Pre-order Tav Falco’s history of Memphis from Creation Books

book-cover-mondo-memphisJust to get it out of the way: yes – when you add in shipping, Mondo Memphis comes to over $100. But … it’s actually two books about Memphis in one. The first part is written by rockabilly revivalist Tav Falco. Ghosts Behind the Sun is simultaneously a history of the great river city as written by one of its most fabulous residents, while also his musical autobiography.

Part two is Erik Morse‘s Bluff City Underground. It’s a piece of noir fiction, replete with “double crosses, double meanings and murder, all of which point to a centuries’ old secret society known only as the Memphi.”

The massive tome compiling both of these books is Mondo Memphis, and it’s limited to a hardcover run of 75 copies, “with a limited, personally signed and numbered photographic print by Tav Falco.” Both books will be released as separate paperbacks in the next year, with Falco’s book coming in November, and Morse’s in March of 2012.

Mondo Memphis is currently available for pre-order from Creation.

Documents of Culture X-Series kicks off with the Manson/Beach boys connection

book-cover-surfin-with-satan-frontWhile much has been made of Charles Manson’s interaction with the music world, especially in Tommy Udo’s Charles Manson: Music Mayhem Murder, there’s yet to be the definitive examination of his work with the Beach Boys. It’s the interplay between Dennis Wilson and Manson that came the closest to being an actual musical collaboration between a mass-murder guru and pop icon.

Creation BooksSurfin’ With Satan: The Strange Case of Charles Manson and the Beach Boys is the first book in the publisher’s Documents of Culture X-Series. The book, as the publisher puts it:

[A]n in-depth, illustrated analysis of the relationship between Charles Manson and Dennis Wilson, with background details on both men’s ongoing preoccupations – Wilson’s music and hedonism, Manson’s rock-star aspirations and formative murder manifesto Helter Skelter – and the way in which they briefly and fatefully intertwined.

It’s limited to 69 copies, and will run you $29 for the 40-page book, with over 50 “telling” photographs. Pre-order the chapbook at Creation Books.