Bob Dylan by Milton Glaser. The iconic, mandatory wall poster in every ’60s/’70s bedroom and dorm room. Initially issued inside the first pressings of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits double LP and sold separately thereafter. It has since become one of the most famous rock images.

Has it really been only seventy-five years, or several lifetimes? Happy Birthday this week to Robert Zimmerman, the kid from Duluth, Minnesota who became the Bob Dylan from Everywhere. We’ve known him since forever, it seems, and yet we don’t and probably never have known him, not really.

What we do know is the precociously profound and prolific songwriter who, for more than half a century now, has worn a mercurial multitude of guises, disguises, and decoys (musical and otherwise) that have defined our times as much as they’ve defined him. Some of those shape-shifting forms and identities have been of his own shrewd, mischievous making, of course; others have been enthusiastically assigned by us, and occasionally…