The Hendrix riff, modern distraction, and rebranding curiosity
August 29, 2025
There’s a moment during Jimi Hendrix’s intro to Like a Rolling Stone, recorded live at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, that floors me every time I hear it. And I’ve heard it plenty.
Two songs into his nine song set, he’s riffing and chatting up the audience, nervy and coiled tight…
‘“Yeah, dig brother, um, it’s really outta sight here, didn’t even rain, no buttons to push? Alright, now I’m gonna dedicate this song to everybody here with hearts – any kind of hearts and ears. Goes something like this here.”
He’s just working the changes, not yet into the first verse…
“Yes, as I said before, it’s really groovy. I’d like to bore you for about six or seven minutes to do a little thing.”
Then he hits on a lick…
“Yeah! You’ll excuse me for a minute. Just let me play my guitar alright?”
Watching the (miracle!) film footage, we see Hendrix visibly disconnect with the audience, locking eyes instead with the neck of his guitar and his own massive right hand.
You can hear it in the audio too, but watching—you can see it in his face, in his body, seemingly in the eddies of air and energy that ricochet around him.
Calling it the zone, or flow, or whatever the fuck, doesn’t do him or this moment any amount of justice.
It’s an act of exclusion first, total and eclipsing. He’s stepping away from the audience, following his own direction.
And this is important, because it’s a two-step deal, it’s an act of surrender next. It’s a man allowing himself to get carried away—temporarily but also consciously, joyfully—by his own curiosity.
And he was completely unafraid to do all of this in the immediate company, and scrutiny, of thousands.
Entirely needless to say, I’m not about to compare any part of myself to Jimi Hendrix.
What I’d like to share with you though is why this came up for me, when reviewing my own mode of extraction from public life (as in shared social activity) over these waning summer weeks.
Vacation, sabbatical, tuning out… all these things are seasonally appropriate and culturally encouraged. And I/We joined in. My mom and I took my seven year-old on his first train trip to Chicago, my husband and I took all our boys to Ontario for a Lake Erie beach vacation; we’ve sprinkled in concerts and art festivals, library crafting workshops and movies, hikes and bikes and even entire days gone unplanned.
We’ve been doing summer right, I feel, and I’m grateful for the opportunity…for the ability to do so.
Beyond this freedom of choice, however, which we’ve carefully (and often painfully) baked into our lives, something very personal has been afoot for me too. And it’s somehow not unlike those aforementioned three seconds we’re so fortunate to have living proof of—those moments on the record when Hendrix checked-out from us because he was singularly checked in with himself.
I’ve got a thing I say to my kids, typically when I’m working creatively, but often too when I just need to engage any amount of executive functioning.
‘Let Mama cook, please.’
They well know the drill at this point, and it’s a useful signal. I don’t super care for closed doors, sequestering myself away fully, unless the task demands it, and believe there’s an important modeling of behavior here.
My kids can see what I’m doing when I’m doing it, understanding through my messaging that a certain level and length of focus is mandatory. They can see what value I’m placing on certain endeavors in how I’m prioritizing my attention and time.
Important to note, I never use these words when looking at my phone.
The situation is typically borne of the intention to flow. There’s a thing I want to do, figure out, create, generally a problem that needs solving, and I set the stage to give myself the best go at it.
I know what works for me. Where I need to be, how caffeinated, what it smells like, the soundtrack, the lighting scheme. Sometimes I need a freshly washed, serum-ed and moisturized face, but switching out the t-shirt I slept in doesn’t even occur to me.
There’s self-exclusion here of a type too. An agreement I’m making with myself and my family to opt out of the regular current of their days, our day. I’m roaming away, on my own steam and craft, following tributaries with purpose and objective.
These last few weeks though, as the neon greens of early summer turn a little dusty, the air, heavier but cooling, I’ve found myself wandering a bit differently.
This particular manner of meandering, it’s both more intentional and less. A two-step process, a step out of the grind and into the open pasture.
It’s a checking-out to check-in.
It’s cousin to being in the flow, but with distinctly modern cause and consequence.
It’s a willful motion away from the seeing eyes of the world, from seeing those eyes seeing us, and into the joyful space of one’s own whims.
Many of you reading this are artists and/or creatives of some ilk, and as such, have little issue moving into the loftier, waking dream-like elevations. If anything, you’re more challenged finding the gravity necessary to attend to the more quotidian stuff; the management of time, the practicalities of money, lifestyle, life choices.
This is so common, I’ve built my day job around it—helping creatives repurpose their artistic skill in designing the life here on earth they want and need.
Even to those of you deeply familiar and comfortable with the process of extricating yourself from the utilitarian in favor of the inspired, there remain plenty of strings held by invisible hands.
We live in an era of influence, constant and insidious; there’s little to be argued here. We’re also managing our way through (and hopefully out of) a phase of hyper-connectedness, a state of mass co-dependency that serves our now ingrained need for the validation of our own experience.
Clan behavior, once an evolutionary development that promoted safety and survival, now inhibits our growth as individuals. And even those of us that make a concerted effort at breaking free, either on occasion or the regular, still struggle with full autonomy.
Case study: Fifty year-old me, conscientious objector of all Meta products, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc., taking only occasional news media snacks, dumb phone advocate, overall digital minimalist, big fan of the coffee meet-up. I STILL struggle with divorcing myself from the expectations of our over-connected global clan.
This recent thing happened, though, and it’s turned a good few of these restraints non-applicable. It’s not new, it’s not novel, and yet, I can only insist we all need more of it.
It started, surprisingly, after seeing the movie Eddington with my husband. We loved it, but whatever. We love lots of stuff.
As experienced rabbit hole enthusiasts, it naturally followed that we both spent some time reading about Ari Aster, his films, process, personal life, etc., all via Google’s slutty availability.
Chris and I exchanged findings and musings over the following days, as we’re wont to do, but some errant domino somewhere, just a little heavier maybe, created the extra force that sent me into what I’m now calling the periphery.
I stopped Googling and started wondering… What was it actually, about this particular movie, that stuck with me?
Instead of asking the algorithms to connect the dots for me, I put my own brain on it. Sounds trite, childishly simple. Of courrrrse the outcomes are different if we boot up our inner data center vs. the supercharged external systems. But this is just the first bit.
What happened next was the real banger.
Once I stopped looking for connections of fact (via Google), I started making connections of concept; concepts built by my own learned and inherited experience.
My curiosity around certain aspects of a movie I saw and enjoyed entangled with a book I finally got around to reading. Certain aspects of that book, wildly rhythmic with the movie, nudged me into particular memories, which then gave additional context to the questions I was asking myself about the movie.
This went on, and with building complexity and impact over the following weeks. One film + one book led to a knitting of insights with memories, interpretation with translation, inspiration with production. More books, plus photography, art, music, others and my own.
And so it went—and this is the really crucial development—to the point where I couldn’t bear the cost of sharing any of it with anyone else. I couldn’t bear the interruption. I didn’t even consider it.
Getting ‘carried away’ has colloquially been used and understood as a mark of weakness, of a person’s disregard of self control in favor of whatever bright and shiny thing captures their attention.
So I’m calling for a rebrand.
Be / get carried away, modern usage: to follow ones whims not for the purpose of distraction, but to disengage with the herd IN ORDER TO reengage with one’s own curiosity.
But isn’t scrolling/googling actually a form of engaged curiosity, and… a mostly solitary one? Sure. But the question must be something like:
Am I following this thread in celebration, in fascination with my own experience?
Or am I doing it out of a compulsive hunger for social connection paired with input, a few spoonfuls of ice cream becoming the entire pint before I realize it?
It’s a fine line, playing the periphery; a balance, a toggle, between being fully engaged with others and alternatively, a necessary if momentary binary, with one’s own adventure.
And, there’s acknowledgement to be shared here too, in our joyous investigation, as if holding up a finger… ‘Hold up, I’m on to something. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
It’s not detoxing, or going dark. Both prescribe a doing without in order to return with a greater capacity to endure. They’re both a form of abstinence that focus on an absence vs. that absence PLUS richness.
Playing the periphery, getting carried away, is undoubtedly an indulgence. But it’s an indulgence of our humanity, and of being in love and occupation with one’s own mysteries.
And that’s what I see and hear in that Hendrix riff, unrehearsed and yet primed—an impermanent rejection of the clan followed by complete commitment to an open-ended curiosity. It can be minutes, hours or weeks, the choice is always ours, always available.
Bree Stilwell 