Welling up the first wave of the psychedelic tide
The Chambers Brothers’ immortal “Time Has Come to Today,” one of psychedelic rock’s most enduring, epochal classics, was the result of a weird mixture of coincidence and controversy involving Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins’ conk hairdo and the outraged fury of gospel star Mahalia Jackson.
Co-written by Los Angeles-based singer-musician Willie Chambers, who appears as part of Ronnie Mack’s salute to the music of Tina Turner at Burbank’s Pickwick Gardens on Sat., Sept. 12, the song’s extraordinary evolution began in rural Mississippi over 60 years ago.
“We were born into the church, that’s where it all started,” Chambers said. “My younger brothers, Joe and Lester, we had a gospel group with a couple of other kids and my older brother George was in a separate group. One day, out working’ in the fields, we all started singing together, and it sounded nice. So we thought, ‘why not just all do it together?’ Couldn’t come up with a name, nobody agreed to anything, so finally we settled on the Chambers Brothers.”
After George served in the Korean War, the family came to Los Angeles and their vocal quartet finally got rolling.
“We got paired up with the Mighty Clouds of Joy, and that carried on, successfully, for quite awhile,” Chambers said. “One day [Specialty records A&R man] Bumps Blackwell told me he needed a guitar player for a Texas bluesman Long Gone Miles, who was a good friend of Lightnin’ Hopkins. Lightnin’ came to town to play the Ash Grove and he needed to get his hair done, cooked and straightened, and my brother was going to do it for him at our house. Well, they had to get to the beauty supply and Lightnin’s driver was [Ash Grove owner] Ed Pearl, who heard my brother mention they we had this gospel group. Pearl said he’d never really heard any gospel singing and offered us an audition.”
“We rehearsed it, got real tight and that place just exploded. No one at the Ash Grove had experienced gospel and they all got so excited, they jumped, ran to the stage, knocked over all the drinks, it was a mess. I mean the whole place was torn up and wet and yucky, the waitresses couldn’t serve any drinks. Pearl said ‘Sorry, I can’t hire you, we can’t sell any drinks when you’re on!’ So we said, ‘Well, they can buy another drink after we’re done!’”
The Chambers’ became an Ash Grove favorite, which quickly led to national bookings at everywhere from nightclubs and folkie coffeehouses to the Apollo Theater and Newport Folk Festival. The novelty of a Southern gospel quartet electrified white audiences but outraged the pious.
“That did not set well with all the Deacons and church people,” Chambers said. “Mahalia Jackson, the Queen of Gospel Singers, went on [KTTV interviewer] Paul Coates’ show and later gave an interview to the L.A. Times, where she said that we were terrible people and that singing gospel in the rock ‘n’ roll clubs was blasphemous and equivalent to burning the American flag. She was really carrying on, saying all these things about us and club owners didn’t like that. This was a very serious matter at that time.”
“We couldn’t get hired. So, before we knew it, we were a full-fledged rock ‘n’ roll psychedelic band.”
It was 1966, the dawn of psychedelia and for these lifelong gospel traditionalists, the transition was not easy, but “Time Has Come Today” pretty much created itself.
“Psychedelic music was just starting and it really pretty much just sounded like people throwing objects at a wall, there’d be no melody or rhythm to a lot of it,” Chambers said. “But one day, I was down in the basement where we rehearsed, with my guitar and this melody came into my head. And I was playing it and Joe, he was upstairs, writing. He comes down and says ‘What are you doing? What is that? This fits what I’m writing.’ It was just like the two was made to be together. But there was one area in the song that he couldn’t finds the words for, and I said, ‘Well, I’ve got a word for that,’ and that last line of the verse, so it went ‘I’ve been loved, put aside / I’ve been crushed by tumbling tide / and my soul has been psychedelicized.’
“Joe said, ‘My soul has been psychedelicized? No. I can’t. What will the church say?’ I told him, ‘You have to — you have to say it, not for you, but for millions of other people.’”
“I haven’t thought about that in a while,” Chambers said. “But that’s how it came about and when we started playing it in the clubs, people went absolutely crazy, 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 was a striking amalgam of expanded consciousness, sanctified passion, blues mysticism and rock ‘n’ roll defiance. Getting it recorded was no easy task. After producer David Rubinson heard it, he made it his avocation to get it on wax, but the Chambers were no dummies. Having been educated by, as Chamber said, “a lot of older writers who had been burned and ripped off and who know about song publishing and mechanics and they advised us not to sign these shady contracts.”
They turned down one bad deal after another but finally decided to go with Columbia Records, entering into a heated, drawn out, saga-worthy, expletive-laden course of negotiation with newly appointed label head Clive Davis. At first he told them the company had to have the song recorded by a white band because the message was “too profound” to come from four black men and their white drummer; at one point Rubinson was vindictively fired.
But the brothers refused to give an inch and eventually it was released, as a single in 1966, and again in 1967 as the majestic, 11-minute mind-bender found on their “The Time Has Come” album.
“That song was a monster,” Chambers said. “It’s been used in over 160 movies, commercial and television shows. But it ain’t about how much money you make, it’s about the joy it brings you.”
“It all comes back to what our parents taught us: ‘Don’t dish out any crap and don’t take any. If you want to get respect, give respect.”
What: Ronnie Mack’s Salute to Tina Turner with Willie Chambers, Audrey Turner, Adelina Madero, Debby Holiday, Louis Metoyer, Elizabeth Hangan, Sky Henry, Ronnie Mack, more.
Where: Pickwick Gardens’ Pavilion Room, 1001 W. Riverside Drive, Burbank
When: Saturday, Sept. 12, 7:30 p.m.
Admission: $15
More info: (818) 845-5300, pickwickgardensconferencecenter.com
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JONNY WHITESIDE is a veteran music journalist based in Burbank and author of “Ramblin’ Rose: the Life & Career of Rose Maddox” and “Cry: the Johnnie Ray Story.”