New Germs singer Shane West did an admirable job filling in for the much-mythologized Darby Crash at the Marquis on Saturday. Photo from MySpace.com.

Reunion tours usually come about to revive a band’s previous life, and they’re mostly based on a tenuous, and often brief, popularity years earlier. It’s an entirely different thing to see a band come together, after decades of separation, as part of a resurrection.

But it’s a resurrection that the Germs have been riding since the original members came together in 2005, during the making of the biopic “What We Do Is Secret,” with actor Shane West cast as the group’s frontman — and arguably the L.A. punk scene’s most important catalyst — Darby Crash.

They came to the Marquis on Saturday night to delight, and maybe even challenge, a house full of youngsters adorned with tall mohawks, spikes and leather, boots and braces, and even a few safety-pinned cheeks and earlobes. The challenge: to reinvent a band that’s been a legend for nearly three decades for an audience who’s only familiar with them (if at all, really) through decades-old recordings, bootlegs and short scenes from punk rock documentaries, while respectfully maintaining the place that band holds in rock ‘n roll history. I think they pulled it off, and West deserves a lot of credit for it.

Touring with Pat Smear on guitar, a constantly grinning Lorna Doom on bass and Don Bolles on drums, West performed well, more as a vehicle for Crash than an imitation. He more than filled in vocally (truthfully, he was more controlled than Crash ever was) and occasionally came close to emulating Crash’s legendary charisma as well. More than a few times West was quick to challenge hecklers, at one point even reaching into the crowd and tearing a hat off of the head of one particularly mouthy punk, while threatening to jump into the crowd and kick the shit out of him.”

Yet, despite these few high points, West largely maintained a secondary presence onstage, clearly giving sway to the band. I have to hand it to him for filling in the part they couldn’t, while giving them all a chance to be celebrated as the heroes they are, after representing such a seminal part of punk for so long.

They played for just about an hour, opening with “Forming,” and then easily tearing through pretty much their entire repertoire (this may have been the most glaring inconsistency with their original shows, which often degraded into riots after a only few songs). All of their songs were greeted with slamming by teens and old punks alike, but it was during each of their most recognizable tunes, “Lexicon Devil,” “Richie Dagger’s Crime” and “Sexboy” that the floor resurged with new energy.

Darby Crash embodied the rebel mantra to “Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful corpse,” though his, sadly, was abused with the ravages of heroin addiction and scars from stage-born injuries when he killed himself. His story is one of a rock star outside of his own control, possessed by a cult of personality that he helped create and that in turn helped to create the early L.A. punk scene. It’s that sprit that lives on in the Germs shows, and these new audiences are lucky to be able to see something that comes so close to the real thing.

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Billy Thieme is a Denver-based writer, an old-school punk and a huge follower of Denver’s vibrant local music scene. Follow Billy’s giglist at Gigbot.