It isn’t long until Les Paul is officially inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  A month to be exact.  Slash, Velvet Revolver guitarist and former member of Guns N’ Roses, will be performing at a tribute concert in celebration of the event honoring Les Paul on November 15th.

Being such a huge fan of Les Paul, Slash agreed to play at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s tribute concert without even hearing who he would be sharing the stage with.

“I’m just coming with my guitar,” Slash said. Could it be one of his signature Gibsons maybe?

The concert which features other guitar talents such as Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, The Ventures and Richie Sambora of Bon Jovi, is part of a series put on by American Music Masters and is set to take place at Cleveland’s State Theater.

Last month, there was a huge news story about a blogger being arrested for leaking songs from Guns N’ Roses forthcoming “Chinese Democracy” album. This story was ridiculous in many ways, namely the fact that the FBI was involved in the arrest of the blogger and that the blogger also faces the possibility of many years in jail. This was looked at as extremely heavy-handed and very anti-fan, on the part of Guns N’ Roses. Apparently though, the Blogger’s arrest has now resulted in even more downloading of the leaked “Chinese Democracy” songs than ever before.

Website TechDirt.com has an interesting piece on this…

“Bob Lefsetz does a quick email back-and-forth with Eric Garland of BigChampagne, the company that tracks file sharing activity. Garland points out that prior to the arrest, there was almost no file sharing of the album, despite the fact that the leak happened a while back. However, since the arrest, the numbers have shot way up, as the arrest has really only served to alert the public that the album is available for download on BitTorrent.”

Now what they’re implying here is that this may have all been an elaborate viral marketing campaign perpetrated by the band and their management. This actually does make perfect sense, but it still doesn’t explain why the FBI is involved or why a fan/illegal downloader could go to jail for years. And you thought this whole “Chinese Democracy” fiasco couldn’t get more ridiculous.