Les Paul was recently named the 2008 honoree in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's American Master Series, with a week-long of tributes that culminated with an all-star concert in Cleveland, featuring Slash, ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, Bon Jovi's Richie Sambora, Patti Smith's guitarist Lenny Kaye and many more.

At 92, Paul is one of the few who can say, "They're all old friends of mine."

And the guitar innovator remains charmingly humble about the honor, crediting others for his success. "Those were the fellas that made the guitar possible today," he tells Spinner. "I'm lucky they were looking for a Les Paul -- like Paul McCartney, Slash, Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page. They all wanted to have the guitar and if it weren't for them, I probably wouldn't be known at all."

If only Lou Reed were so modest.

"I have no desire to go back and play in Blink-182 again," former Blink guitarist and now Angels and Airwaves frontman Tom DeLonge told Spinner in June. But that was then.

Since the deadly September plane crash that drummer Travis Barker and DJ AM survived, the punk trio, who have been estranged for nearly four years now, have a newfound respect for both life and eachother.

"Tom, Travis and I have all spoken together," Blink's singer/bassist Mark Hoppus writes on his blog, Hi My Name Is Mark. "First through a number of phone calls, and then a couple of weeks ago we all hung out for a few hours."

One of the greatest and longest-running bets in rock 'n' roll (second perhaps only to those pertaining to Keith Richards' lifespan) has been decided. The Flaming Lips' years-in-the-making film 'Christmas on Mars' was released before Guns N' Roses' decades-in-the-making CD 'Chinese Democracy.'

"I've heard that 'Chinese Democracy' is coming out at the end of November," Lips' ringleader Wayne Coyne says. Noting that 'Christmas on Mars' hit DVD shelves just last week, he tells Spinner, "I think we beat them. Whew!"

Congratulations to all those collecting odds. But remember: art is not a competition. In an earlier conversation with Spinner, while discussing the Flaming Lips' annual Halloween skeleton march, Coyne said, "If [the Lips] had to be just a rock band -- if Axl Rose called us up and asked us to be his backing band -- we wouldn't want to be. It's not enough for us. We like the idea of being utterly unrestricted. If we want to make a movie, we make a movie."

Apparently, you can even bet on it.

Rob Zombie is taking his own advice. After dubbing the upcoming White Zombie four-disc/one-DVD box set, 'Let Sleeping Corpses Lie,' Zombie said in a recent conference call that he is "closing the book" on the band that first made him famous. But but first he had to write the epilogue.

"I felt the band had two major shifts that were important," he says. "The band really had two different lives; 'Soul Crusher' was as far as we could take our New York underground art-damaged insanity, and 'Sexorcisto' was the beginning of taking White Zombie out to the world phase."

It would seem that everyone is a Tom Jones fan, including two Irish gentlemen best known as Bono and the Edge.

To that end, U2's lead singer and guitarist wrote the song 'Sugar Daddy,' featured on Jones' first new U.S. album in 15 years, especially for the Welsh superstar, which also finds the Edge playing on the track.

Although Jones says he immediately loved the song, he was a little concerned with the title. "I said, 'Is that what you think of me?'" Jones tells Spinner. "Bono said, 'I just like the sound of sugar daddy.'"

The modest Jones was also worried that some of the lines would come across as bragging, but Bono quickly quelled Jones' fears by assuring him he was the right man for the job. "When I first heard it, I said, 'I hope it [doesn't] come across [like I'm] blowing my own trumpet.' And Bono said, 'Well, you're the only guy that's got balls enough to sing this thing.' So, I said OK."

And who are we to argue ... or check.

If you've never heard of Paul McCartney's side project the Fireman -- or if you have and never connected the dots -- you're not to blame. The first two LPs, 1993's 'Strawberry Oceans Ship Forest' and 1998's 'Rushes,' created in partnership with producer and fellow bass player Youth, formerly of Killing Joke and currently working with the Orb, were more than credible takes on ambient electronic music. However, these works were released almost in secret and bearing nothing musically or nominally to identify them as emanating from the man best known for his "silly love songs."

For the upcoming third album carrying the Fireman brand, 'Electric Arguments,' Sir Paul has emerged from his experimental closet, as he and his collaborator are proudly owning up to the eclectic array of sounds and -- a Fireman first -- vocals found on 'Arguments.' McCartney and Youth talk to Spinner about the collaborative process, along the way vehemently defending the commercial prospects for the album.

The previous Fireman albums were released with very little fanfare. Are you worried that the larger profile for 'Electric Arguments' will confuse or alienate the average Paul McCartney fan?

PM: They always say that! "You think you're gonna alienate your fans?" It's a weird idea, isn't it ... putting out a record to alienate people.
Y: I think this is a fan's ultimate album. I mean, I'm a massive fan, and this is a fan's record, really.
PM: I'm not worried about alienating anyone. I think, you know, our fans are fans. They're pretty cool people.

Fresh from a year and a half performing as UNKLE's live band, Mike Lowry, Matt Pierce, and James Griffith have happily revved the engines back up for their own band, Lake Trout.

"I guess it's no secret that Lake Trout has kind of been off the map for awhile," Lowry said. "I can really offer no reason for this except that we wanted to take a break and see what else is going on the world and to just kind of get on with living."

In their time, Lake Trout achieved cult status in the Northeast touring circuit as an improvisational-heavy live band that could deftly attack hip-hop, electronica, jazz-fusion and even Radiohead-rock all in turn, without a net. Now that they're up and running again, at least partially, the band is releasing a live album, which will be available as a free download. The compilation will serve as the inaugural release from the Biggest Label Ever, a new venture which plans to offer free music supported entirely by advertising.

They are known for their big piano-driven ballads like 'Somewhere Only We Know,' but on 'Perfect Symmetry,' British trio Keane's third album, the band wrote themselves a new template.

"There's the sort of poppyness of it and the funky-ness, and I suppose the dancability of the whole thing," frontman Tom Chaplin tells Spinner . "It was just a stream of consciousness. It's just what came out -- what was kind of inside us."

The three piece -- Chaplin, drummer Richard Hughes, and pianist and main-songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley -- took the cuts the latter member wrote to Paris, followed by Berlin, where they self-produced the record earlier this year.

"Everything that we recorded and everything that we added to those songs, really just had this joie de vie about it," Chaplin explained. "We were just excited the whole way through. We were just like little kids looking at each other with starry eyes and just very excited about what we were doing."

Jody Reynolds, whose tragic musical tale of a suicidal lover, 'Endless Sleep,' kick-started the "death rock" craze of the late '50s and early '60s, had died in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 75 years old.

In 'Endless Sleep,' an appropriately dirgelike rockabilly ballad written by Reynolds, the singer's girlfriend attempts to drown herself in the ocean after a quarrel. At the song's conclusion, our hero rescues his distraught lady from "an angry sea." Later songs in the teen tragedy genre, such as Mark Dinning's 'Teen Angel,' Ray Peterson's 'Tell Laura I Love Her' and the Shangri-Las' 'Leader of the Pack' felt no such need, happily killing off its protagonists.

The song, which peaked at No. 5 in 1958, was the only hit for the Denver native, who grew up in Oklahoma and Arizona before relocating to California, where he based his career. Reynolds was inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame in 1999.

By all accounts, Prince is known as a fairly hospitable fella, especially in his own kitchen. He once offered comedian Charlie Murphy pancakes (following a round of b-ball) and, more recently, offered up food to journalist Claire Hoffman. In her resulting article, published by the New Yorker and entitled 'Soup with Prince,' the purple majesty shows off his new crib in the Beverly Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

But get him to talk about love and marriage, and he's not quite as generous. As usual, it comes down to religion and politics. Speaking his mind on same-sex marriage, Prince -- a devout Jehovah's Witness convert -- allegedly told Hoffman that, "God came to Earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, 'Enough.'"