British magazines like Uncut and Mojo exist to prey on middle-aged men like me. There I was in the temple of the Virgin on Thursday (record stores, as we once called them, are a refuge for boomers too), buying an odd assortment of CDs (Marley’s Exodus; the soundtrack to I’m Not There, Tom Waits’ odds & sods assortment Orphans and Radiohead’s In Rainbows — just ten bucks! which was about the kids had already decided it was worth when the band did a forward-looking pay-what-you-want sale of the album online) when I saw the latest Uncut at the checkout line.

The March cover features Rod Stewart and the Faces, circa 1971, with a teaser that promised yet another rehash of a story many rock fans have heard before (“Bottoms Up! The untold story of rock’s ultimate hellraisers”). Of course I had to buy it. These magazines are like porn for guys like me and I have to smuggle them past my wife. (“Didn’t you bring home a big Jimi Hendrix special last month?”) I think of the Time-Life books ads I use to see on TV when I was kid, for titles steeped in nostalgia for people of my parents’ generation, filled with images of soldiers and their girlfriends dancing to Benny Goodman, and wonder if I have fallen into the same trap.

Of course Uncut and Mojo are not entirely mired in the past. This issue includes reviews of contemporary artists (Supergrass, Drive By Truckers) and a whole CD of mostly new “rock ‘n’ roll in the spirit of the Faces”. But I have to cop to wanting to buy a piece of the past, a moment lost in time.

I was a junior in high school in 1971, and most of the bands we went to hear in Sacramento and sometimes San Francisco were at the tired end of the psychedelic scene. I remember seeing Quicksilver Messenger Service in a rather late and unfortunate phase. Lead singer Dino Valenti (who had been MIA on a drug rap for a few years) paced the stage, babbling incoherently before singing hippie shit like “Have another hit of fresh air.” It felt like the end of an era, lacking in both verve and showmanship. It was the beginning of shoe-gazing, from performers too stoned to do anything else.

The Faces we knew from when they were Small. Their psychedelic hit of a few years earlier, “Itchycoo Park,” would inspire countless kids to skip school (“Why go to learn the words of fools?”) and I was no exception. But the new Faces were a slightly less droogie bunch. With Ron Wood and Rod Stewart, who had both recently fled Jeff Beck’s band, added to the mix (Stewart to replace former frontman Steve Marriott) they were singing more rough-and-tumble, tongue-in-cheek numbers about girls and drinking.

I don’t remember who opened for them at the Cal Expo but it was a kind of heavy metal I had not been subjected to, at least in concert, and what was worst about it was that I couldn’t split; it was way too crowded. The crunching chords and death-tinged songs weren’t mixing with the drugs I had taken for the concert and by the time they finished I was exhausted from fighting off visions of purple windmills and bats from hell.

From the Faces’ opener (“Bad ‘n’ Ruin,” I think; that tour was captured on the live album Long Player) it was clear that this group had another agenda. They were laughing and strutting and drinking (I learned in the Uncut article that they innovated the idea of putting a bar, complete with bartender, on stage for their live act) and the whole thing seemed like a lark. When Stewart dueted on Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” with bassist Ronnie Lane, the latter had to stand on a soap box. (That’s why they had been known as the Small Faces.) It was funny, in a arms-around-the-shoulder-of-your-mate kind of way, and made everyone in the crowd feel like they were up on that stage with them.

By picking up Uncut the other day I was probably trying to capture a little of that feeling, that out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new kind of vibe I had that night. (I’ll resist any Obama comparisons here — though Hillary is the one who wanted to commemorate the Woodstock festival.) Lane is dead and Wood became a Stone and poor Rod Stewart seems to be turning into Perry Como, right before our eyes. But a few well-chosen pictures and memories got me rolling home, back to “Gasoline Alley” where I started from…