A heavy metal musician from Tampa (west coast of Florida) named Prince Midnight decided to honor his dear uncle Filip, who died in Greece more than 20 years ago, using his bones to build the very first “Skelecaster” electric guitar.
A YouTube video, watched by more than 200,000 users, shows the musician wearing a black leather jacket sitting on an amplifier while playing the guitar built from his uncle’s remains.
“The skeleton belonged to my dear Uncle Filip, who died in the 1990s and through a series of events his remains were repatriated from Greece to the United States and came into my possession,” Prince Midnight writes on the channel page.
According to the rocker, his uncle was the person who introduced him to the ‘heavy metal’ genre, his musical mentor has now been transformed into an electric guitar: a neck that looks like a Telecaster supports the ribs and is extended by part of his uncle’s spine and hipbones, to which he attaches the pickups and potentiometers.
Prince Midnight says he ruled out the use of Filip’s skull because it was damaged, but his primary intention was to crown the guitar’s neck with that part of the skeleton.
In his Facebook account, the musician ensures that the guitar stays in tune, that all parts are level, and a steel rod supports the skeleton’s spine.
The guitar “is completely stable”, he says, saying goodbye to his uncle writing: “Uncle Filip RIP (Rock in Perdition)”.
He admits that his mother was initially shocked and told him this was sacrilege and the work of the devil. “You know what mothers are like,” she told the online newspaper Huffpost.
But then he asked his mother if he considered his uncle, who died in a motorcycle accident in Greece in 1996, as the greatest “heavy metalhead” in the world, to which she answered yes.
“Where would you rather have it, buried or pounded?” He asked her, and she replied, “Pounding.”
