As a prelude to tonight's particularly goosefleshy rendition of "Not Even Stevie Nicks...", Calexico frontman Joey Burns gets to tell his Glen Campbell story. "Scottsdale, Arizona, is a very strange place," he begins. "We have friends who've been to his house there. As you enter the driveway, electric bells start playing 'Rhinestone Cowboy', then barking dogs drown out the chorus." Burns stops fingering the chords of the buckskin balladeer's biggest hit and pauses, senses a certain bafflement in the audience.
Timely reminder, in the midst of all the Kill Bill hyperbole, of true balls-to-the-wall Tarantino talent—that sickly mint-green warehouse, those black suits, that red blood, the infectious music, the terrifying Hawksian machismo and, mostly, that dialogue: witty and crude, poignant and allusive, naturalistic and downright poetic. Nothing less than genius.
