From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

It's The Treatment.

It's The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell.

And there's probably no more interesting way to start a book than the sentence,

Wayne Williams wanted to make it in the music business.

It is the first line, as the introduction, of the book, Ratt Cabot, and Atlanta Story.

My guest is the cultural writer and commentator from New York Times, Joe Kaskerli,

Joe Persol, so good to have you here. Thank you for doing this.

Thank you so much for having me.

Really, the whole first third of the book is about how it was so hard for people to get

a grasp on how to cover Atlanta just as a social and cultural phenomenon.

That was fascinating to me that you started with that.

Yeah, you know, I knew I wanted to tell some stories about Atlanta that were not directly related to the rap industry of the last, you know, 10 or 20 years, which is where most of the book focuses.

And what I found was that it's almost impossible to tell an Atlanta story, either, you know, culturally,

politically, historically, historically, that doesn't somehow connect directly to the present-day

music scene. And that was, that was really fascinating for me because I thought I was going

to have to do a lot of stretching to make this stuff relevant. But it turned out it was,

it was more directly relevant than I even knew going in.

But what's fascinating about that, too, is, I mean, as a kid, I can tell you, when Wayne Williams started to turn up in the press, you know, if you were a person in the black community, you go, that guy was in Jet Magazine.

So you're talking about Wayne Williams, you know, better known insofar as he's known at all

as the perpetrator allegedly of the Atlanta child murders, the serial killings that span

the late 70s and early 80s in black neighborhoods in Atlanta. And it's true, yeah, Wayne Williams,

...