By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, December 2010
In mid-December 2010, KCRW DJ Chris Douridas paused mid-set on his weekly New Ground show to tell listeners he had been in a car accident the night before — on the way home from Hotel Cafe’s tenth-anniversary party. The original FishbowlLA framing was relieved-and-admiring: Douridas had walked away from the crash, and the on-air mention was a small, characteristically mellow public-radio moment of LA-rain disclosure.
Then
Chris Douridas had been a fixture of KCRW’s music-discovery DJ bench for years prior to the December 2010 crash. His Saturday-afternoon New Ground slot (noon to 2 p.m.) was one of the station’s signature curation positions — his soundtrack-consultant and iTunes-program work had given him a parallel industry footprint, but the KCRW slot remained the public face of his on-air work.
The Hotel Cafe ten-year-anniversary party had been one of the December 2010 LA-music-scene events — Hotel Cafe, the Cahuenga Boulevard singer-songwriter venue, had been at the center of the late-2000s LA acoustic-and-indie circuit that produced acts like Sara Bareilles, Ingrid Michaelson, Glen Hansard, and many others.
The recurring LA-weather narrative — that the city’s drivers struggle with wet roads — got picked up in the original FishbowlLA framing. The piece quoted Douridas’s on-air description: he had been “kind of like, I don’t know… If I’m an old house, my floors are creaking and my doors are squeaking. I’m not quite together, but… I walked away from it.” The mellow-disclosure register was characteristic of his KCRW broadcast voice.
The original framing was the kind of small in-the-community public-radio item FishbowlLA periodically surfaced — both an on-air-personality update and a small documented LA-rain narrative.
Now
Chris Douridas continued at KCRW for years after the 2010 crash. His curatorial work across film soundtracks, music-supervision projects, and the broader LA-music-discovery ecosystem has continued through the streaming-platform transition.
Hotel Cafe has continued operating at the Cahuenga Boulevard location through the entire interval. The venue celebrated its twentieth anniversary in late 2020 — the COVID-era timing dampened the anniversary cycle, but the venue survived the pandemic and continued through the post-2020 LA-live-music recovery.
KCRW’s broader music-discovery DJ bench has continued, though the streaming-era displacement of curatorial radio has substantially reduced the kind of cultural footprint individual DJs had at the station in the late 2000s. The Jason Bentley-era Morning Becomes Eclectic transition that began two years before the Douridas crash is now itself history; Bentley left KCRW in 2019 and the show has continued under subsequent hosts.
The LA-rain-and-driving narrative has remained a recurring annual story across the decade and a half since 2010, with the post-2017 atmospheric-river cycles producing substantially more dramatic LA-region weather events than the 2010 storm Douridas was driving through. The 2010 piece reads now as a small documented moment of LA-public-radio personal-disclosure on-air — the kind of low-key, in-the-listener-community moment that has gotten harder to surface in the podcast era’s more produced audio register.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.