Downtown Mobile is once again gearing up to ring in the New Year the only way the Azalea City knows how — with a giant, glowing MoonPie descending from the RSA Trustmark Building as thousands pack the streets below. For the ninth year of MoonPie Over Mobile, organizers have tapped Southern rock veterans .38 Special to headline the free New Year’s Eve street party in downtown Mobile.
The tradition began nearly a decade ago as Mobile’s answer to the countdown spectacles held in other cities — Key West drops a giant conch shell, Atlanta lowers a peach, and Mobile, true to its identity as the self-proclaimed birthplace of the MoonPie, sends a supersized replica of the beloved marshmallow treat down the face of a downtown skyscraper. Over the years the event has drawn tens of thousands of revelers and has featured acts such as En Vogue, The Commodores, The Village People and Gretchen Wilson on the main stage.
This year, the city of Mobile and the Downtown Mobile Alliance turned to .38 Special, the Jacksonville, Florida-founded band that spent the 1980s racking up radio hits including “Hold On Loosely,” “Rockin’ Into the Night” and “Caught Up in You.” More than 40 years into its career, the band still plays roughly 100 cities a year, and founding vocalist and guitarist Don Barnes says the downtown Mobile crowd will get the full show.
“It’s the greatest job in the world,” Barnes said of still performing for both longtime fans and new listeners after four decades. “When we’re on stage, we’re cranking the guitar up to 10 and 19 years old again.”
Barnes, who grew up in the same Jacksonville music scene that produced Lynyrd Skynyrd, said the late Ronnie Van Zandt was an early mentor who pushed the young band to find its own sound rather than mimic the Southern rock acts that came before it, including Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers Band. That advice steered .38 Special toward what Barnes calls “muscle melodies” — hard-charging guitar riffs paired with the more melodic, British Invasion-influenced songwriting that came to define the band’s biggest hits.
One of those hits, “Hold On Loosely,” grew out of Barnes’ own difficult marriage in the early 1980s. He wrote the song with Jim Peterik, the Survivor songwriter behind “Eye of the Tiger,” after the two started talking at a kitchen table about relationships and control. The title, and the reply “but don’t let go,” became the emotional hook for one of the band’s signature singles — a case, Barnes says, of a personal low point turning into one of .38 Special’s most enduring songs.
The band has also weathered lineup changes over the years, including the departure of founding members Donnie Van Zandt and Larry Junstrom. Van Zandt stepped away after doctors warned that continued exposure to loud performances risked permanent hearing damage. Barnes said the band leaned on its deep catalog of Top 40 hits to rebuild a leaner, more high-energy live show built to keep audiences on their feet from the first note to the last.
For Mobile’s New Year’s Eve crowd, that means a set built around the band’s full run of radio staples alongside a few newer songs, all wrapped into what Barnes promises will be a “bombastic” show. “It’s New Year’s Eve, so it’ll be wild,” Barnes said, adding that Mobile’s mayor and city dignitaries are expected to join the crowd on stage for a countdown rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.”
Festivities on Dec. 31 are set to begin at 9:15 p.m. with the ceremonial cutting of the world’s largest edible MoonPie, followed by a second-line parade from the Renaissance Riverview Plaza Hotel to the main stage downtown. An opening act will take the stage ahead of .38 Special’s headlining set, which is scheduled to begin around 10:45 p.m. and run through the midnight countdown, capped off with fireworks and a laser display over the Mobile skyline.
Bars and venues throughout downtown are expected to offer their own entertainment and countdown specials as the city turns its historic core into one large, open-air street party for the night. More information on MoonPie Over Mobile is available through the event’s official website.