The Chambers Brothers are a soul music group, best known for its eleven-minute long 1968 hit “Time Has Come Today”. The group was part of the wave of new music that integrated American blues and gospel traditions with modern psychedelic and rock elements. Their music has been kept alive through heavy use in film soundtracks. (More from Wikipedia)
At the time of the British Invasion that began in late 1963, it wasn’t so hip to be American. Thus, many bands and recording artists in that period feigned Englishness in hopes of improving their changes of making the charts.
Sometimes though, they were just dressing in the fashions of the day. As an African-American group, the Chambers Brothers certainly weren’t fooling anyone on the cover of their most successful album, The Time Has Come, though their white drummer Brian Keenan had lived in England and Ireland for a time. This album featured the band’s 1968 psychedelic hit song “Time Has Come Today”; the extended version of this song runs for 11 minutes, and Keenan’s distinctive drumming is one of the reasons it has remained so popular. The Chambers Brothers had started out as a gospel quartet in the 1950’s and gradually edged into folk music during the early 1960’s. They went electric at about the same time that Bob Dylan did – and at some of the same venues even, such as the Newport Folk Festival.
(April 2013)
Using several of these sound tricks can be enough to completely change a song. I am up to mid-2013 in loading up my Facebook posts into my website, and one song that I wrote about then is a long-time favorite called “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers, which started out as an African-American gospel group. The song was originally recorded in 1966 but had a completely different sound; it was next released on the band’s album The Time Has Come in November 1967 and became a hit single in 1968. Wikipedia notes that it is “one of the landmark rock songs of the psychedelic era” and continues: “Various effects were employed in its recording and production, including the alternate striking of two cow bells producing a ‘tick-tock’ sound, warped throughout most of the song by reverb, echo and changes in tempo.”
(July 2015)
