Steve Vai once said that “only an idiot competes with Eddie Van Halen,” but that hasn’t stopped a score of shredders from entering guitar battles with him.
Leslie West and Allan Holdsworth are two players that have vied to go toe-to-toe with him over the years — the latter a hugely influential figure in Eddie's approach to the instrument.
But it was Ed's 1987 shred-off with a Hollywood movie star that made for his most unlikely of challenges.
As Van Halen's long-time guitar tech Kevin "Dugie" Dugan tells Ultimate Guitar, the NAMM 1987 guitar duel was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek jam session, but it ended in disaster.
For the occasion, Ed's second tech, Zeke Clark, put together a rack of equipment specially for the show. Dugan was on hand that day to serve as a bodyguard for Ed among the throng of gawkers at the annual NAMM show. When he learned who Ed was scheduled to duel with, he was surprised.
"He was going to do this guitar battle with this guy who, it turns out, was a friend of mine,” Dugan says.
That friend was Michael Winslow. Known as the Man of 10,000 Sound Effects, Winslow became a star courtesy of the Police Academy film franchise, thanks to his uncanny ability to make realistic sound effects using only his voice.
The idea of the jam with Van Halen was to show the array of sounds both men could make with their respective instruments. .
"Kramer had made Michael this guitar that had a painting of Hendrix on it, but it had a mic stand that came out of it, so he was going to battle Eddie using his sound effects.”
But before Ed could play a single note, the entire event threatened to go south when a fan inadvertently kicked his rig's power amp. .
“[Clark] put the main input power amp at stage level,” Dugan explains. “It was just a small stage, and the rack ended up right at the top of the stairs. There were all these people and hanger-ons at the top of the stairs, and I was trying to get security to move those people out of there.
“One guy turned around to leave, and he kicked the rack, and he kicked the plug sideways, of course, the amp shorted out and fried. There was no spare, and Edward didn't have another amp."
In a panic, Ed came up with an on-the-spot solution.
"He grabbed Michael Winslow and said, 'You gotta cover me!'" Dugan recalls. "So they worked it out where they did this battle, but Winslow would do sound effects for both parts! It was so funny.”
Point scorers may chalk the battle off as a rare loss for Eddie, but it also highlights how he never took life too seriously. He simply laughed off what could have been a nightmare for many other players — especially in front of a gearhead crowd like NAMM.
Writing about all things EVH and NAMM '87 on his website, Vintage Music Images, photographer David Plastik recalls the hysteria that Eddie, and his unusual link-up, caused at the gear show that year.
“He also jammed with Steve Stevens and Tim Bogert,” Plastik says, but it was the Winslow jam that left the biggest impression on him.
“They were dueling,” Plastik notes, “with Eddie playing a lick and Michael voicing it back.”
The jam caught the attention of MTV (see above), which included it in a news segment where host Mark Goodman joked, “If you find it kind of hard to tell who is doing what there, apparently that’s the point.” Eddie had certainly met his match.
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