The Sweet Sound of Ambrosia : Rock Music: Popular ‘70s group gets on the reunion bandwagon with San Diego performance.

SAN DIEGO —  Now that just about every big-name rock band from the 1960s has gotten back together and hit the comeback trail, reunion fever is starting to spread to bands from the 1970s.

The bug has already bitten such celebrated ‘70s bands as the Doobie Brothers, War and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. The latest to be bitten: Bacchanal-bound Ambrosia, one of the quirkier bands of a quirky decade. The band plays tonight.

One of the group’s first big gigs was a part in the debut performance of the late Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass.” Their first Top 40 hit, 1975’s “Holdin’ On to Yesterday,” was pure pop with classical flourishes; they subsequently shifted gears to so-called blue-eyed soul and returned to the charts with “How Much I Feel” in 1978 and “Biggest Part of Me” and “You’re the Only Woman” in 1980.

After a six-year hiatus, the four original members--singer-guitarist Dave Pack, singer-bassist Joe Puerta, keyboardist Christopher North, and drummer Burleigh Drummond--are back in business, touring and recording again with new recruits Tollak Ollestad (keyboards) and Shem (percussion).

Ambrosia’s comeback attempt was launched a year ago, with what was supposed to be a temporary reunion, Puerta said.

“Last fall, we did a series of six shows, just a guerrilla run, just something we wanted to do for our fans, who had been asking us to do it for years,” he said. “And then after we did it, it was so much fun that we said to ourselves, ‘Let’s see what kind of new music we can create and see if we can get a new record deal.’

“So we went into the studio and cut some demos, which we’ve been circulating since August. And now certain labels are very interested, which is very encouraging to us because we did the demos with no budget and very little time--I was busy with Bruce (Hornsby) and Dave was producing other people.”

Ambrosia broke up in 1984, four years after their last Top 40 hit. But it wasn’t the lack of hits that precipitated the breakup, Puerta said.

“Not having hits doesn’t necessarily mean the end of a group,” Puerta said. “A lot of bands put out albums that don’t have hits. Instead, it was a combination of many things--we were having a lot of business problems that compounded the normal, day-to-day sort of problems every band has.

“Due to some unfortunate contracts we were signed to, we were in the position of making records, records that sold well, and never getting a dime in royalties.

“And that’s pretty hard to take after a while, to put your life into something and see it become successful and not get any compensation. So we went through a protracted time of inactivity, trying to get out of the contract, and it just got very, very messy.”

During their six years apart, the four members of Ambrosia kept busy, but the old wounds healed, and the four decided to give it another shot, Puerta said.

“Enough time had passed where our differences had cooled, the horrors of our contractual arrangement had faded into the past, and we were all free agents,” he said. Ambrosia was formed in 1971 in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. Puerta had gone to the same high school as North and grown up in the same neighborhood as Pack. As kids, Puerta and Pack had unwittingly shopped at the same music store.

“I put up an ad in the store, looking for a guitarist, and Dave answered the ad,” Puerta recalled. “Then I called up Chris, and eventually we had to expand our horizons, going all the way to Venice Beach to find Burleigh.”

At first, Puerta said, Ambrosia played straight rock ‘n’ roll, mostly in San Pedro nightclubs--but a series of strange events steered them to the classical-rock sound they introduced on their 1975 recording debut.

“We became the test band for this PA system company based out of Hermosa Beach,” Puerta said. “We would go around to different venues where they were trying to audition their sound system and play our music. One night, we were auditioning the system at the Hollywood Bowl, and Gordon Parry, one of the greatest classical engineers in the world, was really fascinated with the music we were making.

“He told us, ‘You’ve got to expand your horizons and learn about classical music,’ and he invited us to come out every night to the Bowl. We did, and we got the chance to listen to and meet all the great classical conductors and musicians, including Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Mehta, the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

“The following summer, Gordon set up a concert at UC Los Angeles where we did all our original stuff. Zubin came out to hear us, and we ended up playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the All American Dream Concert at the Hollywood Bowl.”

A year later, Ambrosia performed in the debut of Bernstein’s “Mass” at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. They subsequently began incorporating elements of classical music into rock ‘n’ roll and in 1975 landed a recording deal with 20th Century Records.

Despite the Top 40 success of “Holdin’ On To Yesterday,” Ambrosia was primarily an album-oriented rock (AOR) radio favorite, a champion of the mid-1970s progressive-rock movement.

But by the end of the decade, their music had evolved into a more commercial, rhythm-and-bluesy sound, putting them back on the singles charts with a series of blue-eyed soul tunes.

Now that Ambrosia is back together, Puerta said, their music is something of a hybrid of their two previous sounds, classical-rock and blue-eyed soul.

“The new stuff has a range of ballads and interesting musical things, so it’s kind of a combination of what we were doing before,” he said. “And all our songwriting is very melodic, whether it’s classical-rock or rhythm-and-blues--just like it’s always been.”