ALLENTOWN, Pa. — On Thursday, Sept. 12, Allentown's PPL Center turns 10 years old.
In the decade since it opened on Sept. 12, 2014, with a concert by The Eagles, the venue has presented 83 concerts (including comedy shows).
There have been some great ones:
KISS played there on its final tour. Tom Petty played a wonderful show three years before his death.
In PPL Center's first year, I saw all of the eight artists who played concerts there (Neil Diamond played on consecutive days; I saw only the first show).
"There’s no such thing as a bad show.”PPL Center General Manager Gunnar Fox
The list could have been longer. In that first year alone, Cher twice rescheduled, then canceled, a show. Rascal Flatts canceled on less than two days' notice.
PPL Center General Manager Gunnar Fox said he has many favorites.
"I think that one that was very special was Elton John’s farewell tour starting in Allentown," Fox said. "That had Allentown really being talked about across the world — social media, news, everything.
"We had people coming in from England and Los Angeles, you name it. That was really, really cool."
He also mentioned “Bon Jovi, Stevie Nicks, Janet Jackson, Tom Petty — unbelievable. But then stuff for the younger crowds — Morgan Wallen, Kane Brown, Twenty One Pilots, Imagine Dragons.
“I thought the Morgan Wallen concert was outstanding," he said. "Brooks and Dunn — I’m a country fan, a prime country fan. So that was one of the best shows that I’ve seen.
“Adam Sandler on the comedy front a couple years ago. For hard rock, we had Five Finger Death Punch, we had Korn, all these acts.
"There’s no such thing as a bad show.”
Picking the best
Of the 83 concerts PPL Center has held, I have seen 49 of them, or nearly 60% — and, I would argue, all of the best ones.
I missed some that likely were good shows — Michael Bublé in 2020, Greta Van Fleet in 2022 and Tool in 2023.
The truth is that few if any others that I didn't attend likely would have been considered for my list of the best.
Here are the 10 best concerts I have seen at PPL Center in its first 10 years:
1. Elton John, Sept. 8, 2018
When John and his Goodbye Yellow Brick Road started his final tour at the PPL Center, he approached it not as the marathon the tour would be — it ended up being 300 performances over three years — but sprinting at full speed, ceding nothing to age. John roared through an exhaustive 24 songs over two hours and 45 minutes. That road had yellow bricks for a reason: It’s paved with gold — and platinum — as in the more than a dozen gold and platinum hits John played.
2. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Sept. 16, 2014
Petty's concert was the second ever at PPL Center. And while The Eagles was the perfect show to open the arena, four days later Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers was the perfect act for the arena’s second event — or any beyond that. While the Eagles played a set that was pleasingly precise in re-creating all its hits, Petty played a far more raucous show that often shook, not soothed, the nearly sold-out crowd. And while the Eagles looked back through their career, Petty looked forward — even when playing hits that sometimes were nearly 35 years old. Petty and the six-man Heartbreakers ripped through an 18-song, hour-and-45-minute set with an intensity that sometimes took them outside the lines. It wasn’t for the sake of changing the songs, but in a way that suggested their confidence.
3. The Eagles, Sept. 12, 2014
In the long run, the Eagles might have been the perfect act to open a gleaming new PPL Center. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group — which once was such a mighty force in music that it sold 60 million albums in the 1970s and became the third-best-selling band of all time — was back on tour after just one studio album in 35 years. That put the band in much the same situation as Allentown — a city that was decades removed from its glory years and looking to reassert itself. The concert spanned two-and-a-half hours plus a 20-minute intermission. When it was the full band playing the hits, the Eagles were impressive indeed.
4. KISS, Feb. 4, 2020
Paul Stanley, lead singer for the rock band KISS, stood onstage at PPL Center, two thirds of the way through its farewell tour, and addressed the nearly sold-out audience. “Yes, we play Philadelphia. Yes, we play Pittsburgh,” Stanley said. “But tonight, no city has anything on you people.” And through the band’s effects-filled, 21-song, two-hour-and-six-minute concert, KISS performed as if that was true. From its start with an explosion and a deluge of sparks and flames, and the band’s four members being lowered to the stage on huge risers for “Detroit Rock City,” KISS offered up a career retrospective of not just its songs, but its classic concert tricks. And it performed them with such zeal that for its last tour, it went out on a high note.
5. Carrie Underwood, March 19, 2016
For entertainment and a full concert experience, country music singer Underwood’s concert might have been PPL Center’s best. It was a supremely talented artist at the top of her game giving an enthusiastic performance. But even more, it was a spectacle. Presented in the round, with a huge, rotating stage in the middle of the arena floor, with massive towers and walkways, lighting, display screens and pyrotechnics, it made PPL Center feel big — and big-time. Underwood was big time, too. In an hour-and-40-minute show, she performed 20 songs that put her talent on full display: A dozen No.1 hits from throughout her decade-long career and more.
6. Bon Jovi, May 2, 2018
“Who says you can’t go home?” Bon Jovi sang on its 2005 hit. And in many ways, the group’s concert at PPL Center was a return to its roots. The 21-song, two-hour and 20-minute show was the New Jersey-born group’s first show in more than 25 years in the Lehigh Valley, where in the mid-1980s (at Bethlehem’s Stabler Arena) it rehearsed and kicked off the tour that marked the height of its commercial success. But that song also was a statement of Bon Jovi’s resilience and staying power — a band that played just two weeks after being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (“We made a little pit stop over in Ohio,” Jon Bon Jovi said later in the night) and had a No. 1 album with its newest disc, “This House is Not for Sale.”
7. James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt, March 1, 2019
Much as singer-songwriter James Taylor has done throughout his nearly 50-year career, his concert gave voice to his listeners. If you were at a station where age has added wisdom, leavened life’s lessons and seasoned its simplicities, the then-70-year-old singer’s show again gave voice to your feelings — just as he did throughout the 1970s, but with a more sage perspective. If, however, you were the kind of person who age has not slowed nor softened, who believes the passing years have not diminished your ability or desire to rock, and who looks upon age not charitably but challenging, Taylor’s opening act Bonnie Raitt blew him away. Raitt, who in the late 1980s and early ’90s (then already in her 40s) was a reminder that women can rock — and can continue to — bestowed that same lesson, as potently as ever.
ALSO, James Taylor, July 2, 2015
Taylor first became popular in the waning days of the 1960s, a time of turmoil perhaps unseen before or since — the soothing sound of his voice a calming effect for a generation. Nearly 50 years later, Taylor seemed to be that voice again. In a time when society again seems split by discord, Taylor’s then-new album “Before This World” debuted at No. 1 — an achievement he’s never before had, as if people again were looking for a voice to soothe them. When Taylor kicked off his tour to promote the disc at PPL Center, the near-sellout audience seemed not only ready to again embrace him, but eager to do it. And Taylor gave them much reason to do so.
8. Neil Diamond, Feb. 27 and March 1, 2015
It almost seems that Neil Diamond has always been with us. Not necessarily at the center of our attention, but somehow as part of the soundtrack to our lives. Then 74, he was far closer to the finish than the start (he retired less than three years later after a Parkinson's disease diagnosis), and that made all the more poignant Diamond’s concert, which kicked off his first tour in two-and-a-half years. In an ambitious set that lasted two hours and covered 27 songs from throughout his 50-year career — including four from his strong new album “Melody Road” — Diamond conveyed all those emotions. And his position as an elder statesman added gravitas.
9. Twenty One Pilots, Jan. 24, 2017
Twenty One Pilots was a duo best seen while it was still young and full of optimism and convinced its music can reach people and make a difference. PPL Center got it at just the right time. Four years to the day that Twenty One Pilots was an opening act at Allentown’s former Crocodile Rock Cafe club just two blocks away, that optimism and honesty still came through. In a set of 19 songs and a medley of four others lasting two hours, Twenty One Pilots spoke far more of life, love and the questions of success than of topics chart-topping songs usually do, and in a way that seemed to connect to everyone in the sold-out crowd.
10. Shania Twain, Oct. 2, 2015
The reasons to see Shania Twain in concert are multitude: She’s the second-best-selling female country artist ever, has the best-selling country album ever, and seven of her songs hit No. 1 on the country chart. But when Twain came to PPL Center, she hadn’t released an album in 13 years and not toured in 11. She had vocal cord lesions that left her unable to sing and barely able to speak. Additionally, Twain said it was her final tour. So to answer the questions — yes, Twain’s voice is not what it was when she last toured in 2004, but she compensated well. And her songs are still great. If she’s not “Still the One,” she at least still impresses much.
Five more great shows
Barry Manilow, Oct. 6, 2017
It was no coincidence that Manilow opened and closed his concert with his 1975 hit “It’s a Miracle.” It may have been a miracle that Manilow, then 74, still performed with the vigor he showed. For nearly the entire 21-song, 85-minute set, he stood at the front of the stage, mic in hand.
Jason Aldean, May 5. 2016
With artists such as Merle Haggard dying off, it’s been left up to singers such as Jason Aldean to carry on real country music. So it was good to see that when Aldean played a sold-out show, despite the strong influence of rock ‘n’ roll on his performance, he still carried on the spirit of country. There was a little twang in his voice, a little edge in his attitude, and an unapologetic love of family, farm and country in his lyrics. And hard work in his presentation: In a show of 19 songs and a medley of four others, Aldean’s energy never seemed to wane.
Kelly Clarkson, March 9, 2019
Clarkson rose out of the stage at her concert to start with a minute-long, a cappella rendering of her first hit and coronation song as the first “American Idol” winner, “A Moment Like This.” It was a song Clarkson skipped in her last Lehigh Valley appearance, at Allentown Fair in 2009, when she was perhaps trying to put her “Idol” image behind her. But on her first tour in three-and-a-half years at PPL Center, maybe Clarkson was trying to remind listeners how good she was, or to reconnect with her past. Clarkson played nearly every charting song she’s ever had in what now is a 17-year career in a 90-minute show of 20 more full songs and a medley of five others.
Rod Stewart and Cyndi Lauper, Aug. 3, 2019
New Kids on the Block, with Boyz II Men and Paula Abdul, July 5, 2017
EDITOR'S NOTE: John J. Moser is LehighValleyNews.com's deputy director for news. He's also a longtime Lehigh Valley music critic and entertainment writer who was recognized by the Lehigh Valley Music Awards for writing and lifetime achievement.
