Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood, And The Friendship That Outlived The Faces

The Faces broke up in 1975, but Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood never really did.

That was the year everything changed. Ronnie Wood walked away from The Faces and stepped into the wild, immortal machine of The Rolling Stones. For most bands, that kind of moment would leave scars. There would be silence, distance, maybe a few polite words years later when cameras were rolling.

But Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood were never built like most people in rock and roll.

The Faces had been more than a band. The Faces were noise, laughter, loose jackets, late nights, smoky rooms, and songs that sounded like they might fall apart at any second but somehow landed exactly where they were supposed to. Rod Stewart had the voice that could sound scratched by heartbreak and lit by mischief in the same breath. Ronnie Wood had the grin, the guitar, and that restless spark that made every stage feel like a party just about to get out of hand.

When Ronnie Wood left, it could have felt like betrayal. The Faces were already carrying the weight of separate careers, changing ambitions, and the pressure that comes when a band becomes too loved to stay simple. Rod Stewart was becoming a massive solo star. Ronnie Wood was being pulled toward one of the biggest bands in the world. By 1975, the road that had carried The Faces together finally split.

And yet, somehow, the friendship stayed.

Fifty Years Later, The Laughter Was Still There

Decades passed. The clothes changed. The crowds changed. The music business changed almost beyond recognition. But when Rod Stewart sat down with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2, the question came naturally.

How does a friendship last that long?

Rod Stewart did not need a grand answer. Rod Stewart did not reach for anything dramatic or rehearsed. Rod Stewart gave the kind of answer that only makes sense when two people have known each other through youth, fame, mistakes, survival, and old jokes that never stopped being funny.

“We’ve got the same sense of humour,” Rod Stewart said.

Then Rod Stewart painted the picture. When Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood meet up and start talking, people around them can almost feel the clock turn backward. The room changes. The years fall away. Suddenly, it is 1975 again. Two old bandmates are laughing at the same jokes, teasing each other in the same rhythm, and carrying on like nothing in the world ever really interrupted them.

There is something deeply human about that. Fame can create distance. Money can create distance. Success can create distance. Even time can quietly pull people apart until the friendship becomes a memory instead of a living thing.

But for Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood, the laughter kept the door open.

More Than Bandmates

Rod Stewart joked that Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood share more than humor. Rod Stewart mentioned the same nose, the same hair, and the same habits with that familiar cheeky grin that has carried Rod Stewart through generations of interviews.

Then came the word that mattered most.

Brothers.

Not brothers because they always agreed. Not brothers because life was easy. Not brothers because the band stayed together. Brothers because some bonds are made in strange little moments that never make the official history books.

Maybe it happened backstage after a difficult show. Maybe it happened during a long drive when nobody else understood the pressure they were under. Maybe it happened in the middle of a laugh, when Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood realized that success was better when someone beside you remembered who you were before the applause got loud.

That is the part people often miss about rock and roll friendships. The public sees the songs, the headlines, the breakups, the famous names. But the real story is often smaller. A shared joke. A private look. A familiar voice on the other end of the phone. The comfort of knowing someone still sees the younger version of you, even when the rest of the world only sees the legend.

The Faces Ended, But Something Survived

The Faces may have ended in 1975, but the spirit of The Faces never fully disappeared. It lived in the laughter between Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood. It lived in the way Rod Stewart could still talk about Ronnie Wood with warmth instead of bitterness. It lived in that rare kind of friendship that does not need to prove itself because it already has.

There is a reason people still care about stories like this. It is not only nostalgia. It is not only because Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood helped shape an unforgettable chapter of rock history. It is because their friendship reminds people of something simple and hard to keep.

Some relationships survive because nobody keeps score.

Some friendships last because the people inside them choose laughter over resentment.

And some bonds, once formed in the chaos of youth, become stronger than the band, stronger than the breakup, and stronger than fifty years of everything life can throw in between.

Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood walked different roads after The Faces. But whenever they meet again, the road seems to bend backward for a moment.

Back to the jokes. Back to the music. Back to 1975.

Back to two brothers still laughing like the song never ended.

 

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HE WAS A SHORT, IRISH-ROMANIAN KID FROM CHAGRIN FALLS, OHIO, WHOSE FATHER GROOMED POLO PONIES FOR A RICH MAN AND WHOSE MOTHER CLEANED OTHER PEOPLE’S HOUSES TO PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE. HE WAS DYSLEXIC IN AN ERA THAT HAD NO NAME FOR IT, AND THE OTHER KIDS LAUGHED AT HIM EVERY TIME THE TEACHER MADE HIM READ ALOUD. HE WANTED TO BE A JOCKEY. THE JOCKEYS TOLD HIM HE WAS TOO TALL. AND THIRTY YEARS LATER, HE WOULD STAND ON A SOUNDSTAGE IN HOLLYWOOD AND MAKE HARVEY KORMAN LAUGH SO HARD THE MAN WET HIS PANTS ON LIVE TELEVISION. He wasn’t supposed to make it. He was Thomas Daniel Conway, born in 1933 in Willoughby, Ohio, in the deepest part of the Great Depression. His father Dan was an Irish immigrant who groomed horses on a rich business owner’s estate. His mother Sophia worked as a cleaning woman and seamstress. The boy was baptized Toma — the Romanian version of Thomas — at a Romanian Orthodox church where, as a baby, he nearly crawled out the door before the priest could finish. Tim grew up in a house with beer stains on the kitchen ceiling. His father brewed his own beer and put in too much yeast, so the bottles exploded in the night and shot the caps straight up into the plaster. The Conways had no money for storebought beer and no money for a new ceiling either. Then came school. “In high school, and even in grade school, people couldn’t wait for me to get called on to read aloud because I would put words into sentences that were never there. They thought I was being funny, I guess, so they would laugh at me. And I just continued that through life.” He had dyslexia. Nobody knew what it was. So he turned what was supposed to humiliate him into a routine. He made the other kids laugh on purpose now, before they could laugh at him. By 18, he wanted to be a jockey like the men his father worked for. He was too tall. By 22, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. By 25, he was back in Cleveland writing skits between movie reruns at a local TV station, working with a wisecracking partner named Ernie Anderson — whose son Paul Thomas Anderson would one day direct Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood. Then came 1961. A visiting comedienne named Rose Marie watched a tape of his sketches and refused to leave Cleveland until somebody put him on a plane to New York. By 1962, he was Ensign Parker on McHale’s Navy. By 1967, he was a recurring guest on a new variety show hosted by a redhead named Carol Burnett. He called his mother in Ohio to tell her. She told him: “Ken Shutts down at the hardware store is taking on new help. You should apply. That crap on TV isn’t going to last.” That crap lasted eleven years. He won six Emmys. He made Harvey Korman break character on national television so many times the bloopers became more famous than the sketches themselves. He told audiences across America: “They told me I was finished. I’m just getting started.” Then came his final years. Normal pressure hydrocephalus — water on the brain — slowly took the timing, then the words, then the man. His daughter Kelly and his second wife Charlene fought a public legal battle over his medical care while he lay unable to speak. He died on May 14, 2019, at 85. Some men chase the spotlight until it kills them. The ones who matter learn to make a roomful of strangers cry from laughing — even when they themselves can barely read the script. What Carol Burnett wrote on her Instagram the day he died — calling him “one in a million” — tells you everything about who he really was.