When the engines of punk rock clattered into motion back in the late ’70s, the only visible gloss was the black stuff so many musicians were painting on their fingernails. Even inventive guitarists like Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd of Television and poetic visionaries like Patti Smith and Pere Ubu’s David Thomas crafted works with the raw, ugly beauty of a rottweiler.

In the wake of punk’s post-Cobain mainstream revival, the music’s true heart stopped beating. And now Wayne Kramer, a guitarist and songwriter who helped inspire the original punks as a member of the revolutionary late-’60s band the MC5, has set out to give that dormant muscle the punch it needs.

“To me, punk is a context that is trying to move away from the status quo and do things by principle that are of value,” Kramer says, explaining the æsthetic behind his new compilation, Beyond Cyberpunk (Musicblitz). “It’s been commodified to mean Green Day or Offspring, which are mainstream successes. I wanted to focus more on what my understanding of punk really meant — to break through — that thinking can be fun.”

So Kramer has assembled a collection of recordings by artists who were, for the most part, in the thick of the original ’70s punk-rock movement. It’s a sampler of new work from Pere Ubu, Richard Hell, Dee Dee Ramone, Chris Spedding, former Dead Boy Jimmy Zero, Henry Rollins, and ex-Stooge Ron Ashton — all heroes of the old school — and from their inheritors, Mudhoney, Downset, David Was, Stan Ridgway, and more.

“Most of these people are artists who did good work back in the day and are doing even better work today,” Kramer continues. “But the way the music business is structured, with its throwaway emphasis on youth culture, a lot of artists don’t get exposure. So it was just a matter of calling everybody that I love — my friends and people whose work I admire — to see if they wanted to work with us on a record.”

Kramer was more than a curator for the project. “I put guitar solos on Dee Dee Ramone’s track and [Henry Rollins’s band] Mother Superiors’. I played bass on Mudhoney’s song, and I co-wrote the Chris Spedding tune with him and played with David Was. It was a hands-on deal, a lot of fun.”

Sex and crime and drugs are a recurring theme on Beyond Cyberpunk’s 15 tracks. Ramone’s abduction fantasy “Bad Little Go Go Girl,” Spedding’s “Love on Death Row,” and the way Zero’s outfit Lesbianmaker pounds through “Take Me in Your Arms like Heroin” are vital, growling examples of traditional fare that hews to the style’s thunderous guitars-and-drums backbone.

Another building block of formative punk was genre-defying musical daring — an arena in which the likes of Green Day and an entire generation of Mighty Mighty Bosstones imitators fall terribly short. Hell, Ridgway, Kramer, and Was pursue that notion, spiking their tunes with edgy poetry. Was, in particular, goes outside rock’s envelope, delivering a surreal electronic sound-noir portrait of “Chow Main Street” that nonetheless respects punk’s inherent simplicity and propulsion. And Hell is rejoined by the guitarists Robert Quine and Ian Julian, with whom he made his punk-era masterpiece/manifesto, Blank Generation.

Kramer finishes the album himself with “Crawling outta the Jungle.” The piece is five and a half minutes of his virtues: poetic lyrics, twitchy rhythmic drive, a sung-and-spoken narrative with a catchy chorus melody, and a guitar sound that spanks the air with shrapnel. The twisted little tale of New Orleans voodoo and worldly disengagement is typical of the ’90s solo recordings on which Kramer came to reclaim his art after years adrift in a creative and sometimes drug-fueled morass — but it’s supercharged, the kind of inventive work you expect from a player whose rock band were covering Sun Ra and John Coltrane during the Summer of Love.

In Kramer’s world, rock, jazz, improvised music, spoken word, and poetry have always been welcome to share the same space. “I don’t see them all being that different. I just try to follow the beauty. I have an unending thirst for ideas and creativity, and I pursue it relentlessly. If it takes six different forms, that’s what it takes.”

So does he believe that as sprawling and ambitious an album as Beyond Cyberpunk has a place in today’s musical culture of teen pop and shit-shoveled angst rock? “I believe it’s the artist’s responsibility to upgrade his audience’s listening tastes. So, yes! It’s needed desperately.

“There’s worse things in the world than the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, but we’ve all grown up with rock now, and it’s not just for teenagers. I’m 52, and I’m still as enthusiastic about sound and art and creativity as I was when I was 17. It’s something that you can do all the way to the end, you know? So I view education as part of my job.