Time & Perspective Quote by Ron Wood

Ron Wood frames the Rolling Stones less like a band and more like a lifelong institution he feels personally responsible for keeping open. The line starts in fan language - "loved the Stones all the time I was growing up" - which is a neat bit of self-mythmaking: even as an insider, he keeps the posture of an outsider who still can’t believe he’s in the room. That’s not just sentiment; it’s a claim to legitimacy. Wood isn’t the visionary auteur or the loudest ego in the group, so he positions himself as the custodian, the guy whose loyalty predates his payroll.

The real charge sits in the blunt, almost tabloid phrasing of the 80s rupture: "Mick thought that Keith hated him and vice versa". He reduces a famously complicated creative feud into a simple, relatable tragedy of misread signals, the kind that can dissolve a marriage or derail a family business. That simplification is strategic. It turns artistic differences and power struggles into something fixable: not ideology, just emotion and paranoia. In a decade when rock bands were becoming brands, splitting meant more than personal heartbreak; it meant the end of a cultural product with massive economic gravity.

Wood’s subtext is clear: he sees himself as the stabilizer in a two-sun solar system. By emphasizing how close it got, he also retroactively magnifies the achievement of endurance - not as romance, but as maintenance. The Stones survive here not because the love is pure, but because someone refused to let the machine stop.