Two years ago on Oct. 25, William J. Ruane Jr., known as Billy Ruane, died. Billy was a voluble and volatile presence on the Boston rock scene for three decades. An irrepressible scenester, an ardent supporter of local music and a tireless promoter, Ruane, 52, died at home in front of his computer, after suffering an apparent heart attack.
    Billy was suffering pain and anxiety, but didn't want to go to hospital, fearing institutionalization. A Harvard grad, Billy was brilliant at times, maddening at others, and most certainly bipolar, though he didn't acknoweldge it. He was manic,  obsessive and possessed of terrific musical taste from soul to jazz to art-rock to punk. He drank fairly prodigiously - it took a toll on his once-boyish looks, leaving him red-faced and bloated. He was often caffeineated; he knew he had heart issues, sought out doctors for presciptions he thought would help him. Problem, was Billy's self-diagnosis never matched the doctors ... and the doctors, sadly, were right. When he was dying, his driver wanted to get him to a hospital. Billy didn't want that.
    He was the Cambridge-based son of the late billionaire investment manager- philanthropist William J. Ruane. Billy had an ample trust fund and he spent a lot of what he was given to him on musicians and friends. He trumpeted many an upcoming new band, that is if they met his high standards of taste. (The last show I took  him to was Interpol at House of Blues. Billy, rightly, said "meh" and left half-way through; me I was reviewing it and had to stay.) Billy's latest fave act was Lady Lamb the Beekeeper.
 He was an ebullient, unshaven, gray-haired man with a ready smile, a suit jacket and untucked white shirt, who had a hug and a wet kiss for all. He was usually drinking and buying drinks. He booked the Helldorado series at Green Street, brought the Delgados to twon, was the man that came to Joseph and Nabil Sater at the Middle East Restaurant in Cambridge in 1987 and convinced them to put in live music, opening up a new chapter in Boston rock.
  

 My friend Francis DiMenno did a truly great piece for the Noise after Bill's death. You link to it here:   http://thenoise-boston.com/2010/12/citizen-ruane/

    “Boston lost a legend and a giant-hearted friend,” said Buffalo Tom guitarist Bill Janovitz. "Billy gave Buffalo Tom one of, if not our very, first gigs in Boston. He will be missed and his death marks the end of an era.”
   
      “No one can truly understand my profound loss right now. It has no measure,” said Mary Lou Lord, a Salem musician Ruane had long championed.
   “I am out of my mind with grief,” said Chris Brokaw, a guitarist and longtime pal.    
     “He was a real philanthropist of the arts,” said Lilli Dennison,cq former Boston band manager, club owner and collaborator with Ruane.
  Ruane had friends everywhere. Late in life, he befriended A.R.T. senior actor Jeremy Geidt. “Billy was a man of great kindness, great generosity and great thought,” Geidt said.
 
     Patrick McGrath, musician and owner of Looney Tunes, was Ruane’s right-hand man, his support system for eight years, hired by Ruane’s trust to look after him. It was not an easy job, as there were numerous arguments and confrontations.
  Sweet and kind as he could he be, he could also be a demanding, near impossible, boss.  “He’d been really abusive over the past month,” McGrath said. “He had been given big prescriptions for methamphetamine and guanfacine. All week I’d been trying to get him papered and locked up, probably at Mass. General which is affiliated with McLean. [Ruane had been institutionalized at McLeans once before.] He was looking at time that he was going to hate. He was going to be confined.”
    “He went through many extremes,” Dennison said, “to get a new kind of kick.”
   
    Ruane was hospitalized Oct. 18, 2010 for heart trouble, but checked himself out the same day against medical advice.     
   The night died "was a really bad night,” McGrath said. “An ambulance was called, but he refused to go. He signed off against medical advice. I knew he was gonna ride this off a cliff and he did.”  
    “He could be brutal with his criticisms,” said longtime friend photographer-artist Wayne Viens. “But once you get over the pain there was some truth. He had a great intellect. He pushed me and he did that for a lot of people.”
  
    “Billy was culturally omni-pervasive and would blow in to even my most esoteric jazz shows, unbidden as if out of some whirlwind with gifts of cash, food and booze for the musicians,” said Rob Chalfen, who runs the performance space Outpost 186. “He’d then disappear, but not before hyping me on his latest enthusiasm. He even put up several out of town musicians on occasion.”
 
     Said guitarist Shaun Wolf Wortis: “Billy could represent the musical culture here: irreverent, smart, quirky, unpredictable, sometimes infantile, occasionally self-destructive. He was un-missable. I'm proud to have had Billy feign his death at a show of mine once. I’m sad to hear this death was real.”
    

    Bob Fay, former Sebadoh drummer, recalled his first encounter with Ruane, at a hardcore punk show by Flipper at the Channel in 1983. “When your first sighting of someone involves them ‘dancing’ into a big, bruising forearm of a punk rocker only to do a complete 360 degree flip, land and do that 'sprout' jump move that was uniquely Billy's, you know that greatness has just graced your world.”
    

Gerard Cosloy,cq former Bostonian and co-owner of Matador Records, praised “Billy’s ridiculous generosity” and said, “even at his most exasperating, he was the funniest person in the room. There was no bigger believer in the power of art to transform and inspire, and no one in my lifetime gave as much of himself to make a rather chaotic scene feel like family. His boundless enthusiasm for [music]-you-needed-to-hear would’ve been inspiring enough if he was just a nutty character that turned up at every gig.”
    
    Back in 1988, Ruane talked about his habit of slamming into people and being knocked about. “I got my nose broken at a Slits show while dancing,” he said. “People kept saying they couldn’t understand why I wasn’t dead yet. I always said one reason was I tended not to hurt people, because I have a degree of control even when I’m drunk.”
  
      “Billy loved music with such reckless abandon,” said “Rock of Ages” co-producer Janet Billig Rich. “More reckless than may have been wise at times. In many ways Billy’s greatest gift to me was that he saw rock through the eyes of an adoring child and that simple yet pure love of music is something we shared.”
    
        )Billy photo by my wife Roza.)