Michael Reidy, the stage-strutting, shock-rocking frontman for the power-punk band Razz, which blazed across the D.C. music scene in the 1970s with roaring guitars and a rebellious edge that shaped the city’s club culture and street art, died March 5 at a hospital in Washington. He was 73.

Mr. Reidy was hospitalized after a stroke, said his wife, Stephanie Reidy.

Mr. Reidy’s influence on the region’s music and art circles spanned more than five decades and came in many iterations. He began as a young blues harmonica sideman and, later in life, worked on abstract and multimedia art that appeared in galleries in and around Washington.

In between, for a few years in the late 1970s, he soared at the top of D.C.’s homegrown music gaggle. Razz caught the eye of record labels as the band started performing Mr. Reidy’s songs at bigger gigs, which he turned into a kind of performance art as the resident poet-provocateur. Razz never managed to sign a major record deal, partly because Mr. Reidy and the band hit their stride just before the British-born punk sound fully took hold on this side of the Atlantic.

Still, it was a wild ride. “Our job,” said Mr. Reidy’s bandmate, guitarist Abaad Behram, “was to just go nuts.”

Razz became the Washington area’s most-watched envoy to the emerging punk-influenced revolution in music, launched by groups such as the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Mr. Reidy carried the style forward with songs heavy on angst and alienation, and he used his own art — sometimes dark and menacing — to promote Razz gigs. One flier for a “back to school” show in 1977 showed a child with a gun walking away from a school bus that crashed into a tree.

Another Razz poster in 1977 featured an image of 1950s serial killer Charles Starkweather, whose grim legacy was revisited in one of Mr. Reidy’s songs released that year, “C. Redux.”

“We were just a little too far ahead of our time,” Mr. Reidy once said, “and no one was ready to hear it.”

He was mostly referring to record company executives. At their peak, Razz packed clubs where hardcore punks in safety-pin chic churned alongside Georgetown undergrads and suburban posses. Mr. Reidy, thin, wiry and brimming with a manic spontaneity, gave them something to see. “He modeled himself on Mick Jagger,” said Razz guitarist Bill Craig. “He just took it to the extreme.”

At a New Year’s Eve gig in 1975 at the Painters Mill Music Fair in Owings Mills, Md., Mr. Reidy whipped out a stiletto blade and slashed open the cover of the kick drum on bandmate Doug Tull’s kit. Mr. Reidy crawled inside and kept singing. At another performance, he clamped his teeth around a ringing cymbal. One time, he surprised guitarist Behram by carrying him piggyback around the stage while Behram kept jamming. “I’m yelling to him, ‘You drop me and you’re dead,’” Behram recalled.

With Razz no longer doing covers, Mr. Reidy was free to explore songwriting. His lyrics were never overtly autobiographical, but he left no doubt that he mined some of his own experiences, even if indirectly. In “Cherry Vanilla” (1979), the song’s narrator claws for fame.

Take me seriously will you please

I wanna be a bona fide star

Wanna ride in a chauffeured car

Razz came close. In June 1977, the band appeared in New York as a warm-up act for rising punk star Patti Smith at the high-profile venue CBGB. Razz landed a follow-up gig at Max’s Kansas City, another top New York music club at the time.

Opening for the popular J. Geils Band in Washington in 1978, Mr. Reidy stepped up to the mic in a moment of star-struck candor. “I’ve still got the shakes,” he told the audience about sharing a gig with a major band. Ten minutes into Razz’s set, Mr. Reidy had the front rows dancing along to his moves.

“The fame of Mike Reidy and the Razz has been rising, slowly,” wrote Bob Reiss in a 1978 Washington Post profile that described Razz as the local band most likely to succeed. They had once caught the attention of Mercury Record executive Cliff Burnstein (and future co-manager of the heavy-metal rockers Metallica). Burnstein loved the band’s energy but couldn’t persuade the label to seal a deal.

Razz never made the expected move to New York or Los Angeles to advance the hunt for the big time. “Rent, food, jobs,” said the guitarist Craig. “We all had commitments in Washington, and we were a bit older than other bands. We just couldn’t chuck it all in.”

With the chance for a record deal fading, Razz began to fray. By late 1979, Mr. Reidy and the others went their separate ways.

Mr. Reidy put together some new bands, including MWWW (the initial of his first name, then turned upside down three times), and arranged Razz reunion gigs in the 1980s and ’90s, including one show in 1997 when Razz shared the bill with another revived act, the Monkees, at Washington’s 9:30 Club. Mr. Reidy found it appalling to be on the same bill as the 1960s pop group, and he let everybody know.

Even at Razz’s pinnacle, Mr. Reidy portrayed a take-it-or-leave-it attitude with fans and the recording industry.

“I know I don’t have a tremendous range. Screw it,” he told the music magazine Unicorn Times in 1977. “I’m a rock-and-roll singer. I’m not trying out for the Metropolitan Opera.”

‘Ahead of the curve’

Michael Stewart Reidy was born in Washington on May 26, 1950. His father was an Air Force officer, and the family moved around the country, including years in Omaha when he was assigned to the Strategic Air Command. His mother was a homemaker.

Mr. Reidy attended the University of Maryland but left before he received a degree. In 1969, he was a harmonica player in a blues band. At the university, he heard Craig imitating guitar riffs in the shower. They talked about music and their mutual influences. They started to jam.

Razz was formed in 1972, doing mostly covers that sometimes left crowds baffled. (The name came from a brainstorming session in Mr. Reidy’s basement that included rejected options such as Razzle-Dazzle.) They would do a Rolling Stones song, then shift to the blues and then veer off into a tune by the rock band the Yardbirds.

The group decided to take a break in 1974 and didn’t fully reunite until 1977, when Craig was back in the fold after a stint in Kansas City. The rest of the band included bassist Ted Niceley, drummer Tull and guitarist Behram, who left the group in 1978 and was replaced by Tommy Keene. Keene died in 2017.

“This was a band that, in a lot of ways, just didn’t have the right timing to move to the next level with a big record contract. Their sound and style were just ahead of the curve and, by the time punk was popular, Razz had their run,” said Richard Taylor, who co-directed with Jeff Krulik the film “Razz (The) Documentary,” which premiered last year at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Md.

In addition to Mr. Reidy’s partner of more than 30 years and wife for the past nine years, the former Stephanie Weiner, survivors include two sisters and a brother.

In the late 1990s, Mr. Reidy joined with two former Razz members, Behram and Tull, to form the group Howling Mad. A song Mr. Reidy wrote for the band, “Lover’s Walk,” drew together the imagery and history of London, a city he often visited, and also was seen as him symbolically putting to rest his past as a punk rebel.

Another job with no power to weight

Not now the hunter but the prey