It might be more usual to walk in gilded splendour. It’s possible that’s what Mac “Dr John, the Night Tripper” Rebennack was referring to when he twisted the phrase for the strung-out centrepiece of his debut album in 1968. “I just thought splinters sounded better and I always pictured splinters when I sung it,” he said. On the other hand, the Doctor’s fellow New Orleans musician, Coco Robicheaux, who is name-checked in the song, suggested that: “In voodoo they call the gilded splinters the points of a planet.” Then again, a guilded splinter could easily be a heroin needle, and long-term addict Rebennack would have known all about that.
The cloudy ambiguity suits a song that, even in the psychedelic fug of late Sixties rock music, sounded like nothing else around. Rebennack was an old hand, even when recording his Gris-Gris album in his mid-twenties. A school drop-out who had been playing in local bars from the age of 14 and appearing on New Orleans rock and roll and R&B records since 1958, he had also spent two years in prison between 1963 and 1965, which led to a move to Los Angeles and work with Phil Spector’s prolific band of session musicians, the Wrecking Crew. His switch from playing mostly guitar to piano came about, not as a savvy career move, but because his left ring finger had almost been shot off in a gun fight.
A colourful life, even before he began draping himself in feathers, beads and snakeskin and taking on the persona of Dr John. The original Doctor John was supposedly a spiritual healer with 15 wives, who set up shop in New Orleans in the 1800s after arriving from Haiti. He could help your ailments with chants and potions and make you a gris-gris, a cloth amulet worn around the neck to ward off evil. Rebennack wanted his singer friend Ronnie Barron to do the vocals for the project, but when Barron turned the job down, the pianist stepped up and found that his untrained growl was perfect for the creepy midnight magic he was concocting with his band.
Surprisingly, for an album that summons the unsettling voodoo spirits of New Orleans, Gris-Gris was recorded in the commercial Hollywood studio Gold Star, during time borrowed from a Sonny and Cher session as a favour. The musicians, who included notable New Orleanians Harold Battiste, Jessie Hill, Tami Lynn and Shirley Goodman, transplanted the heady spirit of their home town by burning incense and candles and working into the night. “I Walk on Guilded Splinters” is the closing track, and the longest – a crypt-opening séance of a song that creeps along on snakey bass and primitive percussion, topped by Battiste’s chilling clarinet call. Lyrically, Rebennack sounds terrifying: “J’suis le Grand Zombie, my yellow belt of choison/Ain’t afraid of no tom cat, fill my brains with poison.”
Given that she donated the studio time, it’s fitting that Cher should have the honour of recording the first notable cover version on her 1969 album 3614 Jackson Highway, which used Muscle Shoals musicians to give the song a rockier punch. Marsha Hunt, best known as the mother of the eldest of Mick Jagger’s eight children and the subject of the Rolling Stones song “Brown Sugar”, brought the voodoo back when she did it the same year.
The cover with the longest shelf life must be the 1974 recording by Georgia blues guitarist Johnny Jenkins, mainly because it begins with one of the great breakbeats. The drums were slowed down by the Beastie Boys on “Pass the Mic” in 1992, sampled on Beck’s breakthrough hit “Loser” in 1994 and, in a rare instance of Oasis getting their groove on, used on the band’s first single of the 2000s, “Go Let It Out”.
It’s likely that Oasis were led to the song by one of their idols, Paul Weller, who had covered it on his 1995 album Stanley Road. He turned the electric guitar right up, corrected the spelling to “Gilded” and got Noel Gallagher to play acoustic guitar.
Weller edited the song down from its original near-eight minutes to more like five, as did Dr John himself when he revisited it on Things Happen That Way, a posthumous album released three years after his death from a heart attack in 2019. Others have become so hypnotised by the rhythm that they seem unable to leave, especially in a concert setting. Former Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra made it last almost 13 minutes on a live album in 2015, while Brit rock band Humble Pie strung it out for close to half an hour on a recording from the New York venue Fillmore East in 1971. Yet more proof that this strange song casts a powerful spell.
