifacts of legend, disappeared in the blur of temporal --and in most cases temporary — friendships and associations, in this case, stolen from Henley in the late 1970’s by someone only identified by Watkins as “a writer working on a book about the band.” Where they lay in the ensuing three decades is unclear, but in 2005, according to documents filed in the Supreme Court of New York, they fell into the hands of one Glenn Horowitz, a book and manuscript dealer with a history of lucrative deals with literary luminaries such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and musicians like Bob Dylan.
As Watkins reports:
Nearly five decades later, Glenn Horowitz, a New York rare-book dealer, and two other men were charged on Tuesday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan with conspiring to sell about 100 pages of the stolen notes written by the songwriter, Don Henley, lying to law enforcement authorities and fabricating stories about the provenance of the papers, which are valued at around $1 million.
Horowitz’s two colleagues also named in the charges, Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinski, allegedly tried to “market” the notes, which is when their author, Mr. Henley, got wind of their re-emergence. Since they were his property to begin with, according to the District Attorney he notified the appropriate authorities and advised the would-be purchasers that the notes were stolen property.
Which is when things got even more bizarre:
The men sought to launder the notes through Sotheby’s auction houses and engaged in a five-year effort to hide where the documents had come from, the district attorney’s office said. Mr. Horowitz later tried to leverage the 2016 death of Glenn Frey, the Eagles’ other frontman, as possible cover, suggesting that Mr. Frey was the initial source for the papers, according to the news release.
Mr. Frey “alas, is dead, and identifying him as the source would make this go away once and for all,” Mr. Horowitz said in a fabricated statement of provenance after the notes were seized by investigators from a Sotheby’s warehouse, the district attorney’s office said.
Poor Glenn Frey. He could check out, but he could never leave.