TIME DOES NOT JUST GO BY, it whistles past you as on a speeding motorcycle, leaving you with dust on your face and a stunned realization-to take the case in point-that it has been a quarter-century since another speeding vehicle,"Tijuana Taxi" toddled into view.

I wrote a lot ahout Herb and Jerry and Gil and A&M when, in the middle of the 1960s, they were coming to dominate the popular music scene with the merry, fresh and upbeat sounds of the Tijuana Brass and then the Baja Marimba Band. And so I had a double sense of stepping into my own past when, a few years ago, a production company for whom I was co-hosting a television special on the movies chose to tape it on one of the stages at the studio Charlie Chaplin built in 1917.

Since 1966 the Chaplin Studios have, of course, been the home of A&M Records, and I have dropped in often to chat with one or another of the founders. Invariably, as I got out of my car, I would catch the faint, sweet sounds of Herb Alpert, keeping his embouchure in shape with daily workouts on the trumpet Just as invariably, it would occur to me that Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, who wrote "Smile" and other beautiful melodies himself, must have been pleased to think that his old premises were, as in his own day, dedicated to the creation of lyrical art.

Chaplin's brother Sydney lived in a mansion (long since demolished and now an electronics store at the southeast corner of La Brea and Sunset), and Chaplin built his studio on five acres just south of the mansion. The Studios were and are in the form of an enclosed English village, solid with brick, as against the woundable stucco that gave other studios of the time an appearance of ornate but impermanent splendor.

According to the authoritative book, The American Film Industry, A Historical Dictionary by Anthony Slide, Chaplin built his studios for a reported $35,000. This suggests that even by 1917 standards Chaplin did not strew his money about wildly.

Chaplin made 17 films in his La Brea studios,starting with A Dog's Life in 1918 and including most of what have come to be regarded as his classics: Shoulder Arms (1918), The Kid (1921),A Woman of Paris (l923), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights ( 1931), Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940). He shot his last film at the studio, Limelight, in 1952.

He sold thc Chaplin Studios the next year to a New York real estate firm,William Zeckendorf's Webb & Knapp, for $650,000. The plan was to tear down the studio, but thankfully it was leased out instead to a Chicago television production company, who used the stage to shoot "Superman" among other shows.

Webb & Knapp sold the studios to Red Skelton in 1958, and Skelton sold them in 1962 to CBS, which needed a place to shoot the Perry Mason series. In 1966 CBS sold the Studios to the A&M Record Company and Tijuana Brass Enterprises, Inc. who have dwelt there happily ever after.

In 1969, the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board named the studios a historic cultural monument, as it certainly is, or as they certainly are. In a period when the traces, both physical and corporate, of the Hollywood that was disappearing faster than ice beside a swimming pool, it is oddly reassuring to drive along La Brea and note the unchanged facade of the splendid place the Little Tramp built to invent his magic in.

You couldn't prove it, of course, but my suspicion is that Charlie Chaplin, after his 36 years on those five acres on La Brea, may have left a sort of creative aura, a ghostly inspiration, in the lofty catwalks of the sound stages, in the corridors and offices and the stairwells.

My friends at A&M have done a remarkable job of encouraging new voices and new sounds on their labels and, in recent years, they have turned the wheel full circle by moving into the development of motion pictures, with an eye for thc inventive and the unhackneyed. With a generosity of spirit they actually may not have contracted from Chaplin (who left no doubt that he was the sole and undivided genius, as indeed he was), Herb, Jerry and Gil and their associatcs have encouraged a generation of new talent.

When the coat of arms is designed for those historical acres at 1416 North La Brea, it will have to contain, in all fairness, a trumpet and a pair of longhorns, as well as a cane and a punctured bowler hat.