70s Group Ambrosia Comes To THE Big E

The Big E Promises The Finest Entertainment As Always That is correct foks there will be a wave of seventies music coming our way into the Eastern States Exposition starting on wednesday September 18th with the band Ambrosia whom fell into an array of music genres including progressive, soft, and yacht rock catagories and also jazz fusion and blue-eyed soul. They were on Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Brothers record labels which were both huge record labels in the music industry at the time of their career from 1970 - 1982. The band broke up in 1982 but would reunite seven years later to start touring again and recording music. Ambrosia score multiple top forty hits with such hits like "Biggest Part Of Me" "How Much I Feel , "you're The Only Woman", "Nice Nice Very Nice", "Holdin' On To Yesterday", "Magical Mystery Tour", which was the lead off track in the film "All This And World War II". The group has had songs in multiple movies such as "Arthur" starring Dudley Moore, and most recently "Knocked Up". The current touring line-up of the band features three out of four original members of the 1970-1982 band thatt scored those hits starting with Joe Puerta onbass, backing and lead vocals, guitar, Christopher North on keyboards, and Burleigh Drummond on drums, backing vocals, percussion, and bassoon, and other members in the band include Doug Jackson on guitars and backing vocals joined the group in 2000, Ken Stacey on Lead, backing vocals, percussion and guitar member since 2005, and Mary Harris on keyboards and backing vocals since 2012. Recently we spoke with Burleigh Drummond and he gave us a brief history of the band "our first two albums were kind of in the proggish nature, we were kind of America's answer to the groups "Yes" and "king Crimson" and groups like that the we went off and had some pop hits which is where the story gets a little interesting. When we got started we had saw this new upcoming band called King Crimson and that changed our whole direction completely, we started writing things like "nice, nice, very nice" and collaborating with people like Kurt Vonnegut Jr.. we were melodically sounding with outrageous arrangements, but at night while we were recording those first albums we were playing this female lesbian bar where the only wanted r&b and dance music, so we played that every night and it crept into our psychie because you kind of become what you play, and so all of a sudden we started writing songs like "Dancing By Myself", "How Much I Feel" "Biggest Part Of Me", "Living On My Own" more r&bish sounding material so that's how all of that evolved, but we got a few hit records out of it and used that to our advantage. It was quite fun recording Magical Mystery Tour the head of our label at the time Russ Regan who also discovered Elton John, Neil Diamond, and Olivia Newton John, he had this idea for a movie it's hard to find, but anyone who's seen it and I think i've met two people besides myself that have seen it, but anyways it's called "All This and World War II", and the whole movie was Beatle music no dialogue set to World War II film footage and so we had the opening track to the film it's hard to say what the intentions for the film was, but anyways the soundtrack had an amazing amount of hits and great artists like Rod Stewart, Leo Sayer, Elton John, The Bee Gees, Peter Gabriel, all doing Beatle covers it was just amazing if you can find that album I garuntee you it will be a collector's item, it's a mystery sadly what the concept behind the movie was setting Beatles music to the footage, as sadly Russ recently past away so I never got to ask him about that, all I can think of is maybe he thought the music was somehow related to the footage for instance "Fool On The Hill" he had pictures of Hitler up in his castle so some of it was relevant I guess, it was mainly shown in art theaters and had a limited run so not sure how well the public recieved the film, but it was interesting and definitely a rarity to see or even find. Somebody owns the publishing to our music so we generally find out after the fact about our music being in films, but the most recent film our music has been used in was the movie Knocked up which featured "biggest Part Of Me" we were actually offered the theme to the movie "arthur" starring Dudley Moore you know When You Get Lost Between The Moon and New York City" Arthur's theme and we passed on it never knowing how big of a hit it was going to be later for Christopher Cross, but you know life is for learning. Some of the fun Ambrosia has been having is we do our own shows, but we're one of the few bands that can back up different artists which is always an honor to do so like recently we've been called upon to back up Michael McDonald and of course we all respect Michael, and then we've been doing some of these yacht rock type of shows which we just finished doing about two months wortth of playing and backing different artists on the tour like Stephen Bishop famous for "on and On", Peter Beckett from the group Player with their big hit "baby Come Back", Walter Eagon famous for the song "Magnet and Steel" written actually about Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac as the story goes from Walter on stage each night he wrote it as he puts it as he was smitten for the kitten, John Ford Coley who had a multitude of hits such as "I'd Really Love To See You Tonight", Elliott Laurie of Looking Glass "Brandy (You're A FIne Girl) number one hit for him, so it was fun being the host band on a tour like that cause we did our hits and then we'd bring out all of those great singers to do their material while we'd back them up playing, so we basically have our own outing with just Ambrosia and we do our show and then we have this other type of outing where it's Ambrosia and friends, we're sort of forming our own society of the seventies music, we never really got to do that back then as we all had our own careers and we might have crossed paths possibly, but we never got to collaborate and work together like this, so it's a fun outing for us and afterwords we'll sit around telling stories from the road like who was sleeping with who fun meaningless stuff like that, lots of fun and laughs. We are looking forward to coming up to the Big E, we've heard a lot of good things about it, so it will be a fun couple of days up there, and we'll get to see some of the great fall foliage hopefully while we're there as well. Make sure to check out Ambrosia at the Big E on September 18th and 19th at 3:00 p.m. on the Court of Honor stage, it's a show you won't want to miss. for more information on Ambrosia go to their website: www.ambrsialive.net and for more about the Big E go to their website for location and directions: www.thebige.com If you would like to hear the whole interview we did with Burleigh Drummond you can click on either link below from soundcloud or archive.or whichever listening preference you have of choice click below : https://archive.org/details/burleighdrummondoriginaldrummerofambrosia9122019815p.m. https://soundcloud.com/edward-wrobleski/burleigh-drummond-original-drummer-of-ambrosia-9-12-2019-815-pm