Richard Hell is one of the most intriguing figures in the rogues’ gallery that was CBGBs in the mid-1970s. He was the movement’s beautiful strung-out poster boy, the man who pioneered the punk hairdo and sartorial style. He was a key member of no less than four of the best and most promising bands in the scene. And he contributed its anthem.

Yet while fellow travelers Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie, and the Talking Heads all went on to rock immortality, Hell made a habit of leaving bands just as they were about to record. His first group, the Neon Boys, did only a six-song EP, which wasn’t widely available. He was driven out of Television just as Island Records was expressing interest in the band. The situation repeated itself a year later with the Heartbreakers, Hell’s collaboration with Johnny Thunders of New York Dolls fame. By the time he formed Richard Hell & the Voidoids in 1976, he still hadn’t recorded a proper album.

Today, Hell is a cult figure, forgotten by all but devoted punk record archivists. “Spurts: The Richard Hell Story” (Rhino), a new career-spanning retrospective, is the latest attempt to resuscitate his legacy.

Hell had a childhood befitting a future punk icon. Born Richard Meyers in 1949, he grew up in Kentucky and Virginia, where he was repeatedly kicked out of schools. Eventually, he landed in a reform school in Delaware, where he met Tom Miller, with whom he would found the Neon Boys and Television.

Unable to cope with their restrictive environment, the two simply walked off the school’s campus one day, bought train tickets, and headed south. When their money ran out, they hitchhiked. Their destination was Florida, but they only got as far as Alabama before setting a field on fire and being returned to their families by local authorities.

It was clear by now that Meyers and formal education were a bad fit, so he cut a deal with his mother: He would stay in school until he earned $100 – a seemingly impossible sum. He took a job at a Norfolk, Va., pornographic bookstore, made the money, and left for New York City two weeks later.

Meyers arrived with the idea of becoming a writer, and spent his first four or five years in the city working at the Strand Bookstore, attending poetry readings, and self-publishing his own poetry. In 1972, Miller convinced him to try his hand at rock ‘n’ roll. He learned the bass and formed the Neon Boys with Miller and drummer Billy Ficca.

The way Hell explains it, he wasn’t so much abandoning his literary ambitions as refocusing them. “It seemed to me that I had all the opportunity to do things with words with rock’n’ roll songs that I did in any other kind of writing, plus all these other means – music, voice, multi-rhythms, etc., not to mention the visuals, and on and on,” he told me recently in a phone interview. “I’d be talking to the whole mass of my peers rather than just the rare few who gave a s- about books of interesting poetry.”

But the prospects for an unsigned rock band in mid-1970s New York City weren’t much better than those for a fledgling poet. The Mercer Arts Center, a complex of small theaters on Mercer Street that had been home to the New York Dolls, had crumbled in August 1973. If Meyers and company were going to have a place to play, they’d need to find it themselves. Which they did at a former Hell’s Angels hangout on the Bowery called, of all things, Country Bluegrass and Blues, or CBGBs.

The original CBGBs scene is one of rock ‘n’ roll’s great instances of self-definition and rejection of the past. To that end, Meyers and Miller gave themselves new identities: Miller became Verlaine, after the French poet; Meyers chose for himself the blunter surname Hell. “The art-form of the future is celebrity hood,” he wrote in the punk magazine Hit Parader. “The occupation of rock & roll is so appealing to inspired people now – it’s an outlet for passions and ideas too radical for any other form.”

The notion of reinvention through rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t new. David Bowie and the glam rock crowd had taken it to gender-bending extremes only a few years before. But Hell turned it into a call to arms in his song “Blank Generation.” Like the Who’s “My Generation” and Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes,” it was a statement of group identity, but a deeply ambivalent one – a generational anti-anthem.

The song starts off with a bluesy rock riff, and a catchy one at that. Then, just as you begin to groove along, it lurches in another direction entirely. The lyrics are a study in nihilism: “I was saying let me out of here before I was even born / it’s such a gamble when you get a face” begins Hell in a careening slur. The chorus runs: “I belong to the blank generation / I can take it or leave it each time.” Then again with the word omitted: “I belong to the _____ generation / I can take it or leave it each time.” He’s inviting the listener to fill in the blank himself.

For Hell, self-definition extended to all things. “Not going to barbers for your haircut. Not looking at magazines and being manipulated by advertising for what you wear. Not even accepting the name that you were given by the previous generation. Making up your own. Taking it into your own hands,” he explained to me.

Ironically, his determination to smash all idols turned him into one. The style Hell pioneered – cropped and spiky hair, ripped T-shirts, and safety pins – would soon be transmogrified into punk fashion by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren.

It was an obvious reaction against the gaudy femininity of glam, but few were aware of the look’s literary roots. “There were some artists that I admired who looked like that,” Hell told Clinton Heylin for the book “From the Velvets to the Voidoids.” “Rimbaud looked like that. Artaud looked like that. And it also looked like the kid in ‘400 Blows,’ the Truffaut movie. I remember I had a picture of those three guys. I really thought all this stuff out in ’73 and ’74.” Little did Sid Vicious know he was dressing like a French Symbolist.

Hell’s musical legacy is less obvious, and “Spurts: The Richard Hell Story” will only partly redeem him. Hell calls it his “ideal record,” drawing tracks from his entire recording career. And there are some very good songs here. “Chinese Rocks,” the song he co-wrote with Dee Dee Ramone about their mutual addiction to China White heroin, ranks up there with the best drug anthems (“I’m living on a Chinese Rock / all my best things are in hock”).”The Kid With the Replaceable Head” has a pop playfulness that lands somewhere between early Elvis Costello and the Ramones. And “Time” has a great melody to go with its loose-limbed, Jonathan Richman-sounding lyrics.

But the collection is bound to diminish Hell’s reputation as much as elevate it. Five of the late tracks are drawn from Dim Stars, an extemporaneous project he did with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore in 1992.The dense, searing guitar work is interesting if you’re into that sort of thing, but the lyrics lack the urgency and wild exuberance of Hell’s earlier work. It’s pretty clear Moore is carrying him.

The Richard Hell story remains a tale of what could have been but never was recorded for posterity; it will always live partly in legend. We get a glimpse of the legend on the last track, a live version of “Blank Generation” performed by Television in 1974.You can’t miss the tension between Verlaine’s mocking guitar and Hell’s leering vocals. It’s an argument on the verge of getting nasty – a competition over who will fill in the blanks.