Guess what? Velvet Revolver is going to open for Led Zeppelin on that big tour of the United States that everyone has been buzzing about! We had all been wondering who would be tapped to prepare the crowd for the glorious return of the fully reunited Led Zeppelin on America's stages and now we know. It's going to be Velvet Revolver!

"Ho, ho, hold on there a second, buck-o," you say. "Didn't you report just a couple of weeks ago that Robert Plant himself killed the Zeppelin reunion by flat refusing 100 million dollars to tour?"

Why yes, and thank you for listening so closely to the Backstage Blog, nightly at 8pm on KUFO and posted at Cort and Fatboy.com. But it seems that Duff McKagan knows something we don't or possibly, has huffed something we haven't. That's because he's the only one claiming Velvet Revolver will open for Zep. He says, “I understand that we have it, although I imagine there will be plenty of bands prepared to kick and punch us out of the way for the privilege! I would so love to have been at their London gig before Christmas, but we had dates of our own that obviously took precedence. What made up for it was running into Jimmy Page at an awards ceremony and him not only knowing who I was, but also saying he'd caught a couple of Velvet Revolver shows!"

So either the report we saw a few weeks ago, in the parlance of Zeppelin's homeland, was bollocks or Duff is out of his skull on whatever he found in some baggy Scott Weiland left on the bus before heading off to rehab.

Kids, pretty soon you may have to fight your grandmother for your Wii. You come down in the morning to play a little Guitar Hero and you find your poor granny on the ground with a shattered hip and 5-Staring "Happiness Is A Warm Gun." That's because soon Beatles songs may become available on Guitar Hero. The top executive at the music publish company that owns the John Lennon-Paul McCartney copyrights likes the idea of an edition of Guitar Hero dedicated to The Beatles.  Now it's probably juts a matter of if the Aerosmith Guitar Hero does well whether they push ahead.

And now, for the most shocking revelation of the year. Parent's prepare to console your daughters because their most beloved sex symbol has come out of the closet. Yes... Michael Stipe of REM is gay.

Cars all over Portland just went in the ditch. A man listening in Georgia via the stream just punched a hole in his computer monitor and stabbed himself in the jugular with one of the glass shards out of sheer amazement. The moon is hurtling toward the Earth and the universe is imploding on itself.

Yes, this shocking and unexpected news is coming out of nowhere, but Stipe says he did it for the kids… and no, not in that way.

He says,  "I’d just never felt strongly enough about a particular relationship to say, 'Yeah, he’s my boyfriend, that is what it is.’ Now I recognize that to have public figures be very open about their sexuality helps some kid somewhere out there.”