It was an early evening rain, night comin' in a-fallin', and merely on the basis of short advance announcements in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and on Howard Smith's FM radio show, a couple of thousand persons showed up at the Academy of Music on February 8th to catch Dylan's one-hour color film Eat the Document, shown twice at 7:00 and 9:00 with proceeds going to a Pike County citizen's group which has been set up to stop strip mining in the South.

Jerry Rubin and Gordon Lightfoot where there. A. J. Weberman ("name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"), so-called Minister of Defense of the so-called Dylan Liberation Front was standing under the marquee wearing his FREE BOB DYLAN button and passing out a leaflet which concluded "The movie you are about to see is about the old Dylan — a beautiful right-on dude who sang the truth and gave a lot of his bread to SNCC, but the new Dylan, the post-accident Dylan, is a stoned Pig."

The Academy of Music, with its cavernous dome and its karmic memories of the Chords and the Valentines, early Fifties rock and roll shows rubbed and ingrained into the seats, was the perfect setting for this revisitation of old Dylan lovers hoping to retrieve their fantasies of their hero who used to "meet on edges." And there everyone was with that "restless hungry feeling," waiting for some miracle, so called Dylan Liberation Front members in the front rows, confusion boats, kneeling blood hounds, mutiny from stem to bow — all of Dylan's images coming home to roost.