Days after Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the songwriter’s home state Minnesota pays homage to him on Saturday with a mural designed by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra. Pic/AFP

I had listened to Nobel literature laureate Bob Dylan many times before, but it was one afternoon in the fall of 1982 that I heard him for the first time. A few friends and I drove back from Washington DC to Baltimore, Maryland, (to our university) and some of us had dropped acid (it was a strong dose of LSD). The driver (he’s still a friend, on Facebook and Instagram) put on a Dylan cassette — so many in our Class of ’85 were fans of Highway 61 Revisited — and it was just as the drug took effect that Mr Tambourine Man began playing. The repetitive strum-and-croon of each verse built around my head a spiral of sound; as if the song was a sound analogue of the mathematical puzzles of MC Escher’s woodcuts. It made Dylan sound like a wandering troubadour of medieval times; or like JS Bach’s harpsichord. Each line was religious; the song, deliverance. Ever since the Nobel Committee announced the award, the lyrics to Mr Tambourine Man have been pasted over and over again on the Great Wall of social media; still I must say that in my state, in the back of a Volkswagon Beetle as it climbed up Charles Street, I took literally the phrases “magic swirling ship”, “all my senses have been stripped”, “vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme” and “down the foggy ruins of time” (read up on LSD to know its powerful, psychedelic, hallucinatory effect). Dylan’s influence on the woodcut of my mind was not insignificant.