A 20-year-old cassette has surfaced which features none other than Jack White performing vocal duties on a Blondie cover.
If you’re even a passing fan of Jack White, you might be aware just how rare some of his releases can be. Back in March, Ben Blackwell – an employee at Jack White’s Third Man Records label and known as the “official archivist” of The White Stripes – spoke about the rarest of White’s releases, and pointed out how hard it can be to find some of them.
Of course, the most notable of these releases would undoubtedly have to be The Upholsterers’ Your Furniture Was Always Dead… I Was Just Afraid To Tell You, a near-mythical release which was hidden away in furniture made by Jack White’s bandmate Brian Muldoon. To date, only two copies of this single have been found.
Now, Ben Blackwell has taken to the Internet to speak of yet another rare Jack White release that has been uncovered.
Writing for the musical completists’ haven, Discogs, Blackwell spoke about a number of cassettes he has in his possession, including one of the rarest Jack White features of all time.
“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,” Blackwell began. “The track list is a sparse four songs, with the snotty ‘From the Garbage Bin’ being my personal favorite.”
“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,” he continued. “And prior to the mention here, the release was completely undocumented. I doubt more than a half-dozen people even knew about it.”
The performance is undoubtedly rough, and full of the garage-punk ethos that Jack White would later become known for. While it might not be the most professional-sounding performance of all time, it undoubtedly gives an intriguing insight into the future of one of music’s most famous and prolific names.
Check out 400 Pounds Of Punk featuring Jack White performing ‘One Way Or Another’:
