The Time Has Come
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Album Summary
The Time Has Come was laid down and released in 1967 on Columbia Records, right in the thick of one of the most electrically charged moments in American music history. The Chambers Brothers — George, Willie, Lester, and Brian, with drummer Brian Keenan holding down the groove — stepped into the studio carrying the weight of their gospel upbringing and came out the other side as something the world hadn't quite heard before. Produced during a period of genuine creative fire, this album captured a band in full transformation, trading the sanctified acoustics of their roots for wailing electric guitars, churning organ, and a rhythmic ferocity that straddled soul, rock, and the rising psychedelic tide washing over the culture. Columbia recognized what they had, and when this record hit shelves it announced The Chambers Brothers not as a curiosity but as a force — a family unit from the Deep South who had found their electric voice right when America needed to hear it most.
Reception
- The album achieved meaningful commercial success upon its 1967 release, helping to establish The Chambers Brothers as a significant presence in both the soul and rock markets simultaneously.
- Critical response was warm and genuinely impressed, with reviewers calling out the band's fearless fusion of gospel soul and psychedelic rock as something refreshingly original in a crowded marketplace.
- The album built the group's momentum considerably, positioning them as credible crossover artists whose appeal stretched across racial and genre lines at a deeply divided moment in American life.
Significance
- The Time Has Come stands as a landmark document in the story of Black artists claiming full ownership of rock and roll's electric vocabulary — The Chambers Brothers didn't borrow from rock, they inhabited it completely while never letting go of the soul and gospel fire that raised them.
- The album's willingness to stretch arrangements, lean into raw electric textures, and blur the lines between sacred and secular music made it a quiet blueprint for the soul-rock fusion that would define so much of what followed in the late sixties and beyond.
- Recorded and released during one of the most turbulent years of the 1960s, The Time Has Come carried a cultural urgency that went beyond entertainment — tracks like 'People Get Ready' and 'What The World Needs Now Is Love' placed the band squarely in the conversation about music as a vehicle for hope and change.
Samples
- Time Has Come Today — one of the most recognized psychedelic soul recordings of the era, the track has been sampled and interpolated across decades of hip-hop and pop production, carrying its hypnotic groove and iconic cowbell into new generations of music.
Tracklist
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A1 All Strung Out Over You 105
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A2 People Get Ready —
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A3 I Can't Stand It 124
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A4 Romeo And Juliet —
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A5 In The Midnight Hour 129
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A6 So Tired 144
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B1 Uptown 121
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B2 Please Don't Leave Me 68
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B3 What The World Needs Now Is Love 91
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B4 Time Has Come Today 122
Artist Details
The Chambers Brothers were a soulful, groundbreaking outfit that came together in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, four brothers from Mississippi — Lester, George, Willie, and Joe — who blended gospel roots with blues, rock, and psychedelia in a way that nobody else was doing at the time. Their 1968 masterpiece "Time Has Come Today" stretched an already electric track into an eleven-minute mind-bending journey that put them right at the crossroads of the counterculture revolution, earning them a legendary spot at the Fillmore and making them one of the first Black acts to truly break into the psychedelic rock scene. Their significance runs deep, because The Chambers Brothers proved that soul and rock were never really separate rivers — they were always the same mighty stream, and these brothers were bold enough to swim it all the way to the other side.
