Mid-60's "classic era" Bob Dylan is famous for his sneers, put-ons and put-downs, but for every "Positively 4th Street" or "Like a Rolling Stone," there is a beautiful ballad, such Dylan's ode to his Valentine, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit." It's one of the true gems of the Dylan catalog, a highlight of Dylan’s 1965 masterpiece Bringing it Back Home.
Bob is, of course, known for his lyrics, and the words to “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” could be straight out of a Shakespeare sonnet:
My love she speaks like silence
Without ideas or violence
She doesn’t have to say she’s faithful
Yet she’s true like ice, like fire
People carry roses
And make promises by the hours
My love she laughs like the flowers
Valentines can’t buy her
It's pretty heady stuff for early 1965, when even the Beatles hadn't made it past the beautiful but relatively simplistic "Yesterday." In "Yesterday" you learn nothing about the woman in Macca's life, only that he said something wrong and she split.
The woman in "Love Minus Zero" however, is complicated and three-dimensional: she's a one-man woman, she has mood swings, a great sense of humor and plenty of integrity. Later in the song, we learn that "She knows there's no success like failure/And that failure's no success at all."
And yet for all the talk of Dylan’s prowess with words, he wrote many melodies that were as pretty as anything by Lennon or McCartney, and this is one of them. With its folk-rock backing band, "Love Minus Zero" would fit right in on Rubber Soul.
Zimmy was juggling a lot of birds back then, so it's hard to say who "Love Minus Zero" is about. But the haunting last line "My love she's like some raven/At my window with a broken wing" leads one it could be a valentine to his future wife, the raven haired beauty Sara Lowndes.
With its enigmatic title and subject, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" has been a fan favorite and a mainstay of his setlist for a whopping 44 years now.
Herewith, the Bard of Hibbing playing his new song for Donovan in a London hotel room in this outtake from the great rock-doc Dont Look Back:
...A couple months later at the Newport Folk Festival (from the Dylan-at-Newport documentary The Other Side of the Mirror)...
... With George Harrison and Leon Russell at The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971
A coule audio-only versions: from Live 1975: The Rollling Thunder Revue...
...And an Elvis-style big-band arrangement from 1978's At Budokan:
... And to wrap things up, a road-tested version from Prague in 1994:
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