When Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz met up with two of his musical heroes, Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo and Blink-182’s Travis Barker, to rock out in a commercial for Band Hero, he realized the shoot wasn’t going to be an epic jam session. For starters, they were each holding miniature plastic instruments. Also, they were performing in their underwear. Wentz, Cuomo, Barker and Taylor Swift are the latest artists to emulate Tom Cruise in a Risky Business-inspired commercial for Band Hero, the pop-oriented and family-minded spin-off of the Guitar Hero franchise that hits stores today.

“The slide was pretty bizarre. I gotta admire Tom Cruise, because you have to slide so your slide lands on the beat, and you have to slide at just the right place so the next person can slide at just the right place,” Wentz says the harder-than-expected shoot. “And they would Lysol it. And sometimes it’d be way slippery. There was a time when I slid offstage.” Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Going Down” is among the 60-plus playable songs on Band Hero, and while Wentz hasn’t had the opportunity to “play” the song yet, he predicts he wouldn’t do too well. “Joe [Trohman], our guitarist, is pretty good at it, so when we play [music video games], he always has to save us, or save me,” Wentz said. (more…)

Last week, Panic! at the Disco released a snippet of what they told their fans was “something for all of your patience over the last year.” The prize was a ninety-second clip from a new song called “We’re So Starving” that the band admitted would “undergo some change” when they headed to Abbey Road Studios this month to finish their sophomore record, due in March.

Fast forward to yesterday, when Pete Wentz (who signed the over-the-top Vegas quartet to his Decaydance imprint) put up a blog entry in defense of his pals: “Not too sure that anyone gets that the new Panic! song is a joke,” he wrote. “Sell me a sense of humor. The new record is different than whatever you are thinking.” What led to Wentz’s latest defense of the band? A chronology of recent Panic! developments (and a possible solution to the latest puzzle) after the jump.
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