Gentlemanly Repose: Confessions of a Debauched Rock 'N' Roller Book

In a lot of ways, Ruffino's Gentlemanly Repose is a typical account of the rise and fall of a band filled with dreams of rock legend. We've seen it dozens of times on Behind the Music. The Such-and-Such Band reaches for the brass ring. Then somewhere along the way The Such-and-Such Band is faking it, hoping no one realizes they're falling apart at the seams. The concept is such a cliché that we've seen it parodied and fictionalized dozens of times as well. This is Spinal Tap and Almost Famous are two of my favorite examples. But Ruffino, former lead singer for Boston's The Unband in the late nineties and early aughts, knows he's done nothing new in writing this memoir. He also embraces it as part of the ride.
Ruffino's style is sarcastic, cynical, and extremely detached, much of it reading like journal entries. I almost felt that one needed to be familiar with Ruffino's home area (Boston's suburbs in the South Shore region of Massachusetts) to really "get" his storytelling in the way he intended it. It's my occasionally uncomfortable familiarity with the language, accents, and Ruffino's magnifying glass on the unapologetic Northeastern closed-mindedness that is probably responsible for Repose gaining a fourth star out of me. One example of this is Ruffino's telling of a high school Battle of the Bands as seen from the point-of-view of an archetype teen in detention named "Johnny Turner":
"First up was the kids from tha music room. One of them was Chinese ah sumpthin. Drumma sucked." (15)
Ruffino's style is so detached that when he mentions the name of one of his bandmates, one needs a second or two to refresh the mind of who he's talking about. They are mentioned by name infrequently, and like many of the fans, managers, club owners, groupies and hanger-ons in this and many other rock memoirs, they kind of blend into a faceless composite of people bouncing in and out of existence in The Unband's universe. Ruffino puts it this way, in a Kerouac-like sentimental tone:
"It's incredible how many people just pass through your life once for a minute or two." (166)
This sarcastic, detached style can be troubling at times for the reader. Parts of the book have a hurried feel to it, almost as if Ruffino couldn't wait to get to the snort (sarcastic kind or the coke kind - either way) of what he's observing. This gives a reader a sense of being lost in Ruffino's thoughts, and only he gets what the joke is:
"New Year's. Back to Toronto through fifteen-hour blizzard, Eug drove, plowed through, incredibly. Puss and ahem are coming from the Maritimes, where they have been mincing around galleries and frolicking with picnic baskets. In the pansies." (187)
I kind of know what he means here, I think. But I read the book and I seriously feel like you now have as much context to understand the above as I do.
While Ruffino's style can be raw in the technical sense, his style is also a strength. The detachment keeps the reader cynically involved in Ruffino's commentary on The Unband's unraveling. The aspect about Repose that sets it apart from other rock memoirs is that the reader, like Ruffino, accepts that the end is supposed to happen. There was never any sense of destiny or potential greatness or something wonderful dying on the vine. There was a sense of you get what you get and that's that. They were regular guys navigating their way through fun, chaos, dumb luck and turmoil. And it would end typically ugly. But Ruffino embraced this as their page in rock history:
"I considered asking a total stranger to summarize the fall of The Unband, provided he had never heard of it. Exhaustion, conspiracy, tornado, booze, lists, women, money, shake-ups at mega-corp, artistic differences, druggings, the giant inflatable Hand of Fate. It's the same story, even when the most important part is that it isn't. Anyone could tell it cold. That's the whole joke right there:
Guy walks into a bar." (204)