Mix Tape Friday: I Wanna Rawk!

We’ve been swooning and sobbing over love for the last two weeks. Always interesting — but I’m getting antsy. It’s time to rawk — and we’re bustin’ out the jams with alternative bands covering rock classics. (You know I love covers.)

Announcing the First Mix Tape Friday Contest!

And it’s an easy one: E-mail me the list of original artists for each of these forty songs. All winning entries go into the pot. If I draw your name, you win a chance to co-produce the March 14 mix tape. The e-mail address is on the navbar. Can you stand the excitement?

Loosen up those neck muscles, kids, because you’re getting ready to bang the head.

Dave Grohl :: Stairway to Heaven

Scissor Sisters :: Comfortably Numb

Of Montreal :: Suffragette City

Bryan Ferry :: Sympathy for the Devil

Stone Temple Pilots :: Revolution

Fishbone :: Shattered

The Flaming Lips :: Bohemian Rhapsody

The Cardigans :: Iron Man

Bauhaus :: Ziggy Stardust

The Ramones :: Time Has Come Today

Pearl Jam :: Baba O’Riley

The Replacements :: Jumping Jack Flash

Kristin Hersh :: When the Levee Breaks

The Decemberists :: Think About Me

Aztec Camera :: Jump

Seu Jorge :: Life on Mars?

R.E.M. :: Tusk

Lily Allen :: Mr. Blue Sky

Elvis Costello :: All You Need Is Love

Liz Phair :: Emotional Rescue

Everclear :: The Boys Are Back in Town

Buzzcocks :: Ballroom Blitz

Rage Against the Machine :: Street Fighting Man

Devo :: (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

U2 :: Radar Love

Sleater-Kinney :: White Rabbit

Ted Leo :: Dancing in the Dark

Soup Dragons :: I’m Free

The Cure :: Young Americans

Wilco :: Paranoid

World Party :: All the Young Dudes

Sheryl Crow :: Squeeze Box

The Stranglers :: All Day and All of the Night

The Hold Steady :: Against the Wind

Belle & Sebastian :: (Don’t Fear) The Reaper

Jay Farrar :: Like a Hurricane

Joe Jackson :: Oh Well

R.E.M. :: D.O.A.

The Pogues :: Honky Tonk Women

Oasis :: My Generation

Too jittery from contest excitement? Download the zip file and conserve that right-click energy.

These covers are interesting. Some are very true to the original, such as Jay Farrar’s “Like a Hurricane” and Joe Jackson’s “Oh Well.” Others, like Aztec’s Camera’s wonderful “Jump” (way before Nouvelle Vague and Richard Cheese) and Scissor Sisters’ “Comfortably Numb,” become an entirely different song.

I crack up every time I listen to R.E.M.’s "D.O.A." cover (performed at NYC’s Peppermint Lounge, Halloween 1983). As Michael says in the introduction, it’s probably the worst song ever written. It was my fav-o-rite song in eighth grade. Zandra Wonoski (didn’t every girl have a friend named Zandra in junior high?) and I thought we were so frickin’ cool listening to it — and I had the original and the live albums. Listening to the drumbeat slow as his heart slows and dies was just awesome … when you were thirteen in 1972.

I adore musicians who sing a lot of cover tunes — and Dave Grohl may win the prize as the most prolific and most brilliant. I have him covering everone from Creed and The Spice Girls to "Baker Street" and Prince — and I don’t spend much time searching for his songs. He’s so adorable. Show of hands of everyone who’s crushing on Grohl?

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