How I Got Psychedelicized by the Chambers Brothers
Reflecting on the shattering impact of 11 minutes of 'Time Has Come Today'
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This edition of ‘Listening Sessions’ focuses on a recording that I’ve long loved: ‘Time Has Come Today’ by the Chambers Brothers. How I discovered the song and, more specifically, the full-length version of it, says something interesting, I think, about the role of radio when I was growing up (the eighties and nineties) in discovering and learning about music. In addition, I share some thoughts on the album on which ‘Time Has Come Today’ appeared: 1967’s The Time Has Come. I hope you enjoy the essay and please, as always, share your thoughts as well.
Until next time, may good listening be with you all!
Let me know if you’ve heard this one before: radio ain’t what it used to be. I don’t mean by this that there isn’t great radio out there. There is. Campus radio, for one potent example, keeps the anarchic spirit of radio at its best alive. But back when I was growing up, any radio station had an allure. It was a magic partly borne of my never-ending curiosity about music. It was also because radio was the closest thing one could have to streaming; to be able to hear new music and to not be limited by the extent of one’s collection or the ability of one’s wallet to expand it. Of course, that created its own magic. To go to a record store, stare at an album cover and dream of what it may sound like, conjuring an elaborate guess in one’s head and once one mustered enough cash to buy it, and to hear how close or how far one was to how it actually sounded was an amazing way to approach a musical education.
But, to hear something on the radio and be stopped cold by it was to have one’s definition of music altered without warning. Few things could beat that. I suppose that’s how the Chambers Brothers’ ‘Time Has Come Today’ slipped into my young, music-hungry mind. It seemed like it was built to be remembered. The motif of the cowbell slowing down incrementally at two key points in the song. The endless, shouted repeats of the word “time.” The gospel call-and-response against a sound that was not quite soul and not exactly rock. It radiated difference.
The song had been enough of a hit in 1968 to become an enduring musical avatar for the swirling counterculture of the late sixties and a part of the playlist of the oldies-radio incarnation of Toronto’s 1050 Chum. Running to four minutes, 45 seconds, it pushed the limit, even into the nineties, of how long a track could be in order to get AM-radio airplay.
If 1050 Chum approximated what radio once was on the scratchier part of the dial, Psychedelic Sunday, an institution on Sunday afternoons on Toronto's Q107 now long gone, captured, in a small way to be sure, the exploratory spirit of FM radio in the late sixties and early seventies. While I blame the program for, among other things, souring me on almost the entirety of progressive rock, Led Zeppelin (I’m in the middle of being converted into a fan) and the Band (hearing the first fifteen seconds of Music for Big Pink on my turntable fifteen years ago finally shook me from the error of my ways), it also introduced me to Iron Butterfly’s ‘In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida,’ all seven minutes of the Doors’ ‘Light My FIre’ and that Rare Earth’s hit cover of the Temptations’ ‘Get Ready’ actually stretched out for 21-and-a-half minutes. It also spilled the beans that there was more to ‘Time Has Come Today’ that I had been led to believe.
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These days, the discovery of music or, more accurately, the discovery of what music can be, is as simple as a YouTube search or logging onto one’s streaming service of choice. True, you have to know what you’re looking for and if you're not sure, it becomes quickly clear that something is lost when the choice of accidental discovery is solely left to an algorithm.
Imagine hearing something like ‘Time Has Come Today’ and knowing what to expect. After two verses, the music begins to slow down as if the Chambers Brothers were powered by a battery that is slowly dying. Then, as if suddenly recharged, the tempo begins to slowly increase and an echo effect is applied causing each ring of the cowbell to smear into the next as well as the shout of the Brothers saying “time” which drummer Brian Kennan affirms on the snare. Then, after his snare roll, the momentum really begins to build and then explode with Lester Chambers, taking the lead vocal here, yelling “ohhhhhhhh!!!!!!!” to begin the concluding verse.
But what about if instead, at the 3:30 mark, Kennan’s roll resolves into a rolling, heavy beat. The Chambers Brothers’ shouts of “time” gradually decay into nothing. The guitars of Willie Chambers and Joe Chambers begin to weave around each other for the next 90 seconds or so in an eerie fantasia. Then, Kennan switches to a marching beat for a brief paraphrase of ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ (something, I confess, escaped me until I did research for this essay. Sometimes the most obvious details fly straight over my head). If all this wasn’t heavy enough, Lester cackles and screams against a heavily echoed and throbbing cowbell, a repeating ominous bass line by George Chambers, eruptions of chords by Willie and Joe, and an eerie electronic effect sounding like a circuit being jammed, all combining to approximate what it would feel like to really have your “soul psychedelicized.”
A moment of calm ushers in the onrush of momentum long familiar. There is one final trick up the Chambers Brothers’ sleeve: the ending is extended with the group cycling through a crash of multiple chords before Lester lets out a final cry and a last, apocalyptic explosion of pure sound.
The middle section of ‘Time Has Come Today’ lasts about five minutes, 26 seconds. To have heard it one day on the radio without warning was one of the most exhilarating musical experiences of my life. It transforms the song from a powerful, hard-to-categorize call to arms into one of the era’s most daring attempts to stretch the limits of popular song. Previous forays were either mind-melting—the Butterfield Blues Band’s ‘East-West’ remains an incendiary mélange of blues, jazz and Hindustani music—or rambling—Love’s ‘Revelation,’ taking up all of the second side of Da Capo, remains interesting only in theory. None were as radical as ‘Time Has Come Today.’
By the time it was released as a single at the end of 1967, the idea of psychedelic soul or Black psychedelia or however you wish to term it was not entirely unheard of, especially after Jimi Hendrix exploded into the mainstream. Other attempts at a fusion were tentative like Diane Ross and the Supremes’ ‘Reflections,’ released in the summer of 1967, and written and produced by Holland - Dozier - Holland or intentionally outrageous like the first album by Rotary Connection, steered by producer and arranger Charles Stepney. What distinguished the Chambers Brothers was that their music was rooted deep in gospel and folk even when the final result sounded little like either. It’s a stretch, but not inconceivable, to imagine ‘Time Has Come Today’ rearranged to sound as urgent as the Staple Singers’ ode to the March on Selma, ‘Freedom Highway.’
Besides, the Chambers brothers of Carthage, Mississippi: (from oldest to youngest) George, Willie, Lester and Joe (they were four other brothers and four sisters too in the large Chambers brood) had been performing professionally since 1954 and made their first recordings a decade later. On the Folkways label, they backed up folk singer, activist and early champion of the brothers Barbara Dane on an album of Civil Rights anthems with a good portion of the LP acapella, affording an up-close opportunity to hear the Baptist bent of their group harmony.
For Vault, they were recorded live at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles offering up their familiarity and facility with the repertoire that straddled the lines of blues, rock and soul: Lowell Fulson’s ‘Reconsider Baby,’ Barrett Strong’s ‘Money (That’s What I Want),’ an adaptation of ‘Green Rocky Road’ titled ‘Hooka Tooka’ and the Valentino’s ‘It’s All Over Now,’ for a few examples. Joining them by then was Kennan, a New Yorker, on drums, making the Chambers Brothers an integrated unit.
From Vault, they were signed by John Hammond to Columbia Records and from a lecture by Timothy Leary that Joe attended where he partook of LSD came ‘Time Has Come Today.’ They recorded it as their first single for the label and paired it with the eclectic choice of the traditional number, ‘Dinah.’
The version of ‘Time Has Come Today’ that came out on 45 in 1966 exists today as yet another secret of the song. While the basic contours of its re-recording are already in place—this first recording stands with the Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’ and the Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ as a harbinger of what was soon to come—it has a muted quality. Kennan’s 4/4 backbeat is way more explicit, Willie and Joe’s guitars are gauzy but relatively quiet and the cowbell here is doubled with Kennan on cross sticks and more directly mimics the sound of a clock’s tick-tock. Yet still, there is a boldness and a freshness that represents a huge leap forward from what the Chambers Brothers had done on record by then and a huge gap between them and their contemporaries on where they were intending to go with their music.
Not surprisingly, Columbia quickly had the group back in the studio to record something more conventional and easier to push, ‘All Strung Out Over You.’
Yet, even as it was more conventional, it still referenced the counterculture through its double-entendre title. Far more importantly, it defied easy categorization and flaunted convention in its own way. Consider the four-way communication on the repeat of the first verse: handclaps, a propulsive bass line, cleanly comped guitar chords and a syncopated cowbell that snakes around them all. Think also of the interplay between the brothers on the lead and backing vocals—gospel in both execution and in how the harmony is stacked—and that the song moves at a brisk clip bursting with hooks. What you have is a potent two minutes and change.
While it did nothing on the charts, it was selected to lead off their first LP on Columbia, The Time Has Come. No surprise really. Its boldness carries through the rest of the album.
What follows ‘All Strung Out Over You’ is their, by mid-1967, well-oiled cover of Curtis Mayfield’s ‘People Get Ready’ that added a momentum to the Impressions’ stately hit recording. The brothers end their interpretation by singing its most famous line (“people get ready, there’s a train a comin’…”) in unison. It’s a gesture that affirms the hope of deliverance in Mayfield’s lyrics. The final “thank the Lord” is sung acapella and slowly, concluding with a wordless amen.
Two originals by Lester follow. ‘I Can’t Stand It’ has the feel of Motown at its edgiest. Again, at the risk of being repetitive, it’s the sound of their harmony that punches through, placing the Chambers Brothers on a continuum that links the past with their present day. It also makes ‘Romeo and Juliet’ feel more than just an ode to the street-corner serenade of doo wop and helps turn their cover of Wilson Pickett’s ‘In the Midnight Hour’ into a religious experience.
The long build-up of the opening of ‘In the Midnight Hour’ telegraphs a certain momentousness. As the first verse begins, the staccato attack of Pickett’s version is swept away in a rush of pure sound that, no surprise, is tough to label. Here, the witching hour hook-up won’t just take the edge off, it will transfigure. The extended contact high of the coda which moves from standard call and response to a trading of “yeah”’s underlines that. The Chambers Brothers defy the odds by making an already-great record even better—five-and-a-minutes of life-affirming energy.
No wonder then that what comes next to close the album’s first side is ‘So Tired,’ a moment for us all to catch our breath. The tiredness expressed in the song is of an almost existential sluggishness that is felt in the bones, a feeling of defeat that keeps one way down.
Relief comes, after turning the album over, through going ‘Uptown’ to Harlem. The song’s call to “let my hair down” and to “east me some chitlins and some black-eyed peas / some barbecued ribs and some collard greens” is familiar to viewers of Summer of Soul—a literal invitation to take in part of all of 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival. Written by Betty Davis, just before she was immortalized as ‘Mademoiselle Mabry’ by Miles Davis, ‘Uptown’ is the Chambers Brothers’ most explicit nod to soul on The Time Has Come.
‘Please Don’t Go,’ with the exception of ‘People Get Ready,’ is the performance that most closely recalls their earlier music. It follows the cadence of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Big Boss Man’ and is pure folk-blues. Nothing is left to chance for their cover of Bacharach and David’s ‘What the World Needs Now is Love.’ Some may find it overblown—especially the brass arrangement—and at odds with the self-contained sound of everything on the album preceding it. I find it powerful, a recognition that the wish for peace, harmony and other similar intangibles is not simply pie-in-the-sky thinking, an overly earnest group sing of ‘Kumbaya,’ but most powerful when it comes from having experienced or, at very least, of being well aware of the opposite.
And then, of course, is the album’s finale: 11 minutes of ‘Time Has Come Today.’ Being immersed in its daring madness in this context emphasizes how much it was designed to be a big statement. Nothing else on the album, save for ‘In the Midnight Hour,’ sounds like it and hearing it after nine mostly tidy, compact performances, is to newly appreciate how nervy the recording was and still is. Indeed, to become complacent or blasé about ‘Time Has Come Today’ is to become equally complacent or blasé about Lawrence of Arabia or The Grapes of Wrath or Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics teams. The Chambers Brothers revolutionized by doing. Their cri de coeur is immortalized on record. It may not hold currency for the younger generation but I suppose its spirit can be kept strong as long as the young can find paths to discover what music can be and what it can do not as a soul-deadening din but as a way to have their soul psychedelicized too.
It still astounds listening to it today.
Thanks for this, Robert - I wasn't aware of this album but I'm enjoying it now! I hope you eventually come round to Led Zeppelin, and I think you'd be the ideal writer to take a look at one of their albums, if you ever feel the inclination.