‘The Road to Ruane’ tells the story of an antic, unforgettable character in Boston’s music scene
If you attended a single rock show at any of Boston’s legendary neighborhood bars during the 1980s or the ’90s, chances are you’d recognize Billy Ruane. He was the one-man mosh pit driving the rest of the crowd to the edges of the room, flailing like a rabid woodchuck, beer bottle perpetually held aloft, his tie carving figure eights in the rank air.
It was Ruane, a troubled trust-fund kid who fell in love with the local music scene while studying at the Harvard Extension School, who convinced the Sater brothers, Joseph and Nabil, to begin presenting live music at their Middle East Restaurant in Cambridge’s Central Square in the late 1980s. And it was Ruane who planted sloppy wet kisses on musicians while they were onstage, in mid-act. A relentless promoter and archivist of the scene, Ruane was also its biggest pain in the neck.
His death from an apparent heart attack at age 52, in 2010, left a bombsize crater in the city’s nightlife. “The Road to Ruane,” a feature-length documentary premiering Saturday, May 4 at the Somerville Theatre, a highlight of this year’s Independent Film Festival Boston, traces the deep impression left by an antic, unforgettable character.
Ruane, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was the son of the megawealthy investment banker William J. Ruane. Warren Buffett was his godfather. He grew up collecting stamps and coins and learning to ride horses.
He never gave up the ties and sport coats of his upper-class upbringing, but in every other way he rejected his privileged background. As the film makes clear, Ruane couldn’t spend his freeflowing inheritance fast enough. He’d buy up all of a band’s merchandise to give to friends. He’d spend hours on end at a Western Union service, wiring money to less well-off acquaintances.
He was, as a Harvard classmate suggests in the film, a real-life combination of Jay Gatsby and the pirate Jack Sparrow.
“There was a lot of trauma in Billy’s life, some of which people may not be aware of,” says filmmaker Scott Evans. “It cemented who he was as a person.”
Evans completed the documentary over the past couple of years, picking up where Mike Gill left off. They were roommates in Los Angeles for several years, after Gill moved there from Boston around 2015 to pursue film-editing opportunities.
Gill, a drummer for several Boston bands beginning in the ’90s, met Ruane while working at the Middle East. Soon he was shooting footage of various gigs at the direction of Ruane, who had arranged for others to videotape the Boston scene going back to the ’80s. “The Road to Ruane”’s archivist, Greg Dalton-Kay, has created a YouTube channel where he has uploaded dozens of digitized tapes of live sets.
Evans is from the Baltimore area, where he was part of a Mod-revival scene in the early ’90s with a group of friends who all rode Vespa and Lambretta scooters. They often provided visiting bands a place to crash, which is how he first met Gill, who was a member at the time of the Connecticutbased ska band Johnny Too Bad and the Strikeouts.
After Evans moved to LA in 1999, he began his editing career on a television documentary series called “Intervention.” He worked on “Katy Perry: Part of Me” (2012) and a film about the comedian Tig Notaro (2015). Later, he got Gill a job as an editor on “The Amazing Johnathan Documentary” (2019), a Hulu documentary about a dying magician.
The Ruane documentary, more than a decade in the making, was “a real passion project” for Gill, Evans says: “One interview would lead to three more. Eventually, he had over 80 interviews.” Raconteurs include Bostonbred musicians such as Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis, Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller, Letters to Cleo’s Kay Hanley, and songwriter Mary Lou Lord, who recounts how she spent the night before the release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” in Ruane’s apartment, listening to records with Kurt Cobain.
The real caretaker of Ruane’s legacy proves to be Pat McGrath, longtime proprietor of Looney Tunes Records, which reopened in Allston in 2017, a few years after its old location on Boylston Street closed. In the last years of Ruane’s life, when his self-medication began to impact his health, McGrath was on the payroll of the Ruane Trust, charged with looking after his friend.
“To Billy, I was his personal assistant,” McGrath says. On the phone from his store, McGrath says he first met Ruane in the late 1970s, when he began noticing another guy at all the same shows he was attending.
“Being cursed with high self-esteem like I am,” McGrath jokes, “I’m attracted to someone who reminds me of me.” To him, his late friend’s story took on “operatic proportions.”
McGrath, says Evans, is “a great soundbite machine. As he says, the film is an examination of the human condition. Billy was so extreme, it’s easy to examine him.”
“The Road to Ruane” reveals multiple tragedies beyond its central dismay over Ruane’s demise. In the end, however, the film is a celebration of life — a big, loud, messy, enthusiastic life.
A complicated person, Billy Ruane lived to be “in service to other people,” as his sister, Lili Ruane, says in the film. “That heart never stopped giving until it gave out.”