Featured Essay: Light My Fire - My Night With Rock Royalty

by Helio Novell

When I was twelve, my dad inadvertently introduced me to my first musical obsession. His intention was to send me upriver with Captain Willard on a mission to take out the deranged Colonel Kurtz. Instead, what I found was the haunting psychedelic sounds of the Doors. The film was, of course, Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece “Apocalypse Now,” and the song in the intro was “The End.” A band whose singer had passed some twenty years before I had even heard a single note from them; yet a band that would play a role in arguably one of the greatest experiences in my career as a personal chef.

Fast forward a few years. A rock and roll museum had opened in Seattle, bankrolled by one of Jimi Hendrix’s greatest (i.e., wealthiest) fans. The impressions it made on me are still lasting. This visit to the Experience Music Project made me want to trade in all my baseball bats, soccer cleats, and basketball jerseys for a Fender Stratocaster, just like Jimi had in all those videos. 

The following Christmas, I was able to convince my parents to combine powers (a rarity in the world of divorced kids’ Christmases) to get me a Strat and an amp. My dad took me, in a loving but sinister move, to pick one out the first weekend of November, but I couldn’t have it until Christmas morning. To rub salt in the wound, I got to open the amp on Christmas eve at my grandparents’ house. Like clockwork, I awoke the next morning and made a straight line to my new midnight blue axe. I plugged in, and the first notes I played were those haunting intro notes from “The End.” Sure, I was probably out of tune, out of rhythm, and generally bad, but my new life had begun.

Over the next 10 years, I would commit myself to being my best possible self at playing guitar: eight to 10 hours a day, blisters on my blisters, pages of printed-out guitar music and books everywhere. A few months into music school, where I was aspiring to study composition and score music for films, I began to feel the joy fading from music. It felt more like  a task than an outlet for expression. Less about me and more about what the book said about this song structure, and this or that chord progression or recording method. In short, it no longer felt like rock and roll. It was then that I decided I needed to aspire to a new career.

The requirements were pretty straightforward for me: the ability to be creative, to impress chicks, to work weird hours, and to learn something that I could take with me anywhere I traveled. Writer? Nah. Web Designer? Nahhhh (intriguing, though). How about a chef? I enjoyed cooking for my mom and sister, watching cooking shows, and trying new food. How could that miss? 

There were so many musical genres to explore: jazz, blues, metal, fusion. Lo and behold, I saw cooking the same way: Italian, French, and Thai, and those can all be fused. Each cuisine had its own key and time signatures to work in. You wouldn’t play a G in an Eb Dorian scale (well, not without a damn good reason), just as you wouldn’t serve Carolina BBQ with some thick Texas BBQ sauce. I could bring happiness with food, just as so many musicians had delivered me the same feeling with their craft. So on a whisper from the cosmos, I went for it and signed up to start culinary school in six weeks, moving out of the house and on my own, regardless of what anybody else thought. 

The cosmos didn’t lead me astray! Twenty years after starting culinary school, I am the only one of my class still in my field. And after years working in restaurants and hotels, I was lucky enough to be brought into a world almost unfathomable to me! I had arrived as a personal chef for an “ultra high net worth” individual.  

Regardless of how you feel about the word “billionaire” in 2025,  there is no argument that life for them is simply…different. The connections and name-drops to make your jaw drop on a daily basis, the resources to make your wildest dreams come true, private jets, god-tier-level  collections, you name it. 

Imagine sending a team of chefs to the other side of the country to research the recipes of meals that you ate 30 years ago, so that they could be recreated for you at any time. Why not bring one of the chefs with you for ten days at a time while you travel the world? We all gotta eat, right? This was my new line of work. 

One of my first, and possibly favorite, moments as a personal chef occurred in December 2017. One evening, the estate where I was working was having a party. The theme? The Doors. Wait…what? The Doors were to be enshrined in the hall of fame at the local rock and roll museum the next day. So it was only fitting that they’d come by the residence of the museum’s chief patron for dinner and to rehearse for the concert. Nothing abnormal about that at all! At least not in this circle. 

As we spent the day preparing food for the evening’s event—smoked beef tenderloin, arancini, salads, desserts, passed appetizers galore—the team told me about some of the other iterations of this event that they’d had in past years, and about some of the folks who had stopped by. Needless to say, they mentioned some impressive and awe-inspiring names.

Five o’clock, showtime! We were down in the rehearsal space, all set up with our food, waiting for guests to arrive, and getting the bottles of spirits and warming dishes ready to go. Oh, I was not at all nervous, anxious, or excited neither was  12-year-old me, who knew every song, lyric, and bit of trivia about the band. 

As the guests started arriving, the staff looked to me, the resident music nerd, to start identifying folks who would be dining and jamming that evening. Oh, that tall goofy guy? C’mon guys, that’s Krist Novoselic. Those two reformed but punkish-looking folks? Oh yeah, that’s John Doe and Exene Cervenka from X. Guys, how do you not recognize Jerry Cantrell?! Oh, hey, there’s the house band for the event. I’m just going to stay here and slice beef tenderloin while you guys tune up.

The music eventually started. Jerry took some runs at “Love Her Madly.” Everybody traded bars on “Roadhouse Blues.” Okay, I could get used to this being my job! As my line died down, two older gentlemen approached with smiles on their faces. They would have had to been blind not to notice my smile, from ear to ear, because it was Robby Krieger and John Densmore of the Doors! 

As much as I wanted to fan-boy out, to ask them all my burning questions, and to adorn them with praise, I kept it to a simple, “Congratulations on the ceremony. Big fan. What can I get you guys to eat or drink?” I was able to fix them both a plate with a little bit of everything we had that night, fetch them each a glass of wine, and use this once in a lifetime opportunity to share my craft with two gentlemen who had shared so much of themselves with me through their music. In this moment, I truly felt as if I had reached the perfect marriage of childhood dreams and adult goals.

However, there was no time to waste, as my boss told me that I had to get downstairs to get ready for Carlos. “Well I don’t know what Carlos you’re talking about, but yeah, sure, I’ll be ready,” I said. Clearly, my brain had checked out for a moment. 

“Here take this tequila, he’ll love it,” my boss said. Oh shit! Ohhhhhh! CARLOS! Another larger than life figure had arrived for the evening, this time a contemporary of Mr. Krieger and Mr. Densmore, one Carlos Santana! He was joined by his wife, Cindy Blackman-Santana, who commanded a room as easily as Carlos did. They gave the host a hug and followed him into the room that housed the favorite guitars from his collection. After a few minutes of chatting and eyeballing various axes in the gallery, they headed back out towards the stage, conveniently located near where my bar station was locked and loaded. 

Carlos strutted up in one of his designer hats, styled out from head to toe, and asked “for the good stuff.” Without missing a beat, I held up the bottle that the boss had given to me. “Ohhh, yeah, that’s a good one!” I poured him a shot, and down the hatch it went.  He gave me a “Cheers” and headed to the stage.

Meanwhile, my professionalism was holding back my awe, my hero worship, and my nerves, like a bouncer holding back metal kids trying to stage dive at a Dillinger Escape Plan show. One of those inner characters was screaming out, “I was sitting one row over from you at John McClaughlin’s show last night. Did you and John jam at all? Is he coming? Remember that time you did Woodstock?” The inner guitarist was begging to ask, “What’s the secret, Carlos? And how did you get that tone on the ‘Abraxas’ album?” Just play it cool, Chef. Play it cool. Deep breath.

There is always some debate about whether the gear makes the musician or the musician makes the tone.  I could tell immediately, from the first set of notes that Carlos played, that he made the tone, and it didn’t matter which guitar he was playing. He and his wife free-form jammed for about 10 minutes, before the other musicians in attendance and the host began joining in, one by one. 

I held it together because the reality is that I was there to work, even though I had to remind myself of that a few times. There were probably a few moments of me spacing out while Jerry Cantrell was waiting for me to cut more steak. Thankfully, nobody called me out on it.

They ran through six or seven Doors songs—“Roadhouse Blues,” “Love Her Madly,” “Riders on the Storm,” “Roadhouse Blues,” and a few others—as if they had all  been playing them all their entire lives. They paused here and there to work out who was going to solo where and to assign a few parts. But it was truly a spectacle to be watching two of the original members of the Doors, Santana, and a group of other musicians who had a huge impact on my life paying respect to, not only one of the greatest bands of all-time, but the band I fell in love with on my first tour of Vietnam (well, from my couch) all those years ago. 

I would have many more fun moments like this in my career, but this one always stands out to me as my arrival at what I had always wanted in life:  that fun balance of rock and roll, taking care of people, and having a creative outlet to do so. Let’s keep this just between us (and  my parents), but I did call my folks and leave my phone on in my pocket, so they could hear the jam sessions. Otherwise, who would believe me?

Helio Novell is a modern renais-sauce man grown locally in the pacific northwest, on a steady diet of grunge and classic rock. He has been a professional chef for over 20 years and a music nerd since he was a 1 year old chasing around his pet dog Bonzo, named after John Bohnam. He can be found weekly co-hosting The Indie 500 podcast, a show where the hosts take an album at random each week from the NME magazine top 500 albums break it down, discuss and maybe sneak in some comedic ad reads now and again. The chef’s pairing suggestions for the podcast would also be to check them out on Substack where each week there is a recipe paired with that weeks album.

Substack 
Tiktok: Theindie500podcast bluesky: @helionovell.bsky.social

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