Here's a long-forgotten recording of Jack White on a "rude" Blondie cover from 1997

By Sam Barsanti | October 10, 2018 | 7:19pm

Aux Features Music

Here's a long-forgotten recording of Jack White on a "rude" Blondie cover from 1997

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Third Man Records’ Ben Blackwell has written an essay for Discogs about the magic of old cassettes, arguing that they’re “the new 45s” because they were so ubiquitous for a time that there are countless lost treasures and forgotten genres hidden on cassettes, and to prove his point he has shared a cassette discovery of his own. After digging through a box of “upwards of 200 cassettes” that included “commercially-released mementos, aspiringly amorous mixtapes, amateur teenage boombox condenser mic yawps, [and] one-of-a-kind live soundboard recordings of unmemorable also-rans,” Blackwell found a tape some teenagers called 400 Pounds Of Punk put out in 1997.

He says their cassette, He Once Ate A Small Child, was “completely undocumented” and that very few people even know it exists, but it happens to feature a very early and very rare appearance from Jack White on a “rude” cover of Blondie’s “One Way Or Another.” Blackwell suspects that it’s “the rarest physical release of a Jack White performance,” and thanks to the power of the internet, you can hear it below: