By Eli Attie

Photo courtesy Roberta Bayley

Let's begin with a disclaimer: Richard Hell is only half-Jewish. His mother is, in fact, a bona fide WASP. Under the laws of return, the guy's staying right where he is. And Hell, born Richard Meyers, surely didn't change his name for religious reasons.

But while Yid-rockers such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon infused popular music with the brighter side of the Jewish experience—wisdom and curiosity, mysticism and scholarly complexity—Richard Hell, perhaps more than any rock innovator, brought to the rock canon the darker side of the Jewish psyche. The otherness and the rootlessness. The constant fear of extinction and irrelevance. A level of guilt and self-loathing that makes Woody Allen look like Norman Vincent Peale.

Richard who?

You may not have heard of him; he never had anything close to a hit record. What's more, he virtually abandoned music two decades ago. But Richard Hell is arguably the founding father of 1970's punk rock, the man who took the nihilism of William Burroughs, the suicidal recklessness of Jack Kerouac, the grit and grime of New York's junkie street culture, and set it all to a bunch of snarling, half-tuned guitars.

Consider the facts:

Hell's search for a weekly gig for his first band, art-punk pioneers Television, led them to an empty biker bar called CBGB's on New York's Lower East Side. They convinced the bar's owner to feature live music, birthing the entire punk scene from which Blondie, the Ramones, Patti Smith, and the Talking Heads would soon emerge.

Hell's refusal to wash or comb his hair for weeks on end led, albeit inadvertently, to the advent of the spiked haircut, and he pioneered the ripped t-shirts that soon became de rigeur among rock's undesirables.

Hell's music and fashion non-aesthetic was the singular inspiration for Malcolm McLaren, then the New York Dolls' manager, to return to London and assemble the Sex Pistols. "It was like Marco Polo," McLaren has recounted. "I brought back the image of this distressed, strange thing called Richard Hell. And this phrase"—Hell's signature tune—"the Blank Generation."

Hell had moved to New York after dropping out of a Delaware boarding school in the early 70's—a decidedly un-Jewish beginning. Yet Hell's was no slacker path; he was consumed with the tortured symbolist poetry of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud (whose nihilistic opus, "A Season in Hell," gave this nice half-Jewish boy his stage name), and had ambitions of becoming a poet himself. After seeing the fledgling New York Dolls and the excitement they inspired, Hell realized—like Dylan a decade before him—that rock could be an outlet for his twisted treatises, and was certainly better than putting out, as he put it, "little mimeograph magazines that five people would ever see." With only rudimentary bass guitar skills, and a warbling, yelping singing voice that sounded like Lou Reed and Hank Williams fighting over the last syringe, Hell managed to cast a long shadow from rock's gutter.

Like the eternal exiles and wanderers of his half-religion—in history, yet not quite of it—Hell rarely stood still long enough to enjoy his own influence. The band Television was Hell's idea, yet he left over personal tensions before they recorded a single note. Then, out of the ashes of the New York Dolls, Hell and Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders co-founded the Heartbreakers. Hell, clearly more content to live in his own private shtetl, skipped out on this band, too—before they set foot in a recording studio, and before they toured England with the Sex Pistols and the Clash on the famed Anarchy Tour, which sparked a full-scale punk revolution in the Land of Hopelessness and Glory.

It was as a solo performer, with his backing band the Voidoids, that Hell finally made his musical mark. Together with drummer Marc Bell (later Marky Ramone) and brilliant lead guitarist Robert Quine (later a celebrated Lou Reed and Matthew Sweet sideman), Hell fashioned an edgy, angular, manic brand of punk that seemed incapable of settling down—like a street pimp in search of a homeland. "I was sayin' let me out of here before I was even born," he sings in the anti-anthem "Blank Generation," which became the model for the Sex Pistols' "Pretty Vacant." With songs both propulsive and profound, and a band as invasive as it was inventive, Hell earned such admirers as Johnny Rotten, Nick Lowe, and rock's ultimate Jewish non-Jew, Elvis Costello, who even performed with him on-stage.

Unfortunately, Hell rarely captured the depth and intensity of his work on vinyl. As he once said of his own music, it's great—but nothing he recorded shows it, so you'll have to take his word for it. To make matters worse, Hell descended into the typical punk diet of drug addiction, and would only play live when he needed to pay his bills—forcing some of the Voidoids to look for steadier employment. After his first album, the poorly-produced and under-realized "Blank Generation," Costello's manager Jake Riviera expressed interest in handling his career—but according to Hell himself, he was in such sorry shape that Riviera passed. A few years and one album later, Hell had quit music more or less for good. Happily for the Meyers family, he soon cleaned up, returned to writing, and bizarrely enough, had a brief marriage to 80's schlock-pop diva Patty Smyth, now married to John McEnroe—a story twist Hell himself could not have concocted.

By all accounts, Hell does not consider himself Jewish, and would probably not appreciate his inclusion in these ranks. But it is that outsider ethos that makes his work so fundamentally Jewish—the insistence on non-conformity, on non-belonging, on indulging his root neuroses to the point of being a stranger in his own bands. Like the Jewish sitcom writers of the 1950's, who imparted a Jewish sensibility through non-Jewish characters; like the Jewish intellectuals who have influenced both liberal and conservative politicians, yet stayed resolutely on the political sidelines, Hell threw down punk's gauntlet and quickly hid behind the nearest trash can. Maybe that's the true innovator's curse; maybe it means you're unwelcome at your own party, or just incapable of enjoying it. But for a half-Jew, it ain't half bad at all.

Eli Attie is a producer and writer for "The West Wing."

The CD retrospective Spurts: The Richard Hell Story comes out this month from Rhino Records. Richard Hell's latest novel, Godlike, was also published this month by Akashic Books.

Eli Attie is a television writer and producer (The Diplomat, Zero Day) whose credits also include The West Wing, House, and Billions.