Hear A Rare ’90s Recording Of Jack White Singing Blondie’s “One Way Or Another”
A rare recording of Jack White singing Blondie’s “One Way Or Another” has surfaced. It was included on a cassette from 1997 that Third Man Records employee and official White Stripes archivist Ben Blackwell discovered in a box that had been stowed away for a long time.
As part of Discogs’ ongoing Cassette Week, Blackwell has written an essay about the value of cassette tapes in the modern age (called “Why Cassettes Are The New 45s”) and, alongside it, has shared the recording of White’s cover of Blondie, which he recorded with the Detroit band 400 Pounds Of Punk. Here’s Blackwell on how the session came about:
In late 1997, an aptly-named teen trio called 400 Pounds of Punk recorded a handful of tracks in a makeshift home studio at 1203 Ferdinand Street in Southwest Detroit. The track list is a sparse four songs. An unlisted hidden fifth track is a rude cover of Blondie’s “One Way Or Another” with vocal duties shared by the band’s lead singer Jamie Cherry and one of the session engineers, a then-unknown Jack White.
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. And prior to the mention here, the release was completely undocumented. I doubt more than a half-dozen people even knew about it.
Listen to it below.