SACRAMENTO, Calif.--If not for signs outside the doors indicating a Los Lobos [ tickets ] concert, the University Union Ballroom at California State University, Sacramento, could have easily been mistaken for the site of a real-estate seminar on Thursday (5/3).

A thousand-plus chairs--nearly all of them occupied by bodies--were assembled into neat rows, and a crowd with a median age that probably hovered around 40 sat patiently through two opening acts.

Los Lobos couldn’t have been impressed when they surveyed the room, and it showed when singer-guitarist David Hidalgo led the band through a fairly lackluster, jangly take on “One Time One Night,” from their 1987 album, “By the Light Of the Moon.”

Things perked up a bit when Cesar Rosas, the band’s shades- and soul-patch-wearing icon, shared vocal duties with Hidalgo on the song that followed, “Kiko and the Lavender Moon,” and Rosas proceeded to claim the bulk of the spotlight for the remainder of the night.

“Is there room out there for people to dance?” Rosas asked early in the performance. And slowly, as the band negotiated a series of rockers and Tex-Mex dance numbers from throughout its extraordinary 20-plus year career, the crowd found room to dance. A small gap of space between the stage and the first row of seats filled in, and the aisles gradually became packed with gyrating bodies.

During the first half of the two-hour show, Hidalgo's vocals seemed half-hearted, and he even ignored some cues to play guitar solos. Rather than following Hidalgo’s lead, however, the rest of the band took his apparent disinterest in the evening’s proceedings as a challenge to impress him.

The show moved into jam territory during its second hour, and the band's playing grew more impassioned when it launched into the title track from its latest studio album, “This Time,” around which it expertly sandwiched a fine rendition of Bob Marley’s “Waiting in Vain.”

What followed amounted to a romp through guitar rock history, with the band dropping in musical snippets from the surf classic “Pipeline,” the theme from “Batman,” the Yes prog-rock anthem “Roundabout” and the Rascals’ “Good Lovin,'” among many others. Into the mix, the band managed to fit its two obligatory crowd-pleasers, “La Bamba” and “Come On Let’s Go,” as well as an extended take on Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing.”

The encore concluded with “Mas y Mas,” a Spanish-language rave-up from 1996's “Colossal Head.” There was no longer a butt in a seat. Even Hidalgo, fully extracted from his earlier funk, was smiling gleefully as he put down his guitar and finished the song--and the show--playing the bongo drums.