Real Life Rock Top 10

6) Jim Jocoy, "We're Desperate: The Punk Rock Photography of Jim Jocoy, SF/LA 1978-1980" (powerHouse Books)

At first Jacoby's full-length posed color portraits of people on the scene seem to owe everything to the black-and-white pictures in Isabelle Anscombe's 1978 "Punk" -- for that matter, the SF/LA punks seem to owe everything to the Londoners in the Anscombe book. But the longer you look -- and not, particularly, at the shots of Joan Jett, Exene Cervenka of X, Johnny Thunders or other stars -- the more you begin to see what it took to remake yourself as a freak, as a social idiot, as someone you weren't meant to be. A woman with short black hair in a short black vinyl skirt who looks like a follower of the early San Francisco punk band Crime; a blond woman wearing red, black blue, yellow, white and green stripes and squiggles, smoke drifting over her face like a small cloud; a small woman dressed demurely in black and blue and something in her eyes that seems to be daring the world to fuck with her, and not because she knows what will happen if it does -- soon enough, you're seeing real people everywhere.

7) David Gates, "Everybody Must Get Sloshed" (New York Times Book Review, Oct. 13)

On Tim O'Brien's novel "July, July," about a class of '69 30th-anniversary college reunion and how dreams of a better world turned to dust, gold dust that still shines with the pain of hopes abandoned and hearts that even under a carapace of corruption beat on to the music the man can't bust even though he did. Choosing among requisite "uptight Republican housewife," "draft-dodger who split for Canada" and "still-traumatized Vietnam veteran" with "a voice in his head," Gates homes in on the latter, or rather his "imaginary friend," one "Johnny Ever." "Talk about cynics!" says Gates. "'Seen it once, seen it a zillion times,' this hard-boiled internal parasite tells his host. 'We're talkin' grand illusion here. Fairy tales ... "Hair." Your whole wacked-out generation, man, it got turned around by all that tooby ooby walla starshine crud.'" "Edgy stuff," Gates says. "If you can't believe in 'Hair' anymore, what can you believe in?"

8 and 9) Ed Ward on Domino Records, "Fresh Air" (NPR, Sept. 3) and "The Domino Records Story" (Ace)

Resident pop historian Ward told the story of an odd little label launched in 1957 in Austin, Texas, by a team of solidly middle-class white entrepreneurs who met at a business seminar called "How to Market a Song." They experimented. Their strangest record was Joyce Harris' New-Orleans-style chant "No Way Out": No way out from your love, was the concept; it wasn't the feeling, which was life and death. A male voice begins the song with "I gotcha! I gotcha! And there's no way out --" twisting the last word into a drawl so menacing you can't believe anyone can answer him; Harris does, if only by sounding as if she's tearing snakes out of her hair.

The label's stars were the Slades, especially with their original version of "You Cheated" -- a reworking of the Penguins' 1954 doo-wop classic "Earth Angel" -- which became a national hit when in 1958 it was covered by the Shields, who as they were black and the Slades, whose passionate, close-harmony rehearsal tapes are the hidden treasure of "The Domino Records Story," were white, turned the vitally important American tradition of whites strolling to riches on the backs of blacks on its head. Or anyway sideways: Jesse Belvin, who wrote "Earth Angel," was the lead singer of the Shields, and as with white covers of black records, compared to the Slades the Shields were slick.

Ward played the Slades' "You Cheated" -- rough but reaching, for just what you couldn't quite tell. The soul music that was just around the bend? A transparency in the tune the singers couldn't quite find? Hollywood? The humid last notes hung in the air, as if they were ready to burst into rain. "It was a magnificent record," Ward pronounced, as if stunned at his own story, at the glory a marketing seminar could turn up, just like that.

10) "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" (NBC, Oct. 4)

"That's another 25 years," Detective Ice-T says to a murder suspect, setting up a line that for a moment left film noir heroes from Humphrey Bogart to Guy Pearce in its dust. "Your parole officer isn't born yet."

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