Foo Fighters have always enjoyed putting out limited and rare b-sides for their hard core fans, but finding them all can be a big frickin’ problem. To solve this minor dilemma, they compiled the whole lot of cover songs as an album for Record Store Day 2011 and dubbed it Medium Rare. The vinyl included thirteen songs from various EP’s, singles and soundtracks. The CD version, which was released as a companion to Q Magazine subscriptions, was missing the Prince cover of “Darling Nikki.”

As cover albums go, the songs are over the spectrum including numbers from Prince, Joe Walsh, Husker Du, Paul McCartney & Wings, Cream, Gerry Rafferty and few others. The whole album sounds great and gets held together by the Foo Fighters enthusiasm for the material. Taylor Hawkins vocals sound stellar on “Life Of Illusion” and the guitar solo on “Baker Street” is a genuinely glorious bit of ragged string bending.

Thing is, trying to get a copy.

Record stores sold out of this a very long time ago and I’ve only seen one copy in the used bin of my favourite record store (or any other for that matter) once in the last four years. Discogs seem to have the most reasonable prices in the resale market with asking prices in the $100.00 range for either of the CD or vinyl.

On the other hand, e-bay resellers have sealed copies with asking prices that balloon to nearly $250.00 for a CD copy and over $500.00 for the vinyl. However, those high prices are by no means an average, and if you have your eyes open you should be able to snag a copy for under $100.00.

I think the best bet might be to hope for a limited re-issue at some point. The market is certainly there for it, let’s hope Grohl and co. decide it is worth doing.