“What about Bob Dylan?” Article continues after advertisement That was the question put to Paul McCartney shortly after the Beatles had first come to America in February 1964. The man holding the microphone was Murray Kaufman, a popular New York disc jockey who went by the name Murray the K. He was a resourceful, persistent man who had managed to break through the crowds and police barricades outside the Plaza Hotel and install himself in the Beatles’ inner sanctum on the twelfth floor. “Robert Dylan,” Paul replied. “Fantastic. Very good indeed.” He wasn’t just being polite. Shortly before their arrival in New York, during a lengthy residency in Paris, McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr had listened to Dylan’s first two albums again and again in their suites at the George V hotel. “Paul got them off whoever they belonged to, and for the rest of our three weeks in Paris we didn’t stop playing them,” John would later recall.…