"Sounded Like Nothing Else on Earth"

"Moreover, 1968 was the year that flower-power idealism curdled: it was a year of rioting, violence and upheaval, of Sympathy for the Devil rather than All You Need Is Love. That suited the album's sinister atmosphere perfectly. Its flatly astonishing closer, I Walk on Gilded Splinters, offered up eight minutes of crawling malevolence and threatening braggadocio: if you took the title as a reference to needles, as plenty did, it sounded remarkably like a sneering, screw-you defence of Rebennack's drug use, a distant Louisiana relation of the Velvet Underground's Heroin. The live show Rebennack devised to support the album was a sensation, involving dancers wearing nothing but body paint, the singer disappearing in a puff of smoke and voodoo rituals. In St Louis, they were arrested after a band member bit the head off a chicken on stage."

Alexis Petridis at The Guardian writes an appreciation of Dr. John.