Chambers Brothers – "Time Has Come Today" (1967)

I've been loved and put aside

I've been crushed by a tumbling tide

And my soul’s been psychedelicized

The first great American music festival was the Monterey International Pop Festival, a three-day extravaganza held at the Monterey (CA) County Fairgrounds in June 1967.  

The headliners at Monterey Pop included Eric Burdon and the Animals, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the Mamas and the Papas, Laura Nyro, Otis Redding, and the Who.  Noted filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker filmed a legendary documentary titled Monterey Pop, which captured many of the festival’s best performances.

As great at the Monterey Pop festival was, it has been overshadowed in the popular consciousness by another three-day rock festival that took place on the East Coast in August 1969.

Of course, I’m referring to the Atlantic City Pop Festival.

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You assumed I was referring to the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, of course.  But the Atlantic City festival – a forgotten event which took place exactly two weeks before Woodstock – arguably had a lineup that was even better than Woodstock’s.

A number of legendary performers – including Canned Heat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, and Santana – played at both of those festivals.

Woodstock had Crosby Stills Nash & Young, but the Atlantic City Pop Festival had the Byrds.

Woodstock had the Band, Blood Sweat & Tears, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who – all top-rank groups.

But Atlantic City had the Byrds, Chicago, Iron Butterfly, B. B. King, Joni Mitchell, Little Richard, and Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. 

(Crosby Stills & Nash and the Moody
Blues were no-shows at Atlantic City)

That’s pretty close to a dead heat.  But there was a lot of filler at Woodstock – Richie Havens, Arlo Guthrie, the Keef Hartley Band, Quill, She Na Na, Bert Sommer, and Sweetwater, to name just a few – while the Atlantic City lineup also included memorable groups like Booker T. & the M.G.’s, the Chambers Brothers, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Procol Harum, the Sir Douglas Quintet, and Three Dog Night.

Advantage, Atlantic City Pop Festival.

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I learned about the Atlantic City Pop Festival from Mark Lindsay – the oh-so-cute former lead singer of Paul Revere and the Raiders – who has a weekly two-hour show on Sirius/XM.

Lindsay’s show that day featured records by those who performed at the Atlantic City festival, as well as records by those who Lindsay thought should have been there – the Cowsills, the Doors, Vanilla Fudge, and others.  (Lindsay’s comments on his Saturday-morning shows seem to be totally scripted, so I’m guessing that it was his producer who came up with that should-have-been-there groups.)

Click here to read music journalist Jeff Tamarkin’s eyewitness account of the Atlantic City Pop Festival.

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The Chambers Brothers closed the first night of the Atlantic City Pop Festival with a memorable, 30-minute-long performance of today’s featured song.

Unlike Woodstock, no one recorded the Atlantic City festival.  Perhaps that’s just as well – as much as I love “Time Has Come Today,” I’m much too busy to sit through a half-hour-long rendition of it.  

The Chambers Brothers were four brothers from Mississippi who started out singing gospel and folk music.  After bringing down the house at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 -- both the Chambers Brothers and Bob Dylan switched from acoustic to electric music at that event -- the group signed with Columbia Records.

The Chambers Brothers performing
at the Atlantic City Pop Festival

But Columbia's president, Clive Davis, wanted no part of "Time Has Come Today" when the Chambers originally recorded it in 1966.  The brothers recorded it again in 1967, and the song became a hit in 1968.

The album version of "Time" is over 11 minutes long, but the group recorded it in just one take.

Two shorter versions were released as singles.  The first is 3:05 long -- Columbia took the album track and simply faded it out after about three minutes.  The other version is 4:45 long.  It's basically the 3:05 version plus the last minute and a half of the album cut.

"Time Has Come Today" is a very powerful song that simply insists that you pay attention to it.  It's been used in over a dozen movies -- most notably in the award-winning antiwar movie, Coming Home, which starred Jane Fonda as a Marine officer's wife who falls in love with Jon Voight, a paraplegic Vietnam veteran.  (Fonda won the "Best Actress" Oscar that year, and Voight was named "Best Actor."

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Click here to watch an extraordinary live performance of "Time Has Come Today" that runs almost 15 minutes long.

Click here to listen to the 4:45 version of "Time Has Come Today,” which is the recording you hear most often on the radio these days.

Click below to buy that version of the song from Amazon: