High school hosts Bad Company
for fund-raiser
By Sarah Szczepanski
Assistant
Features Editor
Harrison High School students won't have to travel
door to door as much to solicit money now that the band Bad Company
is coming to Lafayette.
Bad Company, a group that was popular in the '80s,
will perform at 8 p.m. Saturday at Harrison High School as a fund-raiser
for the high school.
"We don’t just want to knock on someone’s
door and ask them to do this or buy this," said Jerry Galema, the athletic
director for Harrison. "This way we can give something back to the community
– we can offer them something in return."
Galema said he has been attempting to bring Bad
Company to Lafayette for quite some time.
"We've been in contact with his people for more
than a year now because it's pretty hard to get him to play a venue
of this size," said Galema. "It's very unusual to have a high school
bring in an act of this size."
The lead singer for Bad Company, Brian Howe, said
besides fishing and swimming at the beach, he tries to do a certain
amount of fund-raising events each year.
"My kids are in high school so I know how things
can be in high schools with the current lack of funding," Howe said.
"The whole education system is terribly under-funded, it's become an
inherent problem in the U.S. The government should be ashamed. I'm trying;
I'll do a damn better job than our government will do. They're too busy
bombing other countries."
Howe said he and his group, which includes former
musicians from Heart and .38 Special, perform on 150 dates each year.
Although Howe has played large venues, he said he is still the same
person.
"I live pretty much the way I did before I had
money," Howe said. "My daughter's a straight-A student and my son does
very well in school. They're really into learning and studying and things
like that; the things I was never interested in. My son thinks I'm absolutely
stupid for doing what I do."
"It’s like the high school gig, you won't
find the Rolling Stones doing a gig like this. I play big gigs –
35,000 people – but you can learn just as much playing for a small
audience as you can a large one."
The venue may be comparatively small for Howe and
the rest of Bad Company, but the audience should be a combination for
people of all ages, according to Galema.
This is nothing new for the group, Howe said.
"We get quite a mix," he said. "There are parents
who bring in their kids and say this is what music is like, this is
good music. I would say that most of my audience is over 30, but having
said that, the first five rows at my last concert were all kids."
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