Rocktober '60s Song #1: "Time Has Come Today" by The Chambers Brothers (1968)

As we kick off this year's Rocktober -- a month-long celebration of '60s rock -- beginning in about 20 minutes, there are four Major League Baseball teams whose time has come today.  The Brewers, Cubs, Rockies, and Dodgers will be playing one-game playoff tiebreaker games to determine which teams win the NL Central and NL West (and, thus, get the #1 and #2 seeds in the NL and the right to have home-field advantage in at least one playoff series) and which two teams are relegated to the Wild Card game.

I was already planning on using The Chambers Brothers' 1968 hit "Time Has Come Today" for Rocktober, but given the two MLB games today, it seemed like an appropriate song for the occasion.

Chances are, if you know any Chambers Brothers' song, it's "Time Has Come Today."  It has been used in various commercials and movies over the years.  You may not have even known who sang it or their back story.  The Chambers Brothers was one of the pioneering psychedelic soul bands.  Like Sly and The Family Stone after them, The Chambers Brothers were an integrated bands.  As the name implies, the group was mainly comprised of brothers whose last name was Chambers (George, Willie, Lester, and Joe, from oldest to youngest).  They got their start on the gospel and folk circuits, but as with many folk artists of the mid-'60s, the call of plugging in was too much to ignore.  They added drummer Brian Keenan in 1965, and then went electric, releasing their first album in 1967.

"Time Has Come Today" was released as a single in 1968, and it reached #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 -- the band's highest-charting song by a long shot -- but the song actually has a few versions.  The original 1996 version is only about two and a half minutes long, and it's not quite the same as what would become a hit two years later.  The album version of the "hit" was over 11 minutes long, and I'm not going to include that version here, but you can click on this link if you want to get trippy.  There are then two shortened version of the 11-minute song.  One was about 3 minutes, and the other is just under five minutes.  It's the latter that we are used to hearing on the radio, so that's the one I'm going to embed here.  (There's also a pretty sweet 14-minute live video version from German TV if you really want your soul to be psychedelicized.)  Anyway, enjoy this nugget of rock glory.