Eat The Document premiered at the New York Academy Of Music, February 8, 1971.
Eat the Document is a documentary of Bob Dylan’s 1966 tour of the United Kingdom with the Hawks. It was shot under Dylan’s direction by D. A. Pennebaker, whose groundbreaking documentary, Don’t Look Back, chronicled Dylan’s 1965 British tour. The film was originally commissioned for the ABC television series Stage ’66.
Eat the Document includes footage from the infamous Manchester Free Trade Hall concert, wherein an audience member shouted “Judas!” during the electric half of Dylan’s set. Dylan’s band during these shows were The Hawks (later to become The Band). Songs from various shows throughout the tour featured in the film include “Tell Me, Momma”, “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)”, “Ballad of a Thin Man”, and “One Too Many Mornings.”
Other scenes include Dylan and Robbie Robertson in hotel rooms writing and working through new songs, most of which remain unreleased and unpublished. Among these songs are “I Can’t Leave Her Behind”, which was later covered by Stephen Malkmus for the I’m Not There soundtrack.
The film also includes a piano duet with Johnny Cash performing Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone”.
Woody Guthrie had died (after fifteen years of illness) on October 3, 1967, and, apparently at Dylan’s suggestion, plans were made to hold a benefit concert in his honor. The concert took place January 20, 1968, at Carnegie Hall; Dylan appeared backed by the Band (other performers included Odetta, Pete Seeger, Jack Elliot, and Judy Collins), and played three Woody Guthrie songs: “Grand Coulee Dam,” “Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” and “I Ain’t Got No Home.” These performances were later released on a Columbia album called A Tribute to Woody Guthrie, Part 1. Dylan and the Band are in fine form here – their performances are inventive, exuberant, and sublimely musical.
-Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973)
Carnegie Hall
New York City, New York
20 January 1968 The Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert. Afternoon show.
“Planet Waves” marks Dylan’s return as a committed artist, the first time since “John Wesley Harding” that he has truly allowed an album-in-progress to be an open canvas for the expression of whatever he is seeing, thinking, and feeling as he works on it.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol 2: The Middle Years 1974-1986)
I particularly like the song ‘Something There Is About You’,….. It completes a circle for me, about certain things running through my pattern.
~Bob Dylan (John Rockwell Interview, Jan 1974)
Something there is about you that strikes a match in me
Is it the way your body moves or is it the way your hair blows free?
Or is it because you remind me of something that used to be
Somethin’ that crossed over from another century?
)
)