The Road to Ruane

The latest documentary to explore Boston's storied indie music scene during its glory days is this fascinating look at one of the city's most prominent and eccentric scenesters. Billy Ruane was the informal impresario of the Boston rock world, a concert promoter, a music archivist, a showbooker, a supporter of nearly every local band of four decades, and a visible figure at shows. The son of a billionaire investor and the godson of Warren Buffett, Ruane famously convinced Joseph and Nabil Sater, the owners of the Middle East restaurant in Central Square, Cambridge (who are interviewed here), to turn part of their establishment into a rock venue after he crammed too many people into the neighboring night club for his 30th birthday party. The Middle East quickly became one of the more legendary rock clubs of the 1980s through the 2020s. Billy served as its main booker for many years but was also banned from the club due to his volatile behavior.

Like All Ages: The Boston Hardcore Film, Cure for Pain: The Mark Sandman Story, and WBCN and The American Revolution, The Road to Ruane feels tailor-made for a one-off Somerville Theatre screening packed to the rafters with aging rockers and rock fans who remember fondly, and a bit wistfully, the era the film covers (and, full disclosure, this is how I experienced the movie). But the film has additional layers that should interest many who've never set foot in T.T. the Bear's Place.

Ruane was known for his altruism and generosity but also for being the weird, volatile guy jumping on and off the stage, disrupting shows as much as he added to their enjoyment. Ruane suffered from bipolar disorder, but perhaps his complicated condition was being the son of a billionaire. Always eager to spread his seemingly endless inherited wealth around, it also enabled him to fuel his mental illness and drug use. The film isn't an exploration of the link between unlimited wealth and madness, but it serves as a study of that connection nonetheless. We get just enough understanding of his backstory, including the circumstances of his mother's suicide, which mirror those of Geraldine Page in Woody Allen's Bergmanesque drama Interiors, to draw many conclusions that may or may not hold up to scrutiny.

The legend of Billy Ruane is told by his friends, specifically the owner of Looney Tunes Records, Pat McGrath. The more anecdotes we hear about this larger-than-life character from Boston musical luminaries like Kay Hanley of Letters to Cleo, J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., Roger Miller of Mission of Burma, and Billy Beard of Face to Face and Session Americana, the more he starts to feel like a mythical figure collectively created and evoked like a stage-diving Santa Claus or a hipster Forest Gump. Ruane's former girlfriend, singer/songwriter Mary Lou Lord, tells a great story about how she and Kurt Cobain spent the night before Nirvana's Nevermind came out listening to albums while lying on the floor of Ruane's apartment. An animated sequence showcases Ruane's first meeting with J. Geils Band frontman Peter Wolf, whom he accidentally vomited on. But almost every story is intercut with home video footage of Ruane behaving exactly like the character people describe in their stories. The quality of this video footage and the sections of Boston it captures also serve as a time machine for viewers who were around the scene in the '80s, '90s, '00s, and '10s.

The film was directed by Michael Gill, who seems to have started the project shortly after Ruane's death. Gill passed away himself after many years of working on the doc, which was taken over by his friend Scott Evans. As co-director, Evans devotes a fair amount of screen time to Gill, not just a coda but the inclusion of several moments in interviews where we hear the director from behind the camera. If the film gets any kind of wide distribution, I wonder if these bits will be taken out in a re-edit. They feel respectful and welcome for the crowd of insiders I watched this movie with, but they may make the movie even more difficult for general audiences to connect with. Or maybe not. It's difficult to say with a film like this. In some ways, the parallels drawn between Ruane and Gill remind us that we all have figures like these guys in our lives, just not always so extreme.