A relentless ticking sound, bursts of echo, and more than 11 minutes of psychedelic experimentation turned The Chambers Brothers far away from their gospel roots and gave the group the defining song of its career.
“Time Has Come Today” appeared in its full-length form on the Chambers Brothers’ 1967 album The Time Has Come. Written by brothers Willie and Joe Chambers, the track eventually became a major hit in an edited version, but its sprawling album recording captured the group at its most adventurous.
The Chambers Brothers had taken a surprising path to psychedelic rock.
Brothers George, Willie, Lester, and Joe Chambers grew up in Mississippi singing gospel before relocating to Los Angeles. They eventually began performing folk and blues material, appearing at venues around the burgeoning folk scene and at the Newport Folk Festival before adding drummer Brian Keenan and moving toward an electrified sound.
“Time Has Come Today” developed alongside that transformation.
“I was down in the dining room area with an acoustic guitar and I was playing that music over and over and over,” Willie Chambers told Songfacts. “I kind of got hooked on that line in that melody, but I didn’t have any words. And Joe, at that same time, he was upstairs in his room writing the lyrics to ‘Time Has Come Today.’ He could hear what I was doing down there, and it interrupted his writing.”
The group first recorded a shorter version in 1966, but it failed to become a hit. When the Chambers Brothers returned to the song for The Time Has Come, they expanded it dramatically.
The resulting album track runs for more than 11 minutes.
Its opening sections build around the song’s famous clocklike “tick-tock” rhythm before the arrangement descends into an extended psychedelic passage filled with distorted sounds, reverb, percussion, and shouted vocals. One of its most recognizable effects came from a cowbell processed with echo, creating the ticking pulse that reinforces the song’s fixation on time.
The length made the album version impractical for conventional pop radio, so a much shorter edit was released as a single in 1968.
This time, “Time Has Come Today” broke through.
The single climbed to No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100, remaining there for several weeks and becoming the Chambers Brothers’ biggest pop hit. The success brought a much wider audience to a group that had spent years moving between gospel, folk, soul, blues, and rock.
“When we started playing it in the clubs, people went absolutely crazy,” Willie told the L.A. Times in 2015. “I mean, they were screaming. It was frightening for some; they’d just grab ahold of their heads and run out the door.”
The song proved especially durable beyond its original chart run. Its ominous ticking and increasingly chaotic sound have made it a natural fit for movies and television series looking to evoke the upheaval and counterculture of the late 1960s.
“We never tried to have a Number One record,” Willie told Louder. “We wanted to make music that had a meaning and substance, and that might help someone.”
Fifty-nine years after its full-length version appeared, “Time Has Come Today” still feels unusually bold. The Chambers Brothers took a song that had initially gone nowhere, stretched it past 11 minutes, and created a psychedelic rock epic whose ticking clock has never really stopped.
Related: 1977 Rock Song by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Lasting Nearly 10 Minutes, Is Still a Powerful Hit 49 Years Later
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