Underdog spirit doesn’t blend with award show

It got a bit hard to sort out the Lifetime Achievement honorees from the regular winners during the annual Los Angeles Weekly Music Awards at the Henry Fonda Music Box Theatre on Thursday.

Devo, one of the former, still was committing its art terror in Akron, Ohio, when the Weirdos, who won for best punk band, were helping define L.A. music 28 years ago. Lifetime honoree Mike Watt (his mother accepting for him in his absence) helped invent L.A. post-punk with the Minutemen in the mid-’80s, while “new genre/uncategorizable” category co-winner Tom Recchion noted that he’s been active in L.A.’s avant-garde music scene since the mid-’60s.

The defining observation came from Carla Bozulich, whose route twisted from late-’80s industrial outfit Ethyl Meatplow to ‘90s rock band Geraldine Fibbers to last year’s album reinterpreting Willie Nelson’s “Red Headed Stranger,” for which she won the best country artist award Thursday.

“I grew up in the L.A. underground,” she said in accepting the award. “I’ll probably die in the underground. That’s why you’ve never heard of me.”

That existential assessment fit across genres and generations at this event, in which Weekly writers chose the winners. Save for a select handful, few of the winners, nominees or performers have had much profile outside of the L.A. cognoscenti.

Unfortunately, the underdog spirit didn’t translate into a good show. The performances were uniformly solid but rarely electrifying, and there was a disconnection in that none of the performers (Afro-soul jazz ensemble Build an Ark, pop-rock trio the Like, acoustic troubadour Patrick Park, over-amped hard-rockers Abloom) were among the winners. The audience never got even a taste of the music from anyone being singled out.

Other winners included the Mars Volta (rock band), Dios (new artist), the Icarus Line (hard rock/metal), All Night Radio (pop/rock), Dwight Trible (jazz), Quinto Sol (Latin), Future Pigeon (instrumental), Lili Haydn (world/recombinant), Amps for Christ (tied in new genre) and Jake La Botz and Southside Slim (tied for blues/R&B;). Saxophonist Plas Johnson and rocker Joan Jett were the other lifetime honorees.