May 2011 sees the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan. To celebrate, we're taking you on a journey through the lesser celebrated avenues of his back catalogue. A journey down Highway 61 that won't stop off at 'Blowin' In The Wind', 'All Along The Watchtower' or 'Knockin' On Heaven's Door' but will call by...
Love Minus Zero / No Limits (1965)
This little 30 day journey isn’t setting out to ignore the trio of ‘wild mercury’ electric albums from 1965 and 1966. Our mission is simply to shine a little light on some often over shadowed moments of songwriting genius. Well where Dylan writing love songs is concerned, it’s normally tunes like ‘I Want You’, ‘Girl From The North Country’ that get the notices or on the broken hearted side of the fence, the whole of the ‘Blood On The Tracks’ album. All worthy of the serious championing they enjoy without a doubt but let’s get this straight; the greatest out and out love song that Bob Dylan ever wrote is ‘Love Minus Zero / No Limits’. Tucked modestly away on his first electric album, unable to give itself a bigger heads up alongside blatant attention seekers ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ and ‘Maggies Farm’. But what a love song, never announcing its intention but nevertheless overwhelming you at the sheer might and veracity of the purest state of love it has expressed. The precision in the structure of each verse is supreme; just look at how it is only the final two lines of each verse that concisely sum up his loves’ elevated handling of every situation around her. And then he tells us at the end that she’s at the window like ‘a raven with a broken wing’, as if to emphasise that it’s not purely the ease with which she endures the world that fuels his love for her, but also the vulnerability that only he can see. There’s thousands of songs that can express a euphoria at being in love and many more that articulate a multitude of feelings that occur when love goes wrong. Here Bob Dylan does something a whole lot rarer, by successfully painting a picture of the altered, heightened state one experiences when being in love this incredible song reaches the parts other songs cannot reach. Incidentally, there’s a lot of speculation going around at the moment that most printed music publications are on their last legs. At Essex Boy Review we’re now able to demonstrate why that could well be true. You see no matter how much we may gush about the genius of ‘Love Minus Zero’ or marvel at the perfection of the original 1965 version; nothing can articulate its greatness with more eloquence than simply saying just click on the link below and listen to it yourself right now.
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