Dave Clifford

The awards ceremony was held at the Track 16 art gallery in Santa Monica, Calif., where an exhibit of L.A. punk memorabilia has been displayed for the past month. Ginn says event organizer and gallery curator John Roecker built up the show by using the name of his primary contributor, X vocalist Exene Cervenkova, as clout to attract other artists, many of whom didn’t participate.

“Wasn’t it preposterous that Black Flag, after being broken up for about 14 years, would be playing some punk rock museum?” Ginn asks. “That’s why Black Flag broke up — it wasn’t [supposed to become] some kind of museum piece.”

For his part, Roecker says Saturday’s gathering was a “tongue-in-cheek ceremony.” “A lot of naysayers were calling it so un-punk to have a museum and an awards show,” he says. “I think it is the same as the legitimate exhibits for dada or the 1919 Bauhaus scene. Punk wasn’t just music, it was fashion, photography, writing … it covered every artistic medium that there was.”

Salon Arts & Entertainment couldn’t confirm how many original members actually participated in each of the 16 bands alleged to have reunited for the event. But as Ginn points out, most of the bands that apparently performed — such as the Bags and the Flesheaters — featured musicians who are now deceased. “They must’ve been exhuming a lot of bodies over the past week to come up to those sorts of claims,” says Ginn.

In addition to the re-formed bands, modified versions of L.A. stalwarts X (featuring L7′s Donita Sparks replacing original guitarist Billy Zoom), Devo and the Circle Jerks also made appearances at the show, which was videotaped for possible later release. Keith Morris, vocalist on Black Flag’s first single and later leader of the Circle Jerks, had been scheduled to sing with two former bandmates, drummer Keith Clark and guitarist Greg Hetson (currently in Bad Religion), as well as ex-Minutemen/firehose bassist Mike Watt.

“All these people were saying we were trying to fool people by saying that Black Flag were playing,” Roecker explains. “Well, to me, Keith Morris is Black Flag.”

Ironically, the one man whom Roecker says is Black Flag did not appear. Roecker says Morris was sick and couldn’t make it. At the last minute, Pennywise front man Jim Lindberg filled in with the group and performed Black Flag and Circle Jerks songs.

One little absentee shouldn’t get in the way of an awards ceremony, Roecker says. “It would be the same thing as Dusty Springfield being inducted into the Hall of Fame — then she died. Does that mean she shouldn’t be inducted anymore?”

Well, no, but she probably wouldn’t be there to play her own songs, either.

In the years since the band imploded in 1983 it has become a legend in goth-punk circles, where Cave is the unwilling poster boy of tousled, black-hair, gothic-cowboy heroin chic. And if the sleaze-jazz and molested Western was too aggressively clumsy at the time, it now makes sense as an obvious predecessor to the dark, decoratively narrative torch songs of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (featuring former the Birthday Party multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey).

The 17 songs on “Live 81-82″ were culled from three shows in London; Bremen, Germany; and Athens, Greece. “Junkyard,” a song about urban decay marred with piercing feedback, opens the disc, exemplifying the band’s love of the sound of malfunction. The high-pitched whine squeals above Tracy Pew’s lumbering bass, Phill Calvert’s mortar-fire snare cracks and the shrieking guitars of Roland S. Howard and Harvey. The feedback is just a tease, though. Paradoxically, the sound on the rest of the disc is actually fuller and more powerful than most of the Birthday Party’s studio records. And, unlike “It’s Still Living” (1985) and “Drunk on the Pope’s Blood” (1982) — the pair of chaotic and sloppy live albums issued against the band’s wishes — the performances captured here are nearly flawless in sound, particularly the heavy and propulsive “Bully Bones” and “(Sometimes) Pleasure Heads Must Burn.”

Just as the Birthday Party’s music favored disarray, Cave’s lyrics and gruff vocals portrayed a fascination with characters and situations beyond repair. On the lunging crescendo of “King Ink” he sounds like he’s gnawing on the microphone. Then, on “Six-Inch Gold Blade,” with Pew’s rumbling bass calmly strutting between Harvey and Howard’s gouging guitars, he declares, “I stuck a 6-inch gold blade in the head of a girl.” His voice suggests sexual thrill, not remorse.

“Live 81-82″ closes with “Funhouse,” the Birthday Party dismantling the rhythmic ruction of the Stooges classic. Harvey’s sax bleats after Cave’s frenzied screams, the both of them overloading the soundboard and turning the song into bristling, distorted mush. By the seven-minute song’s end, the whole band succumbs to Cave’s shrieking exuberance and everything falls apart, just as they’d intended.