Alice Waters' KCRW Playlist Reveals Shameless Acts of Bribery

KCRW

Alice DeeJay heats up the tables at KCRW.

​Alice Waters appeared on the Guest DJ Project on Los Angeles-based radio station KCRW yesterday. She selected five tracks, including works by Jefferson Airplane, Youssou N'Dour, Nina Simone, and David Byrne. Nothing too shocking there. But her true curveball came in the form of a Radiohead song, a band for whom she went to extraordinary lengths of bribery to catch live in concert.

"A friend of mine offered me tickets to a concert at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco," Waters told KCRW host Tom Schnabel. "I just wasn't paying any attention to it, but everybody at Chez Panisse said, 'If you do not take those tickets, I want them. I want them.' I was grabbed by the hand with a young friend and we raced over to San Francisco at the last minute and we were late. He said, 'Stop at a hotel in downtown San Francisco because there are no taxis that are going to take you out to Golden Gate Park.' So we stopped at this place and had to bribe the taxi. He said 'I'm not getting anywhere near it because it's just so congested,' and I had to talk him into having dinners at Chez Panisse and we got taken up fairly close and we ran the rest of the way into the park and we made it. As we were entering we could hear the music of 'Reckoner.'"

Ah, if only we had something so gastronomically lucrative with which to bribe cabbies . . .  

(Thanks to Eater SF/Grub Street for the tip)