WATCH: The Devil Makes Three Releases New Video For “Champagne & Reefer”

In the past few days, The Devil Makes Three, a American band combined with various genres such as bluegrass and country, has released a new music video on New West Records for the song “Champagne and Reefer”. This song originally made by Muddy Water will be listed on the tracklist for the new album Redemption & Ruin.

Since the new album circles around the theme of childhood inspiration, Pete Bernhard, the guitarist of the band, had said “Muddy Waters was a childhood hero of mine. I got my first album by Muddy as a gift from my brother when I was eleven years old.” He had also added “We chose these songs to give a nod to some of our biggest influences lyrically and musically. Messing up your life, either accidentally or on purpose, and then trying to pick up the pieces and start over is a tradition. We are honoring that with this album.”

Out of all the songs from Muddy Water’s work, this song was chosen to take a place in the new album. Bernard had commented “it was a song that I hadn’t really heard that many times before,” as he was more knowing of Muddy Waters from his early work. He had told Entertainment Weekly “We had a ton of tunes — blues, country, and gospel — that we were listening through. This one really stuck out. Not to mention, everybody in the band is pro-legalization of marijuana.”

The music video, directed by Black Balloon, uses clips of Reefer Madness, a 1936 propaganda film that had a purpose to showed the evils of marijuana. The scenes in the video range from couples partying and smoking to the court cases to the police cars driving on the streets. Throughout the video, the audience sees people having the time of their lives, even though there are only a few scenes in the court case where the people feel regret. The re-editing was done to critique how ridiculous marijuana prohibition is, as Bernhard would say it. Specific clips were used and re-edited to speed up, make the scene go back and forth etc. to make the whole situation funny and insane. Watch the official music video below.