News on Joe Perry,Aerosmith,Red Jumpsuit Apparatus,Gym Class Heroes,Wilco,Jeff Tweedy,Underoath

Somebody get this man a Les Paul quick! Yosuke Ochi, half of the Japanese comedy team Dainoji, retained his title as World Champion of Air Guitar at a competition held Sept. 5 through 8 at the Club Teatria in Oulu, Finland.

Is Jimmy Page getting ready to bust out his signature Gibson Double Neck for another round of "Stairway To Heaven"? That's the word out of London, where over the weekend advertisements appeared for a Led Zeppelin reunion show in November at the O2 Stadium (formerly the Millennium Dome). The surviving members of the group -- Page, singer Robert Plant and bassist John Paul Jones -- have only reconvened for a handful of gigs since splitting in 1980 following the death of drummer John Bonham.

Veteran rockers Los Lobos have announced they’ll be joining John Mellencamp on the first leg of his tour that will take them through Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Indiana, Mellencamp’s home state. Suffice to say, it’s a bit far from the band’s home of East Los Angeles where they formed more than 30 years ago.

We already knew that Aerosmith would be hitting the studio to record their 15th studio album on Nov. 1 with, er, someome producing. Joe Perry didn't have any names quite yet while talking to Billboard.com earlier this week, but the guitarist did say they were quite excited about getting back to work and having Rick Rubin take over the reins at their label: "His heart's in the right place when it comes to rock 'n' roll."

Now everybody knows that the superfans over at the Les Paul Forum love to hate us and hate to love us, but they are near and dear to our hearts over here in the Gibson Editorial Department. They certainly keep us on our toes. Lord have mercy on us if we mix up a '58 and '59 Standard; they'll be gathering the pitchforks and torches to run us out of town.

An unnamed Lego wizard has created a fully-functional Guitar Hero controller almost entirely out of Legos. Modeled after the Gibson Explorer, the Lego shell conceals a traditional PS2 controller and is slightly bigger than a standard Guitar Hero controller.

New Zealand folk parody duo Bret McKenzie and Jermaine Clement say that the name they chose for their wacky act and hit HBO show Flight of the Conchords came from a dream in 2002, when the guys were just getting their start on the comedy scene. “I had this dream about this V formation of Flying V guitars that kind of looked like Concordes, and I was just telling Jemaine about it, and we just ended up with Flight of the Conchords,” McKenzie has explained.

News on Joe Perry, Ann Wilson, Hatebreed, and My Chemical Romance

A recent blog on the Ted Leo and the Pharmacists website addresses the singer/guitarist’s displeasure that his song “Mia and Me,” from 2004’s Shake the Sheets, has been widely used on the internet as the soundtrack to pro-anorexia and “thinspiration” videos. The song, reportedly about Leo’s friend Ana, who’s battled an eating disorder, is a Ted Leo staple and one of his most popular songs.