Peter Rivera first encountered the drums when he was a child and his parents decided he needed a hobby. Rivera wasn’t interested. He didn’t practice, and his hard-working blue-­collar father wasn’t one to waste money.

End of story? Not quite. When Rivera was in his teens, he got interested in drums on his own. Convinced that young Peter was serious, his father refinanced the family home to buy a professional-grade drum set. Rivera reciprocated by working a paper route until he’d repaid the purchase price.

It was money well invested. By the time Rivera was 18, he was making more money playing drums in local nightclubs than his father was bringing home from his full-time factory job. The gigs got bigger and better until the band, then known as the Sunliners, was one of the top club bands in Detroit.

In 1968 the Sunliners became Rare Earth, and in 1969 they were signed by Motown and given their own namesake record label.

Rare Earth had an impressive string of hits in the early 1970s that included a million-selling remake of a Temptations’ hit, “Get Ready,” and four other Top 20 singles. Rivera was lead vocalist on all those hits — and, along the way, paid off his parents’ mortgage.

“‘Born to Wander’ and ‘Losing You’ are two of my favorites,” Rivera said last week, taking a call in the middle of a busy working day in Los Angeles. “Losing You” — the full title is “(I Know I’m) Losing You” — was another song that had been a hit for the Temptations. And, like Rare Earth’s remake of “Get Ready,” the remake charted higher on the Hot 100 than the Temptations’ original.

Almost half-a-century later, Rivera is 72 and an active songwriter, recording artist and performer. He’ll have some copies of his recently released CD, “It Is What It Is,” some photos and copies of his Rare Earth memoir, “Born to Wander,” with him on Saturday, when he headlines Robin Kimura’s “‘70s Nightclub Reunion Celebrate!” at the Ala Moana Hotel.

“I did a corporate show (in Hawaii) a few years back, but other than that it’ll be my first time there since the ’70s — the H.I.C. is where we used to play,” he continued, using the abbreviation of the original name — Honolulu International Center — for the facility now known as Blaisdell Arena.

HAWAII’S CLASSIC nightclub scene of the 1970s and early 1980s will be represented by three “Nightclub Reunion” veterans — Greenwood, Power Point and Odyssey — and the Mopp Tops, playing the event for the first time.

The Mopp Tops actually predate the ‘70s nightclub scene by almost a decade — the original group, an instrumental trio, recorded a locally released 45-rpm single in 1965. (Michael Nakasone, the high school band teacher whom Mufi Hannemann picked to replace Aaron Mahi as bandmaster of the Royal Hawaiian Band in 2004, was a founding member).

The group survived a series of personnel changes that kept the Mopp Tops going after the original members moved on. Guitarist Bernard Doseo, one of the first replacement Mopp Tops, will be joined by several later members of the group.

Personnel changes are something Rivera has had plenty of experience with. Three members of Rare Earth had left the group for various reasons by the time he left in 1974. Motown executive Barney Ales, the man who’d convinced Berry Gordy Jr., to sign Rare Earth in the first place, got Rivera back with the group in 1976; Rivera witnessed more comings and goings before he departed for the final time in 1983.

“We were constantly moving,” he said of his Rare Earth days. “We played in Anchorage, Alaska, for one show and we were gone the next day. Was I in Alaska? I guess I was, but it was one day in and one day out.”

Rivera has warmer memories of Hawaii and has returned several times as an anonymous vacationer. Many rock music veterans are partial to Maui but Rivera volunteered that he prefers Honolulu.

Did the Temptations ever say anything about Rare Earth’s success remaking their hits? Rivera says the subject never came up. He recalls meeting David Ruffin, an original member of the Temptations “when he would come into the club” and says Ruffin sometimes sat in with them and sang Temptations songs, but Ruffin left the Temptations a year before Rare Earth was signed by Motown and they lost touch with him.

Rivera adds that Rare Earth never thought of themselves as competing with the Temptations when they recorded their remake versions.

“FOR ‘GET READY’ we needed a song to finish the album, so we all took solos until the engineer signaled ‘Enough,’ and then we ended it. The Temptations’ version was very commercial, but ours was a little different,” Rivera recalled.

“Every song you do in the studio, you feel, ‘That’s a smash!’ That’s how you do your best to the song,” he continued.

“Every song has to live on its own and you believe in it when you’re inside the song — vocals, backgrounds, overdubs, everything — you are working on that song and you’re trying to make it the next greatest thing ever. And then you come out of it and you realize that some of them aren’t (the greatest thing ever) and some of them are. So, no, I didn’t know (which were going to be hits). I’ve had songs on albums that I didn’t like and people would come up to me and say, ‘Man, I really liked that one.’”

Looking back to his earliest days as a drummer, Rivera thanked his parents. “They were really there for me. ‘My son, the drummer.’ So many kids don’t have that. They have parents they don’t get along with. I never had that problem.

“When I was a teenager, 15 or 16, I didn’t have a curfew ‘cause I was in a band with guys who were already 18 or 19 — good guys, they weren’t hoodlums or anything — so my parents felt I was in good hands. They told me to always call home if I was going to be gone (late) and I always did. It worked out well.”