On the seventh of July, a Monday, amidst the unassuming hum of a world carrying on, Richard Starkey, saw his eighty-fifth year. The name he would later adopt—Ringo Starr—needs, of course, no introduction, yet it is the given name that feels more appropriate for the quietude of the occasion. If the Beatles were a singular, four-headed marvel of the twentieth century, then Ringo was its circulatory system—unshowy, indispensable, and possessed of a swing that was as intuitive as a heartbeat.
To consider Ringo now is to engage in a kind of pop-cultural archaeology, to sift through the strata of mythology that have accumulated over sixty years. He was the drummer, a role often relegated to the background, a subject of gentle, affectionate condescension. And yet, a curious, patient reappraisal has been taking place in recent years, a quiet insurgency against the established hierarchy. Among those who actually play music, Ringo is now spoken of with a certain hushed reverence. His was a talent not bombast but of an unerring internal clock, a rhythmic sensibility that could lend a Lennon confession its serrated edge or allow a McCartney melody to achieve liftoff.
There is a certain irony, lost to the contemporary ear, that in the first flush of Beatlemania, it was Ringo who possessed the most immediate, imitable charisma. The shag of hair, the clatter of rings on his fingers, the dry, almost laconic wit—it was Starr who grounded the band’s otherworldly genius, who gave them a touch of the dance hall and the pub. He was the vital link, the suggestion that these four young men, for all their celestial talent, were still of this earth.
To label him merely “the drummer,” however, is a profound misreading of the context. Ringo’s genius was one of service, to the song, never to his own ego. His fills were not percussive fusillades but deft, narrative flourishes. In fact, the only extended solo he ever took consisted of a few measures in the run-up to the three way guitar pyrotechnics between John, Paul and George near the end of the Abbey Road Medley.
Away from the drum kit, Starr has settled into the unlikely role of a roving ambassador for a kind of doggedly optimistic serenity. His signature phrase “peace and love,” deployed with the frequency and casualness of a mantra, has become his brand statement. There is something profoundly moving in his adherence to this simple credo, a guiding principle that has seen him through the dizzying heights of psychedelia, the profound grief of losing George and John, and the endless, churning weather systems of the Beatles’ legacy. At eighty-five, he remains a fixture on the road, a working musician who concludes each performance with that familiar, two-fingered benediction.
What, then, are we to make of Ringo the survivor? In an enterprise that burned with the intensity of a dying star, he was the quiet anchor, the one who endured the gale-force winds of fame, the descent into addiction, and the slow, arduous climb back to himself. He has lived several lives since the dissolution of the band: a surprisingly deft turn as a character actor, a late-blooming career as a visual artist, and his current, enduring incarnation as an elder statesman of joy.
In an age saturated with cynicism, there is something almost radical about the simple fact that Ringo Starr still appears to be having a rather good time. His annual birthday ritual—a global call for a moment of “peace and love” at noon—is a gesture of charming, almost quixotic hopefulness, like tossing a message in a bottle into the cosmic sea.
Ringo at eighty-five is more than a mere milestone; he is a testament to the virtue of restraint in a culture that fetishizes excess. It is a quiet affirmation that taste, in its own way, is a form of genius. And it is a reminder that sometimes the quietest voice in the room is the one that, in the fullness of time, resonates the most.
History, it seems, is slowly, inexorably, coming around to his point of view. As we find ourselves, perhaps unconsciously, tapping a foot to “With a Little Help From My Friends,” or catching the shimmer of a cymbal in “Something,” we are hearing more than just a Beatle. We are hearing time itself, captured and branded into each of us. Essential tracks defining the soundtrack of our lives.
