Eddie Van Halen’s Body Celebrates Another Year of Roaming the Earth

“I’m just a normal jerk who happens to make music. As long as
my brain and fingers work, I’m cool.” Sadly, zombies ate most of his
brain and fingers. 

 
The body of Eddie Van Halen, the flashy and innovative guitarist whose eponymous band dominated the American rock scene in the late 1970s and much of the 1980s, celebrated its fifty-sixth year of existence today by lurching through its hometown’s darkened, abandoned streets in search of human flesh.

Van Halen on turning fifty-six: “Brains? Braaaaaains.”

Van Halen’s body currently spends its days aimlessly wandering throughout Studio City, California, with a look of vacant sadness on its face—its stiffened fingers absently thudding against the wood of the fabled Frankenstrat guitar in a perverse sign of a lingering memory of its past existence—as it shambles past boarded-up houses, silent movie theaters, and shadowed Red Line entrances, occasionally bumping clumsily against handrails and tumbling violently down subway stairs only to land on its feet.

Don’t even pretend this isn’t scary.

The guitarist’s creative output slowed considerably after being bitten by the reanimated corpse of Mick Jagger in early 1999, and after several trying months of transition, exhibited dedication to its new lifestyle by devouring not only three lead singers but also original bassist Michael Anthony. On rare occasions it wanders far from home, partially regurgitating David Lee Roth to fulfill touring needs and thus revealing a shadowy semblance of human financial acumen.

Despite his death more than a decade ago, Van Halen is still considered to be more musically gifted than the Insane Clown Posse, a more interesting conversationalist than Courtney Love, and more likely to produce an essential new album than the Rolling Stones.