PAUL McCARTNEY turns 84! By PAUL KUPPERBERG Of course Paul was my favorite! I don’t remember being particularly interested in music before I saw the Beatles in their American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. If it wasn’t in a comic book or cartoon or on a TV sitcom, I wasn’t into it. And the only reason I happened to be watching the Sullivan show, which was on past my bedtime as an 8-year-old at the time, was because it was my younger brother Lewis’ birthday and we were celebrating at my grandmother’s house, where I had gone to hide in her bedroom from whatever fresh abuse my older brother Alan was inflicting upon me. But there I was, laying on my stomach on the floor, looking up at the little black-and-white TV on its wheeled stand, and all of a sudden, I heard this!   Maybe I just hadn’t heard the right music before. My father liked classical and my mother’s taste ran toward Ferrante & Teicher and the 101 Strings, and the few records we had in the house were Allan Sherman and Mickey Katz comedy albums and a few Broadway cast recordings. But when “All My Loving” came bursting through even the tinny speaker of that circa-1960 TV set, I got it. It was like a switch being flipped in my brain. This was the music I wanted to hear! And then, during their second number, “Till There Was You,” the camera picked up close-ups of each of them individually, super-imposing their names on the screen (including, famously, the apology, “Sorry, girls: he’s married” under John’s). And the guy singing lead vocals on this magical music I’d just discovered was “Paul.” Well! Needless to say, I was hooked, and I don’t think I moved through the rest of the show, riveted by the numbers that followed (“She Loves You,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand”), and remained hooked ever since. The Beatles, along with Batman and Bond…James Bond, were the “Three-Bs” that obsessed the country in the mid-1960s, and I was consumed by them all. But unlike Batman and Bond who existed on paper and the screen, the Beatles were, quite literally, in the air, carried by radio waves and picked up by the pocket-size transistor...