Ryan Graveface has been an elusive figure in Savannah over the past 12 years. There was a time when the only way you’d see Ryan in print was in a mask. But in his time here, he’s created some of the most interesting businesses in town, including Graveface Records & Curiosities, Graveface Museum, Terror Vision Records & Video, Lodge of Sorrows and the Graveface Arcade. He’s hosted festivals like Graveface Fest, Terror Vision Fright Fest and countless music shows. His record label, Graveface Records is celebrating their 20th anniversary this Fall, and has been a staunch supporter of local music as well as bringing incredible talent to Savannah from around the world. We caught up with Ryan to talk serial killers, collecting and music.

Jon Witzky: So, you’re a filmmaker now?

Ryan Graveface: I mean I’ve always been a filmmaker. Basically, I made movies when I was young, started a record label, focused on that, then started making movies again, then two of the bands that I was in got too big for me to really do anything but tour. I really wasn’t releasing much music. And that existed for like 6 to 8 years, and I’m just now – I quit touring obviously during the pandemic – the pandemic was great because it allowed me to stop doing all of the stuff that was making me unable to do what I want to be doing primarily, which is not touring. I actually hate touring. I just want to make movies. So yeah, I mean, it’s been great. You know, Terror Vision, which is my horror imprint – we’ve put out soundtracks forever, but now we put out Blu-rays, and I have 5 feature films that I’m producing at the moment that will be out within the next two years, not including the Gacy documentary. So I mean yeah, that’s really my future - production work. Some of the stuff I actually want to be writing, and not just producing, but it depends on the project.

JW: Well, it’s super exciting. I love the horror movie soundtracks. I love Terror Vision. You put out that Unsolved Mysteries album - that soundtrack always gets me, you know?

RG: Oh, it’s amazing.

JW: Do you have any thoughts on collecting as an artform, or collecting in general? Or do you have any interesting stories about visits with collectors?

RG: Yeah, I mean, I’ve written a book called, Story Behind the Piece, that literally details exactly that question. I’ve gotten everything from Jim Jones sunglasses to a $7,000 record, and everything in-between, by way of going to people’s houses and meeting other weirdos like myself all around the world. I mean, who I hate by default are flippers. I can’t fucking stand flippers, the mentality of taking a historical artifact and then just trying to pay the least amount to make the most. I do not relate to that mentality. I will die with everything that I have procured for the museum over the past 25 years of collecting. And I’m happy to die with it, I can’t wait to die with it. You know, the online marketplace, everything is for sale. It just kind of makes me sick. You know, records are a different thing because they’re not rare. Even if you think a record’s rare, it ain’t fucking rare. The rarest record I’ve ever owned is that one I was mentioning, the $7,000 record which ended up being voted the #1 “Most Expensive Record Sold” on Discogs.

JW: What record was that?

RG: I don’t even remember the name – it had this gold foil ankh on a Gatefold jacket, from 1968, limited edition of 100. Terrible folk music.

JW: (laughs) Right.

RG: But I don’t know, I put it up for $10,000, “Make an offer,” the first month of the pandemic. Luckily I’m a hoarder, so – the pandemic fucked me over big time - I didn’t have $150,000 sent to me for free that I don’t have to pay back. So I had to start selling shit that I was hoarding, and that record was the first thing on my mind. So I put it up for 10 grand and, “Make an offer,” and someone said $7,500, and I said “Sold.”

JW: Wild.

RG: I assume they’re gonna re-press it. I assume there’s a reason why someone would spend that kind of money, because they figure they can make money. But I’ve never seen it circulate, and it’s been a couple of years now. But my point is, I can flip records all day, because they’re infinite. They still make them. I still make them, that’s how I make a living. There’s nothing precious about them, despite some people’s attitudes.

JW: What makes a collection interesting to you?

RG: Stories – I don’t care about the items, mostly, I care about the stories. I could care less about, at this point I could give a flying fart about a Gacy painting - I own 237 of them, but you’re damn right I’m stoked every time I meet a guy that used to visit Gacy or has some crazy stories, and I will buy the paintings from him and I will spend the entire afternoon sitting in his living room as he tells me tale after tale, because that’s what I’m buying… I don’t give a shit about the pieces, at this point. I just have so much cool stuff, I don’t need more, but you can never have too many amazing stories. So, that’s what I care about right now.

JW: Yeah. That’s a fantastic answer. I love that. That’s something you don’t hear all the time, but it is something – it’s an important part of collecting.

RG: Well, the museum has helped solidify that. I used to travel with the museum, 7 or 8 years ago, with that concept. Because I didn’t think opening a museum was ever the right idea, I just wanted to show people my shit because I thought it was cool. And then, you know, I bit the bullet and opened the Savannah location. And so I’d say, for the past 6 or 7 years, that’s when my opinion on that really was solidified. All of these objects almost don’t matter. I want to be with you telling the story about them, because that’s what’s really “selling” it. You know, like a flat piece of paper, like a little doodle or something is only so interesting to so many people, but if I can tell you the story behind the sideshow performer who drew that, and what they were experiencing at that moment in time, that’s where this shit is just so – I mean literally, it’s priceless information. It’s information that no one else has.

JW: Right. Yeah!

RG: That’s what I long for with the museum.

JW: Right, the object’s just an object. I mean, I’ve got so many records, but at some point in time it’s like, they aren’t as precious to me as they maybe were at one point in time.

RG: No. I mean, they’re literally not. When I opened the Savannah location, I had to sell my entire collection because I had no investors, I mean, obviously. Who’s gonna invest in me? Nor did I have any money, so the only thing I could stock was my own shit, and I had the world’s sickest record collection and sold it for way too cheap in the store. But regardless, the things that I kept were things like my mom’s 20-piece collection from when she was a little kid, because she scrawled her name on all the records. And it’s all records I hate, like the Eagles and shit that I literally could care less about, but I will never get rid of them, because I think it’s precious – that is precious.

JW: Right.

RG: I have a couple – one crate of maybe, I don’t know, 20 records that I will never sell, because the memories that I have tied to those records will die with me, you know? No one cares about those memories except for me of course. But other than that, I’ll sell any record.

JW: Right. I love that. I can relate to that very much. Let me just ask you about the mix that you made - Is there anything that you’d like to say about those bands?

RG: I’m very much a “music speaks for itself” sort of guy. That’s why my social media is garbage, because I can’t get on there and tell you why you should like something. I just want you to listen, and if you like it, you like it, and if not, that’s fine. So it’s hard for me to – you know, like the Night School band that I’ve worked with forever from Oakland, I mean, I’m obsessed with Shangri-Las and Shirelles and just any of that old girl group stuff. And outside of The Casket Girls, which is a project that I write the music for, I haven’t really found a band that has tapped into that vibe until I found Night School. Now they don’t at this point really sound like that, they’ve all grown up considerably, and the new shit, one of which is a song I put on that mix, is just so good. It’s just so mature. It’s hard for me to explain why I like songs specifically. Because part of it might be knowing the evolution of the band, and the sort of maturation or something. I don’t know, but that’s – I’m kind of terrible at talking about music, to be honest.

JW: (laughs) Ok, what about a band like Basically Nancy? They’ve got that beginning excitement and –

RG: Well they’re very special. I saw them play in my record store – I wanna say they were just about to graduate high school or something – I mean this was a long time ago now, whenever we had a stage in the back of the store, which was seemingly an incredibly long time ago, so say 4 years ago maybe…. I was working the door, and literally stood up on our counter, and watched them with my jaw dropped, like “what the f —” I had never heard of them before, and I was just blown away. Like “how are they writing such powerful melodic statements at their age?” It was impactful. So I think I had them play one more show before they – I don’t think they disbanded per se, but I think they moved around or something happened, because they weren’t around for a bit. But I wrote them and was like, “Hey, you don’t know me, but I would be honored to produce your debut record. I’ll pay for it, don’t worry, and this isn’t a weird thing, I just think there’s something we could do together.” And I don’t think I heard any response at all. And I was like, “Ok, well they’re not interested, that’s cool.” I don’t think I’ve ever sent a direct message like that in my entire life, to any band, ever. So it was kind of like – I assume that’s what they thought I did for a living, is try to – I don’t even have a public studio, so it’s not like a money grab for me – I actually thought that I could help them. And then, I think they moved and came back and were like, “Ok, we’re ready to focus on the band again, we’d love to do a record with you.” And I was like, “Holy shit, cool.” So we did a record together, and I think it turned out, obviously, incredible, in my opinion. And they just made a new EP with some Athens friends that’s really fucking good that we’ll be putting out shortly.

But I think – this is gonna sound kind of offensive, I suppose – but if they got the fuck out of Savannah, they’d be huge. You know, similar to Triathalon, Boy Harsher. The whole Chicago thing has been such a blessing, because the pandemic made me really feel handcuffed and trapped – being a touring musician my whole life, and then not being able to and just being stuck in a place where people verbally say all the right things but there is no action behind it at all. I can’t do it, man. I just had to – I had to get the fuck out. So, I was like you know what? Now is the time to do something in Chicago, and it’s been so nice. People here are so game to spend money, and so game to support endeavors and not just with the mouth. Like, the wallet is the more important part – you can mean well, but I don’t know how that helps a small business.

JW: Yeah. So, where did you move to Savannah from?

RG: Chicago! I’m actually coming back to Savannah in like 5 days, and I’ll be there pretty much until March working on — I need to finish, finish, finish, the Gacy doc – I need to literally lock myself in a room where no one can have access to me, to knock it out. So I’m going to do that in Savannah.

JW: Is that going to have distribution, or is that going to be entirely your project?

RG: I’m just gonna put it out. I talked to someone at HBO Max that was interested, but they were like, “Oh, you’re gonna have to change the names, and you have to use the word ‘theory,” and I was like, “No no no, I have evidence.” I don’t want to use the word “theory.” It’s just gonna dismiss everything.

JW: Right. (laughs) So I walked into Graveface this morning, and I was talking with the guy working about the John Wayne Gacy Netflix show that just came out.

RG: Yeah, it’s not good. It’s just like the basic police narrative that we’ve been told for 40 years instead of the real story. So, it’s well done, but it’s mostly bullshit, honestly.

JW: Really?

RG: Yeah.

JW: Can you share anything about what your documentary is going to be bringing to the table?

RG: I mean, it’s not a secret… Anecdotally, I’ll say this: I think it’s weird, the obsession with true crime and the lack of self reflection, that literally everything that we’re digesting is just an individual narrative that is strictly from the police’s perspective. So why is the mentality that the police are corrupt in 2022, yet, somehow not corrupt in 1978? It’s very odd to me. Almost every documentary, or this new stupid Dahmer show – it’s literally all just the same regurgitated bullshit from Wikipedia and true crime novels that are mostly penned by former detectives. Sometimes victims’ families, but that’s an individual story, not the totality. So anyway, all that to say: Basically, what I’m seeking to destroy regarding the Gacy case, is that the narrative is almost entirely wrong. I have a multitude of evidence - I can name names of people that helped him kill, that dug under his house for him. I can tell you that he was killing out of state – there are bodies that were never attributed to him. I can tell you he was a part of a large pedophile ring that John David Norman started many years prior, and Gacy and many of the people he groomed that were helping him kill were actually filming and selling the video footage – I mean, the case is so much bigger than what Netflix did – they approached me about that, because they know that I have the world’s largest Gacy collection, and I have shit that no one’s ever seen. And so I happily gave them information, and they were like “We’re not interested, that’s too far against the narrative.” It’s like, “Uh, sure, but the narrative that you’re regurgitating are lies that were created by the police.”

JW: So those legendary snuff film stories that you hear about are actually a real thing that was, and probably still is, going on?

RG: Yeah I mean it was a huge – it’s not even like a small thing – It was massive. Like, massive massive.

JW: Disturbing

RG: I have all the check-out sheets – when the police were going through everything at Gacy’s house, and they listed everything in great detail. “This is what we’re putting into this vehicle, we’re taking it to this storage facility to sort through it to see if it is evidence.” And in the PDM office within his house – he had this rolodex that had… a whole team of people that he could buy, sell and trade boys with that were all famous. So you can see it being checked out of his house, and on the check-in sheet, 26 boxes in California, and here in Chicago – guess what, they never arrived. Meaning, clearly, that the police were like, “oh, fuck that, my boss’s name is on there,” or maybe their name is on there, who knows, but magically – it’s just “lost.”

It’s all so fucked up, and I just think it’s weird that we, now as a society – I’ve been collecting Gacy shit since I was a kid, and people used to physically beat me up for my interest in this sort of stuff. So I think it’s weird that not only is it incredibly popular, but people aren’t even after the actual truth, they’re just after a quick thrill, and it’s fucking gross.

JW: Where did that interest come from for you? Do you have any idea?

RG: There was a Fangoria, I don’t remember what year, like ‘90, ‘91 or something, where Stephen King says in passing that Pennywise was created after Gacy, basically. And now he goes back and he’s like, “that’s not true,” even though I literally have a Fangoria with him saying it’s true. But regardless, that was sort of the seedling for me because I had been obsessed with horror movies since I can remember. 4, 5 years old. So I think finding out that this horrifying clown figure in the tv movie was based off of a real person, made the real person someone that I wanted to pursue – and I did, you know? I think it’s very simple, I think… the real-life monsters sort of approach.

I don’t think there’s anything super deep other than that. I dealt with a fair amount of trauma at a young age… more than probably most families deal with. There was a lot of suicide and death in my family, and it was just a lot to deal with at a young age. So, the more I communicate with serial killers, visit them on death row and that sort of thing, the more I learn about myself and it actually helps sort out a lot of the traumas that I experienced at a younger age.

JW: I was very into horror movies when I was young, I would read Fangoria, I loved going to the video store, and looking at every single videotape at that time - I might have been more entranced by the video art than the actual movies themselves. But I do think, yeah, we use those things to kind of face the traumas in our lives sometimes.

RG: Oh yeah.

JW: So your research into this is getting pretty deep.

RG: Well, I mean, not to sound too self-righteous or anything, but it literally will change history. Now, yes, it’s just history for one specific subject matter, but it’s undeniably going to change history within that case. I think I’m going to get an enormous amount of shit for it, and, I mean, I don’t give a fuck.

JW: Thinking about people like Epstein – I mean, of course when you’ve got this whole cabal of extremely famous and wealthy people. You can’t help but think, “Is this real? Is it a conspiracy theory?”

RG: And it doesn’t really get much traction. Which is really proof of why life is so grotesque. There are mentions from time to time, but the way the news talks about Epstein is so boring. How about you fucking ask the right questions, you know? No one ever, ever asks the right questions. Ever. What’s funny is, a lot of my friends now are people that used to visit Gacy, Manson, Ramirez, Dahmer back then – you know, they were probably 20 years older than me, but we’ve all become quite close, because I’m like the only guy that’s going in deep on this shit, and they’re super interested. The consistent thing I hear from all of them is, “Why didn’t I ask the right questions?” These guys probably would have given at least semi-truthful answers.

JW: You think?

RG: Yeah. All of them have significant regrets that they weren’t asking the right questions. Humans don’t want the truth. Humans want bullshit. They want something that’s a little scary, but they don’t want the reality that actually comes with the truth, which is heavy as fuck.

JW: (laughs) What kind of questions are the right kind of questions?

RG: I mean, just specific to my buddy James Sparks, who was one of Gacy’s art dealers: Every time I come up with another insane nugget, he’s like, “I sat across from him so many times on death row – and I just asked him, ‘How’s the painting going?’”

JW: (laughs) Right.

RG: So I’m not suggesting that everyone has to play the role of interviewer, but his point now that he’s an adult, and he’s a professor, he teaches a lot of this stuff, it’s like, “Why the fuck wouldn’t I have asked, ‘Hey, did you have accomplices? Did you murder anyone when you were staying in Pittsburgh for those two weeks in 1976? Yes or no?’ Because you’re gonna get at least something that isn’t a point blank denial or “No.” You might get a weird, obtuse answer, but at least you can know that you tried.

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