Free Electricity

The Go appeared in Detroit in 1998, and I immediately became a fan. I'd been waiting for Detroit to produce a group this good since Brownsville Station broke up, and here they were, except I liked The Go even more than all their hometown predecessors. I eventually was asked to produce their first two albums, so I was granted the rare opportunity to be the producer of my favorite rock and roll group.

The first was the debut album Whatcha Doin', and the second was the mysterious, legendary "lost" album, Free Electricity.

After a few bass and lead guitar personnel shakeups, and a lot of touring in the U.S. following the release of Whatcha Doin’, The Go were back in Detroit with a bunch of new songs which they wanted to record immediately. We again went to Ghetto Recorders, and were in there for a week, maybe two weeks? The Go played these songs at full blast in the studio, getting them all on tape in just one or two takes. The atmosphere surrounding these sessions was one of openness and creativity, so the overdubbing process was an avalanche of ideas, coming down really fast, and going to tape effortlessly.

The title track might have ended up sounding like a more traditional rock and roll song, but I suggested they do a take with the lead guitar blasting non-stop, something which made the dynamics more like that of a free jazz ensemble. When I sat down to mix the track, the reverb tank seemed to open up like a giant hole in the earth's crust and suddenly what came out of the speakers was a big, cavernous sound, like some haunted frequency beamed across the time barrier from the Grande Ballroom circa 1968. At this point, the mixing board felt more like a Ouija board. We were going where the music was leading us, and the strange sounds just kept on coming.

There's a heavy jazz influence on this record. We were all listening to a lot of ‘60s free jazz, so it seemed quite normal (to some of us) that the mixes tended to sound a bit more like records by Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra than the records being made by our peers in the rock and roll scene.

Perhaps this was perceived as a strange approach back in the year 2000, and there certainly were some people who felt we were totally out of control and maybe a bit crazy, but The Go were only as out of control as their musical and literary heroes, like the Fugs and Allen Ginsberg and the Bonzo Dog Band and Nilsson and lots of other individualists who inspired them.  

Guest appearances by Cary Loren from Destroy All Monsters and John Olson from Wolf Eyes only reinforced the album's musical direction. Anyway, "weird" or not, this was an inspired recording made by an inspired group of musicians. There was a feeling of excitement and adventure happening at these sessions, and I think we captured that feeling on tape. 

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The Go’s Free Electricity, the group’s storied, long-lost album, will finally see worldwide release on Friday, September 4th, 2026. The ten-track long player was written, composed, and arranged by Bobby Harlow (except track one, which was written by Harlow and Dion Fischer; and track five, written by Harlow and Cary Loren).

Free Electricity was mixed and produced by Matthew Smith, engineered by Jim Diamond at Ghetto Recorders, and mastered by Jim Kissling at Jim Kissling Mastering in Detroit, Michigan.