Penn’s Peak sits up in the Pocono Mountains outside Jim Thorpe, and if you have not made the drive out yet, this is a reasonable night to fix that. 38 Special is bringing the 50 Year Legacy Tour to the room on Friday, October 2 — showtime 8:00 PM, 1,800 seats, one of the Lehigh Valley and Pocono region’s premier stages. Good reasons to point your car south.
About 38 Special
The band has been on the road in some form since forming in Jacksonville, Florida, co-founded by Don Barnes and Donnie Van Zant — younger brother of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant. Fifty years in, Barnes is still out front and still the gravitational center of the operation. Van Zant stepped away from touring in 2013, but the current lineup — Barnes on lead vocals and guitar, Jerry Riggs on guitar, Bobby Capps on keys, Barry Dunaway on bass, and Gary Moffatt on drums — has been holding down the road for years.
The tour name says it all: five decades of “Hold On Loosely,” “Caught Up in You,” “Rockin’ Into the Night,” and “Second Chance” — a catalog that has moved over 20 million records. But this is not just a victory lap. Last fall the band released Milestone, their first studio album since 2004’s Drivetrain, produced by Will Turpin of Collective Soul, with contributions from Pat Monahan of Train, Randy Bachman of BTO and The Guess Who, and Jim Peterik, co-founder of Survivor. Expect some of that new material woven into a set already stacked with crowd-pleasers.
Barnes put it simply: “We started out with nothing but bold determination to make our own history and to endure.” At 50 years, that is hard to argue with.
About Penn’s Peak
Penn’s Peak is a 1,800-capacity venue on the edge of the Pocono Mountains in Jim Thorpe, PA. It bills itself as the premier entertainment room for the Lehigh Valley and Pocono region — and the booking calendar backs that up. If you are driving in from the Hudson Valley, plan for some mountain highway: scenic, worth it, but give yourself the time.
Tickets & Pricing
Showtime is 8:00 PM on Friday, October 2. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster. No support acts have been announced for this date.