Music

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” Don Henley sang of guests at the Hotel California, that strange establishment on a dark, desert highway, which gave the Eagles their greatest hit.

The same was not apparently true of the yellow legal pads on which Don Henley drafted those lyrics, however. Those left Henley’s home in Malibu in the late 1970s and found their way to New York, eventually ending up in the hands of a memorabilia collector and a curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now Henley, 76, who wrote the song about the lure and trap of Hollywood, wants them back.