In 1985, Ringo Starr’s friend and fellow drummer Max Weinberg flew to England for the former Beatle’s 45th birthday.

The pair had become chummy since meeting five years earlier in Los Angeles, but Weinberg remained somewhat intimidated by his boyhood hero in the early stages of their friendship. (The ever-amicable Starr offered advice: “Sometimes it helps if you call me Richie.”)

While celebrating at Tittenhurst Park — the sprawling estate outside London that previously belonged to John Lennon and Yoko Ono — Starr turned to his younger friend, then 34, and said something that remains an inside joke between them: “Well, Max, I’m going to be 45. Doesn’t that make you feel old?”

That line is classic Ringo — a dryly clever, double-take koan from rock ’n’ roll’s Yogi Berra, the man whose tossed off “Ringo-isms” became immortalized in Beatles song titles like “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Each year, Starr would update the line for Weinberg, until its recitation became something of an annual tradition. “I imagine if I was speaking to him on July 7,” Weinberg said in a phone interview, “him saying to me, ‘I’m 85.’ And it doesn’t sound so old anymore.”

Starr, who celebrated his birthday that day, is the first Beatle to reach that milestone, and like his surviving bandmate Paul McCartney, he never retired. In the past seven months, Starr has released a country album and toured with his All-Starr Band, a group with a rotating lineup of rock luminaries that features members of Men at Work and Toto right now. At a recent All-Starr Band performance at Radio City Music Hall, he bounded onstage with the springy energy of a man half his age and spent much of the show behind an elevated drum kit, bopping away.

While introducing his cheeky 1974 single “No-No Song” (“I don’t drink it no more/ I’m tired of waking up on the floor”), he gave one indication of why he has aged, as Weinberg put it, like “the original Benjamin Button.” “The sentiment of this song,” Starr told the audience, “is why I’m on this stage today.” (He and his wife, Barbara Bach, have been sober since 1988.)

Starr has the amiable manner of a goofy, wisecracking uncle who happens to have been in the most successful band in history.

When asked about the past, Starr is more likely to offer an artfully evasive Ringo-ism than delve into old emotions. But he is not reticent when it comes to talking about Beatles memories; his conversations are peppered with them.

Seven decades after they met — and 55 years since their band split — McCartney was effusive about his onetime bandmate. “Even though I’ve played with other drummers, he’s the best,” he said in a phone interview. “Ringo has got a certain feel that is very difficult for other drummers to capture.”

Summing up Starr’s je ne sais quoi, McCartney added: “He’s Ringo. And nobody else is.”

Weinberg expressed a sentiment shared by many drummers. “It’s impossible to play like Ringo did in the Beatles,” he said. “It’s sort of like singing along with a Sinatra record — you might get close, but you’ll never get the phrasing, you’ll never get the little odd things that he does.”

This was apparent in January, during two sold-out, star-studded shows at Nashville’s storied Ryman Auditorium in Tennessee. (They were adapted for the CBS special “Ringo & Friends at the Ryman,” now streaming on Paramount+.) Like “Look Up,” the country album Starr released the same month, the Ryman performances paired him with a younger generation, including psychedelic bluegrass shredder Billy Strings and soulful crooner Mickey Guyton. The octogenarian thoroughly impressed them with his spunky stamina.

“I remember he was doing jumping jacks at the rehearsals,” said guitarist Molly Tuttle, 32. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you have way more energy than me.’ ”

The day after the first Ryman show, I asked Starr — who was wearing camo-print pants and a necklace adorned with, what else, a peace sign — how he has been able to maintain that vitality into his mid-80s.

“Well, I love what I’m doing,” he said in an isn’t-it-obvious tone.

Starr then drifted back to a memory of his early days gigging around Liverpool, before he joined the band that he sometimes refers to as “the Fabs.”

“When I first started,” he said, “my mother would come to the gigs. She would always say, ‘You know, son, I always feel you’re at your happiest when you’re playing your drums.’ So she noticed. And I do.” He smiled. “I love to hit those buggers.”

Richard Starkey was born in a hardscrabble Liverpool neighborhood known as the Dingle. When he was 3, his father left; when he was 13, his mother, Elsie, married Harry Graves, whom Starr still describes, with childlike adoration, as “the best stepdad in the world.”

These days, Starr’s life is less hectic. He and Bach used to own “several houses in several countries,” but they spend most of their time in the Los Angeles home they’ve owned since 1992.

Professionally, too, Starr has streamlined. Acting — and co-starring with such varied company as Peter Sellers, Marlon Brando and Thomas the Tank Engine — used to be one of his main gigs, but aside from the occasional voice-acting role, Starr said he’s not particularly interested in that anymore. Does he miss it? “I don’t barely, no. I’m just playing now, live and in the studio making records.”

He will, however, be back on the big screen, in a manner of speaking. In April, Starr flew to London to meet with Sam Mendes, the filmmaker who has taken on the ambitious task of directing four upcoming Beatles biopics.

Starr and McCartney have been the last Beatles standing for nearly 25 years, and that experience has deepened their relationship. “With John and George not here, I think we realize nothing lasts forever,” McCartney said. “So we grasp onto what we have now because we realize that it’s very special. It’s something hardly anyone else has. In fact, in our case, it’s something no one else has. There’s only me and Ringo, and we’re the only people who can share those memories.”

Not being in a band together anymore — separating the personal from the professional — can do wonderful things for a friendship, and both men said it has strengthened their bond, so that when they do decide to work together it always feels, as McCartney describes it, “spontaneous.”

Spontaneity is also, of course, a core tenet in the Tao of Ringo Starr. “I live in the now,” he told me. “I didn’t plan any of it. I love that life I’m allowed to live.”