On the back of a hit 45, Neil Diamond left a smaller, sharper clue to the kind of songwriter he was becoming in 1967.
As the original B-side to Kentucky Woman in 1967, The Time Is Now is more than a collector’s detail in the Neil Diamond story. It belongs to the same exact Bang Records run that turned him from a promising writer-performer into one of the most distinctive voices in late-1960s pop. That is why the song matters. In the age of the 45, the flip side was never just dead space. Sometimes it held leftovers. Just as often, it held evidence of how serious an artist really was. A strong B-side suggested depth, momentum, and a refusal to coast. Diamond’s records from this period often carry that feeling, and The Time Is Now fits squarely inside it.
By the time Kentucky Woman arrived, Diamond had already established a remarkable pace. Solitary Man, Cherry, Cherry, and Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon had shown how naturally he could combine immediacy with a slightly troubled undertow. The hooks were direct, but there was usually a little pressure inside them, a sense that the singer was pushing toward something he could not quite settle. That tension became one of his signatures. Heard in that context, The Time Is Now does not sound like an afterthought trailing behind a better-known song. It sounds like part of a larger creative burst, another piece of the same fast-moving year in which Diamond seemed to be writing from instinct, discipline, and restless ambition all at once.
What makes the song especially interesting is the way it carries the compact urgency of the period. This is not the broad, orchestral Neil Diamond of later arena years. It belongs to the earlier sound: tighter, quicker, and built for the physical limits and emotional demands of a single. His voice in the Bang era is leaner than the one many listeners later came to know, with more edge in the phrasing and more youthful strain in the attack. On The Time Is Now, that sound works beautifully. Even without the fame of the A-side, the performance gives the title real momentum. Diamond does not sing it as a casual phrase. He sings it like an instruction, or maybe a private argument with delay itself. That is often where his best early records live: between confidence and urgency, between a pop surface and a deeper impatience underneath.
Set beside Kentucky Woman, the value of the pairing becomes even clearer. The hit side has the immediate public shape, the kind of record designed to catch ears fast. The reverse side offers something slightly different, less exposed but no less telling. A good B-side can act like a second camera angle on the same moment, showing the artist without changing the era, the voice, or the emotional weather. The Time Is Now gives that 1967 single extra dimension. It suggests that Diamond was not simply delivering products for radio; he was building a body of work even in the small spaces around the obvious songs.
That may be one reason collectors and long-time single buyers still care about records like this. Turning over a 45 was once a small act of curiosity, almost a ritual. You did not just consume the promoted song and move on. You listened to the other side because sometimes that was where the personality deepened. In Diamond’s case, the flip sides from this era can reveal how consistently he wrote and how little separation there was between the material intended to lead and the material left to follow. The Time Is Now carries the discipline of a songwriter who already understood that every release added to the portrait. Even the back of the sleeve had to mean something.
It also captures a fascinating point in Diamond’s career arc. This was before Sweet Caroline, before the larger stage identity, before the sweeping adult ballads and the grander self-presentation that later defined him for millions. In 1967, the power is more compressed. The songs are shaped for radio, jukeboxes, and repeated spins on a home turntable. Yet within that scale, Diamond was already unmistakable. The melodic instincts were there. The emotional pressure was there. So was the sense that his writing could make even a short pop song feel like it had a life outside the room where it was recorded.
That is why The Time Is Now remains worth revisiting. Not because it overturns the accepted history of Neil Diamond, and not because every B-side must be treated like a lost treasure, but because it quietly confirms something important about him at his fastest and youngest. He was already too committed to waste a song. On the original flip side of Kentucky Woman, you can hear a writer who knew that the so-called secondary track still carried his name, his voice, and his standards. Decades later, that old 45 still offers a simple pleasure: the feeling of turning a familiar record over and finding that the story has more depth than the front label first promised.
