For the first time in my life, I can’t do justice to “The Road to Ruane” without talking about where I saw the movie. This year’s IFFBoston centerpiece selection premiered at the Somerville Theatre’s massive main hall, and it was packed to the gills; there was a long standby line outside. That is odd for an independently made documentary at a film festival, but what was really remarkable was who made up that crowd. Every seat seemed filled by a Boston rock journalist or musician or scene freak of a certain age people whose music you know, or at least have flipped past in the record bins. Leather clad sixtysomethings slapping each other’s backs and reminiscing about good times and gigs they’re still playing swarmed around me from all sides. It felt like part class reunion, part wake.
I say this for two reasons (beyond plain old “I was there” bragging rights). One is because watching the movie with so many of its participants quickly became inseparable from seeing the film itself one of those immersive 4D screenings. The other is because that turnout speaks to just how much of a singularity Billy Ruane occupies within Boston’s music scene.
If you went to any rock show in Boston from the ‘80s until 2010, you were likely in Billy Ruane’s presence. Even if you didn’t know it, you definitely noticed him nattily dressed in blazer and loosened tie, hair unkempt, leaping up and down in front of the stage like some kind of maniac. He belonged in that pit: As a rock promoter/general madman he served as hub for all of indie rock-era Boston. Most famously he convinced Middle East owners Joseph & Nabil Sater (then running a Lebanese restaurant with occasional belly dancers) to start hosting live music after accidentally double-booking his own 30th birthday party at T.T. the Bear’s Place next door where Billy also served as house booker during the club’s golden age alongside musician Greg “Skeggie” Kendall and Fort Apache founder Joe Harvard. His reputation for giving things away and general air of largesse were not exaggerations, either: His father was a billionaire investor (“One of the richest men in the state,” one interview subject speculates), he was literally Warren Buffett’s godson. But you can’t be that weird for that long without it taking its toll.
The structure of “The Road to Ruane” is like if “Broadway Danny Rose” had a seemingly infinite succession of Boston hipster-elite talking heads (many of whom, again, were present) telling increasingly wild Billy Ruane stories; its de facto narrator is Looney Tunes Records owner Pat McGrath, Ruane’s best friend/handler/Sancho Panza through many years. The image painted by these people is something of a tall-tale figure but then again, all signs point to even the tallest Billy Ruane stories being true.
Some examples of anecdotes from the film are animated in amusing sequences, such as a hilarious early encounter with J. Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf, and some are shown through a treasure trove of home video footage someone in Ruane’s orbit (possibly McGrath, though the film isn’t always clear) was clearly a habitual self documentarian, giving us an extraordinary amount of access to a subject who was not a public figure in any conventional sense of the word. We don’t just hear about Ruane’s notoriously terrible table manners, we see him shovel fistfuls of lo mein into his mouth and use shrimp heads as little finger puppets (it must be said that these clips also offer a priceless snapshot of Central Square at its most wonderfully scuzzy). One gets the sense that the existence of this footage is what made the movie possible; somebody needed to show the world.
The home movie footage supplies one of Road‘s most striking and tragic images. At some point in the mid-2000s Ruane abruptly loses his boyish good looks and apparently ages decades overnight his tousled hair becomes slicked-back gray, his lithe frame becomes bloated, and his teeth appear to recede into his gums (it is this incarnation of Ruane I encountered as a college-age concert hopper, knowing him only as “the crazy old guy”). As McGrath explains it, this is not because there isn’t footage rather, there’s too much. Ruane suffered from bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and (it should come as no surprise) impulse control; in the last decade or so of his life he tracked down a doctor unscrupulous enough to prescribe him unlimited quantities of methamphetamines. Ruane’s decline was precipitous and feels preordained in retrospect, everyone interviewed describes it as nothing less than shocking when he finally did pass away. He was one of those unique souls so crazy that people around him assume he is immortal.
There is also a secondary story running through The Road to Ruane, though you may not realize it until the final act. Throughout the movie there are funny moments in which director Michael Gill interacts with his interview subjects telling McGrath how to hold his cigar on camera, or lamenting to Amanda Palmer about how many people he still needs to talk to. On the surface these moments seem jokey, or even self-indulgent, but their purpose becomes clear during the film’s big reveal. Gill died unexpectedly while working on the movie, two years to the day before its IFFBoston premiere; it was ushered through post production by Gill’s friend and collaborator Scott Evans, who is credited as co-director (and received a standing ovation when he took the stage for the Q&A). At this point in the film’s runtime it modulates: we see footage of Gill’s own band at the Middle East, and Road‘s interview subjects (and others, including Kevin Smith) reminisce about how they met him. It became clear that these sentiments were shared by many in the audience, as I could hear audible sobbing throughout the theater.
Gill’s death has clearly changed The Road to Ruane in terms of its shape, but not its meaning; if anything the passages about him underline what was the film’s message from the beginning. Billy Ruane was one of a kind, but we all have our Billy Ruanes or Michael Gills larger than life characters whose stories can’t help but touch others, and whose absence is acutely felt when they’re gone. The Road to Ruane is admittedly a shaggy dog story full of in jokes and digressions that may mean less and less the further one gets from central Cambridge (I spotted Lyres frontman Jeff “Monoman” Connelly in a scene stealing cameo helping McGrath clear out Ruane’s storage locker, but I’m not sure how many outside of Saturday’s crowd would clock him without on screen identification). But its heart-grizzled scene lifers telling stories about their crazy, dead friend is universal. Billy Ruane may be dead, but as long as weirdos keep making asses out of themselves at rock shows, his spirit will never die.
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