I first bought this on tape in 1992 for a solitary dollar in a record shop sale in Freeport in the Bahamas and listening to it now still brings back memories of driving an American car with the steering wheel on the left but the traffic on the right side of the road.
It's since become one of a select band of albums I own on tape, vinyl and CD (Blondie's Parallel Lines , J Geils Band's Bloodshot, REM's Fables Of The Reconstruction and Miles Davis's Sketches Of Spain are the others that come to mind).
Having only ever heard a five-minute edit of Time Has Come Today previously, I was expecting psychedelic soul but Time... proved more of a curate's egg, filled with traces of the band's long journey from the Mississippi gospel circuit to fashionable Haight-Ashbury.
The Chambers Brothers had already been going 13 years by 1967, having started out as a gospel group when George Chambers quit the army to join forces with his brothers, Willie, Lester and Joe.
By the early 1960s they'd adapted their style to suit folk-blues crowds, with Lester being taught to play harmonica by Sonny Terry along the way. In 1965, they played at the Newport Folk Festival, scene of Bob Dylan's ill-received electric conversion that had Pete Seeger searching for his axe.
Never the types to turn down a paying gig, the Chambers Brothers were also happy playing to R&B crowds pumping out the likes of Long Tall Sally and Bony Moronie.
This approach won them a deal with LA label Vault in 1965 and, a year later, drummer Brian Keenan joined on his return from three years of schooling in London where the psychedelic scene was getting underway. As a result, the band soon threw themselves into the burgeoning US scene, sharing stages with the likes of Iron Butterfly and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
A new deal with Columbia followed and they immediately got busy in the studio in late '66, including an early single version of Time Has Come Today with what sounds like a sitar in the intro.
1967 saw the band's full emergence as black hippies, with the added multi-racial dimension of having a white drummer, which went down a storm on California's countercultural scene.
By the end of the year, Columbia were finally ready to release The Time Has Come. It climaxes with the 11-minute psychedelic blow-out of Time Has Come Today - but before that come a nine-track dash through much of the band's past.
The harmonising between the four brothers remained the bedrock of the band and is brilliantly showcased in covers of two very different songs - Curtis Mayfield's Impressions hit People Get Ready and Bacharach & David's What The World Needs Now Is Love.
They blow up a storm on Lester's I Can't Stand It, a cover of Wilson Pickett's In The Midnight Hour and the particularly fine Uptown, written by Betty Mabry, who later became Betty Davis when she briefly married Miles in 1968 and subsequently released a trio of stunning albums that I want to write about on here in the near future.
George's Please Don't Leave Me is pure barbershop quartet soul and they drop the pace right down for So Tired and Lester's Romeo And Juliet. The recurrent use of a cowbell throughout the album even seems to obliquely tip a hat to their country origins in the Deep South.
Finally the album winds itself up to the full version of Joe and Willie's Time To Come Today, with its spectacular echo-drenched 'time tunnel' section that showcases what a great drummer Keenan was. Joe certainly appears to have noticed when he detours his guitar solo into a sly take on Little Drummer Boy.
When it comes to naming the epic acid rock songs of the 60s, Iron Butterfly's In Gadda Da Vida seems to have stolen Time Has Come Today's thunder, which is harsh. It may be six minutes longer but it came out six months later (18 months if you count the original single version).
Mind you, both bands ultimately suffered the same fate of opening a lot of doors but not being able to capitalise for long while others took their ideas to the bank. The Chambers Brothers suffered from the lack of main songwriter, despite all four brothers earning writing credits on the album and Keenan supplying the excellent B-side Love Me Like The Rain.
Sly & The Family Stone and The Temptations under Norman Whitfield's guidance quickly seized the moment, while the hits dried up for the Chambers Brothers and the band split in 1972.
Various reunions followed but Keenan ended up working as a carpenter before dying of a heart attack in 1985. There's no better way to mark 25 years since his death than by giving The Time Has Come a spin.
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