“Love Minus Zero/No Limit” (read “Love Minus Zero over No Limit”, sometimes titled “Love Minus Zero”) is a song written by Bob Dylan for his fifth studio album Bringing It All Back Home, released in 1965. Its main musical hook is a series of three descending chords, while its lyrics articulate Dylan’s feelings for his lover, and have been interpreted as describing how she brings a needed zen-like calm to his chaotic world. The song uses surreal imagery, which some authors and critics have suggested recalls Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” and the biblical Book of Daniel.
The version of the song that appears on Bringing It All Back Home was recorded on January 14, 1965, and was produced by Tom Wilson. This version was recorded by the full rock band that Dylan used to accompany him on the songs that appeared on side one of the album, and features a prominent electric guitar part played by Bruce Langhorne. However, like the other love song on side one, “She Belongs to Me”, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” had been recorded a day earlier in various acoustic configurations, and one of these takes was a strong contender to be included on the album. The January 13, 1965 recordings and a first take from January 14 were released on the 6-disc and 18-disc versions of The Bootleg Series Vol. 12: The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 in 2015. The initial title of the song was “Dime Store”, in a reference to an included lyric; it was also briefly referred to as “(Tune Z) Dimestore” on the recording sheet.
The first verse of the song has the singer infatuated with a woman, admiring her inner strength. The three remaining verses reflect the inauthentic chaos that the singer has to deal with in the outside world, from which the lover’s Zen-like calm provides needed refuge. Author Andy Gill has commented that the final image of the lover being like some raven at the singer’s window with a broken wing recalls Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”, but is also a symbol of the lover’s vulnerability in spite of her strength. Author Anthony Varesi has remarked that the broken wing may also be a reference to the woman’s need for shelter, or else to a flaw in her. According to Dylan critics Oliver Trager and Marcus Gray, the style of the song’s lyrics are comparable to William Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose” in their economy of language and use of a detached tone to express the narrator’s intense emotional experience. Wilfrid Mellers has suggested that the song’s surreal images anticipate the psychedelic songs Dylan would later write.
Dylan has frequently performed the song in concert since the time it was written, nearly always acoustically. He performed it occasionally in concert during 1965 and 1966, but more frequently during the Rolling Thunder Revue tours from 1974 through 1976. Dylan also played it at The Concert for Bangladesh, during the first of the two August 1, 1971 benefit concerts organised by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar to help provide relief for refugees in Bangladesh. Dylan has also been playing the song live throughout the Never Ending Tour that began in 1988. In addition to its appearance on Bringing It All Back Home, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” has been included on several Dylan live and compilation albums. In the 1970s, it was included on the compilation Masterpieces and on the live Bob Dylan at Budokan album, recorded in 1978.
In a 2005 reader’s poll for Mojo magazine, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” was listed as the #20 all-time greatest Bob Dylan song, and a similar poll of artists ranked the song #32. In 2002, Uncut magazine listed it as the #23 all-time greatest Bob Dylan song. Australian music critic Toby Creswell included the song in his book 1001 Songs: The Great Songs of All Time and the Artists, Stories and Secrets Behind Them.
