Boston’s ska infused punk act Stray Bullets have premiered a music video for the first song off their new album “Ghost Town Rockers.” The track is titled “Knife For The Pusherman,” and singer Jon Cauztik explains a bit about its inspiration and the making of the video:
“So, full disclosure, this isn’t a “new” song, per se…I wrote it around the time that Stray Bullets were sort of in the process of breaking up like ten or so years ago…the backstory is that I worked as a bike messenger for a long time, and on one of my daily routes I would see this scummy looking dude who hung out down the block from this methadone clinic near North Station and would deal to the addicts who were heading there trying to get clean…gotta admire his business acumen, but the fact that he was preying on these people and exploiting their weaknesses always disgusted me every time I saw him…like many of us, I’ve lost people to addiction, and in my mind he sort of became the scapegoat for all of that, so I started hatching a plan to roll up to him under the guise of copping, and then stab him…luckily for both of us, I came around to the realization that getting rid of one shitty drug dealer wasn’t gonna fix the problem, so premeditated murder became this song instead.
We shot the video over a couple of days in the beginning of August…my old high school friend Shane, who works as a filmmaker in New York, drove up for the weekend and shot and directed it (and edited, and edited, and edited)…we enlisted our friend Richie, my wife Becky, and our boys Derek, Adam, Tanzi, and Kory from the awesome punk band OC45 as actors, and shot the narrative stuff all around downtown Boston…my buddy and former coworker Brian Fresh gaff taped a couple of GoPros to his bike to film the traffic scenes…interesting bit of trivia, while we were shooting the throat cutting scene behind my old office in Chinatown, a dude rode by and asked us if we were recreating the murder that happened in that alley a couple of nights before…so there you have it, Knife For The Pusherman.”
Watch the video below.
“Ghost Town Rockers” was released last week though our very own Dying Scene Records and you can stream the entire thing on Bandcamp.