The producer called for more cowbell and the Chambers Brothers happily complied. Thus was forged “Time Has Come Today,” the most famous of the hippie soul classics.
“Time Has Come Today” was everywhere in the late 1960s. The song kicked serious ass as a jukebox number, sounded great blaring out of a VW van’s AM radio, and proved plenty mind-blowing for free-form FM radio.
The number was written by Joe and Willie Chambers (according to the disputed credits). The first-person tale of displacement was inspired by the waves of hippie transients headed for the coasts. (A simpler reading would be that of a man thrown onto the streets by love gone wrong.) The high-speed call-and-response format reminds the listener that time never lets up:
Now the time has come (time!)
There’s no place to run (time!)
I might get burned up by the sun (time!)
But I had my fun (time!)
I’ve been loved and put aside (time!)
I’ve been crushed by the tumbling tide (time!)
And my soul has been psychedelicized (time!)
Even as pop radio eased up on its song-length restrictions, the Chambers Brothers’ 1968 hit was far too long for prime time: more than 11 action-packed minutes. Columbia, which rejected an earlier version of the song, found success with two single versions: one at 3:05 and the other at 4:45.
Brian Keenan’s psychedelic percussion work dominates the song, but everyone remembers the cowbell that kicks things off (as a Brother cries “coo-coo”). It was played by Lester Chambers. Throughout, the bell is used to represent the ticking away or speeding up of time — or its Einsteinian distortion. At the end of the song, the cowbell winds down in dramatic fashion, making the ending as memorable as the beginning.
What makes “Time Has Come Today” a psychedelic rock classic — rather just a terrific rock song — is its thundering middle section, an in-studio jam.
Let’s have a listen:
It’s like an echo chamber in here. A heavily distorted guitar flirts with a phrase from “Little Drummer Boy.” An electrified sitar flies by. Screams, primal howling, maniacal laughter — the ingredients for a bad acid trip. All this swirling around The Cowbell.
The producer was David Rubinson, who’d just worked with one of the top San Francisco bands, Moby Grape. The song required one glorious take. Psychedelicized, indeed.
The song made the Chambers Brothers an immediate draw on the rock festival circuit, sometimes playing on the same bill as Pacific Gas & Electric, another California-based interracial act that brought blues/soul music into the almost exclusively white rock scene. (Sly and the Family Stone found fame in this period as well.) The Chambers Brothers were regulars at the Fillmore.
As a bow to “Time Has Come Today’s” iconic status, the PBS documentary series “American Experience” has used the song as its theme music. That’s just one of dozens of appearances “Time Has Come Today” made in films and TV, often in connection with scenes of Vietnam War protests. “Coming Home,” with Jon Voight and Jane Fonda, used the song most effectively, for a drawn-out scene of violence.
Artists who covered “Time Has Come Today” include the Ramones (video below), Steve Earle & Sheryl Crow, Willy DeVille and Joan Jett.
A new generation knows the song via the video game “Homefront,” which uses “Time Has Come Today” in a key helicopter action sequence.
We were just young high school kids when this song came out. Yeah … we got high. Nothing chronic. It was all a new way of thinking. You would sit down in a big chair in someones apt and go off to another world for a few minutes. This song did just that. It was psychedelic.
Race wasn’t a concern back then. We just wanted to hear music that new and trippy. I never heard anyone ever mention the race of the Chambers Brothers.
A great time with music as the catalyst for everyone. My interest went farther than this song. I loved R&B. These guys didn’t want to be a psychedelic group and played a lot of R&B. But “Time” whether it was a ruse to get them air play or not, didn’t matter. They were not a garage band. Very professional.
I remember believing the song, especially the “psychedelic” break, was about Charles Whitman, the shooter who sprayed the University of Texas campus with bullets from a clock tower there. I have no idea how I heard that, but it was pretty widely believed at the time. Great song, though.
It’s the soundtrack of the Apocalypse. The instrumental is the destruction of the world, with the dying human race screaming, and God literally laughing at the day that had to come. It came today. “Cuckoo — Cuckoo …”, indeed.
Love the full version of this song. Used to play it when I was getting ready to go out on a Friday night. (Yes, I’m that old!)
Saw these guys many times at the Village Theatre and Fillmore East. Nicest guys you every wanted to talk to. And of course, a great Band. Their early Gospel Folk music wasn’t bad either.
Best cowbell work this side of Mountain’s “Mississippi Queen.”
If there is one overlooked genre, it is psychedelic soul. Groups like The Chamber Brothers and Sly & The Family Stone were great at it!
If that’s not chamberpsych then what the hell is?
Classic tune. The long lp version a nostalgic trip for me back to freaky times
I was in a rock band while in high school, 67-70. My band played this song, usually to close our set. I think we did it justice.