Attention, deep White-heads: A really rare, unreleased recording of Jack White has been uncovered. If you like White, that’s the good news. The less-good news is that the tape is from 1997, recorded while White was engineering a session for a Detroit punk band called 400 Pounds of Punk. The better less-good news (maybe): It’s a Blondie cover. 400 Pounds of Punk’s “One Way or Another,” on which White splits lead vocal duties with lead singer Jamie Cherry, has now been uploaded to YouTube by Third Man Records co-founder and archivist Ben Blackwell.
Blackwell discovered the tape recently and wrote about it in a newly-published essay for Discogs called “Why Cassettes Are the New 45s.” “The cassette, titled He Once Ate A Small Child is, as far as I can tell, the rarest physical release of a Jack White performance,” Blackwell wrote. “And prior to the mention here, the release was completely undocumented. I doubt more than a half-dozen people even knew about it.”
The song was the only track from the five-song 4PoP session on which White guested. The White Stripes released their debut self-titled album in 1999. In other recent throwback-y Jack White news, his supergroup-of-sorts The Raconteurs, mostly inactive since last decade, announced this week that they are releasing two new songs this month. Listen to the “One Way or Another” cover below.
