Gary James' Interview With Burleigh Drummond Of
Ambrosia



He's the drummer for one of the most successful American bands. Between 1975 and 1980 they charted hit records like "How Much I Feel" (#3), "Biggest Part Of Me" (#3), "You're The Only Woman (You And I)" (#13), and "Holdin' On To Yesterday" (#17). The group toured with Heart, Fleetwood Mac and The Doobie Brothers, and they're still touring today! The group we're speaking of is Ambrosia. Ambrosia's drummer, Burleigh Drummond, talked with us about his past and the group he pounds the skins for.

Q - Burleigh, what a perfect name for a drummer, Drummond. Can you get a better name than that? I don't think so.

A - Well, it wasn't like it was premeditated or anything like that. When I started music, my parents started me on accordion and then wanted me to play guitar, but I ended up playing all those things. But drums were the fascination for me.

Q - And you even went to co-found a group called Tin Drum. You just have to wonder if anybody would ask you, "What instrument do you play?"

A - (laughs) Tim Drummond was a real famous bass player. He played for Neil Young for years.

Q - You know what else you have going for yourself? You're a self-described "Army brat". So, the life of a touring musician would not be foreign to you.

A - Well, yeah. Army brats are typically two years in one place. So yeah, you do get used to moving around.

Q - Ambrosia just got back from a gig in Jamaica?

A - We were invited by the Yacht Rock Review. They celebrated all things Yacht Rock. They asked us to be their special guests. So, it was really nice. I've got to salute them because they are keeping that genre of music alive and prospering and growing. It's like the fan base is growing and growing. It's great.

Q - What exactly is Yacht Rock Review?

A - They're a group unto themselves. They're young. They're in their 30s. They're doing this Yacht Rock tribute. So, they asked us, the old guys, to come be their special guests. It was fun.

Q - Is it true that the three guys who formed the nucleus of Ambrosia agreed to play together without ever having played together?

A - Well, yeah. Let's say we got together... It's a long story. They were a band before me, Dave Pack, Joe Puerta and Christopher North, and they wanted to replace their drummer. I had put a 3" x 5" card on a place called Musicians Contact Service, a little postcard where you could put your name and what instrument you played for five dollars. You put it on the board. Five bucks was a lot in 1970, but I coughed it up and put my name up there. About a week later I had three guys knocking on my door and we became Ambrosia. I think we were pretty excited by our mutual interests. The first time we played in Joes's living room, his parent's living room I mean, the first song lasted a couple of hours. That's how excited we were to play together. From there we just kept going. It's been fifty-two years now.

Q - And you guys all get along. Your personalities must have been compatible.

A - It was just a strange combination of personalities and talent. I wouldn't say it's always been a bed of roses, but it's like any other group. It's like being married to three other people. You have your ups and downs. You have your alliances, your falling outs. All those kinds of things. Somehow we managed to keep going.

Q - Where did you guys perform in the early days? Were you doing clubs or did you bypass that and concentrate on writing and recording original material?

A - We did basically everything that a young group starting out would do. We did have some interesting adventures because we were kind of... I mean, we weren't really what I would call a Top 40 dance band. We would go play clubs that wanted kind of dance music, but we had too much of an exploratory nature. Say, if we started out with a dance tune, pretty soon it became a Jazz thing. We'd get fired a lot of the times. (laughs) But we were favorites at Free Clinic concerts, things like that. Things where people would go to listen, we were great. We just weren't a wallpaper dance band. But then we got into some strange things where the sound company we were friends with asked us to audition their sound system at the Hollywood Bowl for them so they could sell their system. That attracted the Chief Recording Engineer from Decca. So, he took us under his wing and we met every Classical conductor on the face of the Earth practically. Anyone of any stature. We hung out with Leonard Bernstein for a long time. So, we did have some kind of unique adventures and interactions with people more than say your typical band. I'm not trying to toot our horn too loud, but we seemed to attract a strong mix of people that helped us along the way.

Q - Where did this Ambrosia sound come from? Soft Rock seemed to gain attention in the early 1970s with The Carpenters, Jim Croce, John Denver. Ambrosia came along later than that.

A - Our first album came out in 1975. It was called "Holding On To Yesterday". In those first two records that we did, which was '75 and '77 I believe, we were kind of considered to be a Prog band, Progressive Music band. We were touted as America's answer to King Crimson, Yes, Genesis. Bands like that. I should back up a little bit. When we got our first deal with a label called 20th Century Fox, the president of that was Russ Reagan. Russ Reagan discovered Elton John, Neil Diamond, Olivia Newton-John, Barry White. People like that. When he signed us he asked us to demo up our songs so he could kind of pick what he wanted. So, we did. We demoed sixty tunes, all different styles, Country/Western, Blues. But we had some Progressive in there and he heard it. He heard songs like "Nice Nice Very Nice", "Hold On To Yesterday" and I believe we did "Mama Frog" for him. Out of all the songs he heard, he applauded all the songs, he just picked the Progressive side, saying he had the other styles on his label. He just didn't have what we were capable of doing in the Progressive arena. So, that's what he wanted us to supply. That gave us the license to really pursue the music that we really enjoyed the most.

Q - Did 20th Century Fox do a good job for Ambrosia?

A - Yeah. They broke our first single right out of the gate, "Holdin' On To Yesterday". So I think they did their job. Our second album did not produce a Top 40 hit. Whether you can blame the label or blame the group, that's such a fickle thing, having the combination of having the right tune, being in the right place at the right time on the right label. There's so many variants that go into the success of something like that. But we moved over to Warner Bros. at that point and then our third album came out and we had kind of added a new sound. We still had the Progressive side, but we were doing tunes like "How Much I Feel" and "Biggest Part Of Me" and "You're The Only Woman". So, we had added kind of an R&B side to the Prog we were already doing. So we kind of diversified the sound and all of a sudden we were getting hits. "How Much I Feel" was obviously a hit, "Biggest Part Of Me", "You're The Only Woman". So now we had broadened the palate a little bit here. Warners I think did a good job on that.

Q - 1978 was when the hits started coming for Ambrosia then?

A - Well, yes. Our second hit happened in '78 with "How Much I Feel".

Q - Would you say the success of the band could be attributed to your songs, radio airplay, or the support you received from Warner Bros. Records, or a combination of all three?

A - Yeah. I think it always is. You have to have all those elements, in that day especially. There was no artist breaking themselves. You were dependent on large labels for the promotion. Now there's independent releases. People seem to get famous doing their own videos and self-promoting, which I think is great. I salute that a hundred per cent. But back in that day you were much more dependent on a label.

Q - And with all the creative freedom an artist enjoys today, you try posting a video on YouTube and 700.000 videos are uploaded on YouTube each and every day. Your chance of being noticed are incredibly slim.

A - Yeah. I would think so. I had a manager once when I was really trying to break Tin Drum and get some attention to Tin Drum, who was very supportive. He said if one out of a hundred people heard your music enough to want to listen to it or buy or subscribe to it, then you have a career. It's really just exposing yourself, and that's the work. That's where the work comes in, exposing yourself to the masses out there. That's endless. I think even when you're an established artist you can never let down that supplying of new material or interesting stories or tours. You need to keep your image out there. You need to keep your name present.

Q - Ambrosia actually auditioned for Herb Alpert. That label would have been a perfect fit for the group. What happened?

A - Well, when we did that we did three songs that were pretty tame by Ambrosia's standards. I mean, it was like our first time in the studio. We were very green. We did three songs for him and he ended up passing on us. I can totally justify why he did it. We weren't ready. But the demos we cut there, later on a friend of ours, an engineer who was working at another studio and played them to try out the system and see what he was listening to, the owner of the studio heard those songs and one of them was "Holdin' On To Yesterday" by the way, but more of a Country version. The owner of the studio turned out to be Freddy Pirro, who became our manager and took those songs to Russ Reagan, off the same demos. So, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? It's like you never know.

Q - You never know what's going to be a hit. It's a guessing game. It's not science.

A - I feel like I have a feeling. No, I take that back. I had a feeling about what could be a hit during our run. But nowadays I hear music, you could play stuff that's on the Top 40 or 50 charts now and I have no connection to it. I couldn't tell you who it was. It's like another style of music that has come along. I don't relate to it as much. I can appreciate some of it, but it's not my genre anymore.

Q - Did you help write the hit songs for Ambrosia along with David Park and Joe Puerta?

A - Sure. Within Ambrosia I was kind of like the George Harrison. I supply my one or two songs per album. Joe and Dave were the primary writers, but we were all contributors. We all worked on each other's songs. Something that I may have played on, the drums triggered Joe or Dave to write in that vein or to write to that groove and so it's impossible to say anybody wrote anything by themselves because we were all influencing each other all the time.

Q - Does that mean you each got songwriting credit to every song? You split the songwriting royalties equally?

A - Sometimes. In Ambrosia it really wasn't a generous situation. It was more like if you wrote the melody and the lyric, those were the only things that counted, which now in retrospect I think was a mistake because you'd have somebody, especially like Chris North who was the keyboard player who made amazing contributions to the music but never really shared in the songwriting because of the narrow definition of what songwriting was. I think he was slighted in that situation.

Q - I interviewed Joe Puerta I believe in 1980, just at the same time Ambrosia had a number one hit on the radio. At that time there was an article in People magazine on Ambrosia, towards the back of the magazine. I recall asking your publicist, "Shouldn't Ambrosia be on the cover of People magazine?" Do you remember that article I'm talking about?

A - No. I don't remember that. I wasn't even aware of that. I appreciate you doing that. I wasn't aware of that.

Q - Ambrosia went on tour with groups like Heart. How did your music go over their audience?

A - Great. We toured with almost everybody. I mean Foreigner, Fleetwood Mac, Doobie Brothers. Even Rush. We used to open for Rush, which was interesting. It was like playing for the fights. You'd be up there playing and you'd just watch young guys get in fights with each other. It was interesting. (laughs)

Q - Why were they fighting each other?

A - It was just young male testosterone. It was crazy, but fun.

Q - But not fun to be a part of.

A - I would not want to be out there in the audience, no.

Q - Your wife has quite a resume. She's worked with Pink Floyd and Jimmy Buffett.

A - Yeah. She sang background for Pink Floyd. Basically she did a lot of sweetening. When they did live albums she was kind of called in to make the background sound better or fuller. She's really good at that. She played with Jimmy Buffett and she also played and sang with Animal Logic and XTC. People like that. So yeah, she had quite a resume.

Q - Oh, there's so much talent in that family of yours!

A - (laughs) Thank you. If you really want to talk about talent, I don't mean to go off, but man, my son and daughter are killin' it! My daughter is killin' it right now. She's writing songs every day. I can't keep up with her.

Q - What is she doing with those songs? Does she have a record deal?

A - No, she doesn't. She just came home right when COVID hit. She had to come home from the Peace Corps. She had been in the Peace Corps in Thailand. She came home and of course everybody went through major changes during COVID. I'm sure you did too. And so she kind of went back to her passion of doing music. She'd done an album's worth of music that we're trying to record for her and get it out. But during COVID, Tin Drum became the Tin Drum Family Band, since we were the only ones we could play with. So, we did a lot of live streaming. We kind of got known for that. Now we're playing around as the Tin Drum Family Band and my daughter has kind of become the impetus for that. She's so musically gregarious out there. She's like playing every day now. She's an inspiration.

Official Websites: www.TinDrumMusic.com and www.AmbrosiaAlive.net

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

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