The Chambers Brothers – Time Has Come Today

20th July 2021 · 1960s, 1967, Funk, Music, Soul

The Chambers Brothers blended their gospel roots with folk and West Coast rock to create a unique take on psychedelic soul in the first Summer of Love.

It’s only when I listened again to Papa Was A Rolling Stone that I began delving back into that short-lived mid-Sixties niche of psychedelic soul.

I quickly discovered there was more of it than I had imagined, and a lot of it is weirder and farther out (as they said back then) than I imagined.

Like, for example, The Chambers Brothers who (it says here) are best-known for their eleven-minute 1967 hit Time Has Come Today. Not by me, they aren’t, though I was only nine when it came out. Psychedelia wasn’t really my thing. Nor, to be fair, was soul.

It’s brilliant, blending blues and soul and gospel and psychedelic rock, especially when it all breaks down and the drums start to echo, the guitars start to spiral and sinister screams start to come out of the speakers as a second voice cackles with manic laughter and the whole thing dissolves into a mind-melting acid trip.

As the lyric says, your “mind starts to psychedelicise.” Which isn’t entirely what you’d expect from a gospel group who made their name on the folk circuit.

The four Chambers Brothers – Lester, Joe, Willie and George – started singing in Baptist church in their hometown of Carthage, Mississippi, and later moved to Los Angeles, forming a vocal group with George on washtub bass, Lester on harmonica and Willie and Joe playing guitar.

Their style blended RnB and folk and after a decade or so they finally found an enthusiastic audience in the new coffeehouses that were springing up in the mid-Sixties as the folk revival began to boom.

Through a connection with Pete Seeger they were invited to perform at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival – the one where Bob Dylan caused outrage by bringing an electric guitar – and they actually backed Dylan on some unreleased sessions

Their debut album, recorded live, came out that same year and their sound was already evolving towards electric rock. They switched it up in 1966 with the landmark album The Time Has Come, whose psychedelic flourishes reached their apotheosis on the 11-minute title track.

The brothers evolved even more when they recruited session guitarist Steve Hunter, who would go on to be in Alice Cooper’s band, but they split in 1972 having failed to break through to the mainstream.