Brian, far left, with his band
The boys named their band Paxton’s Backstreet Carnival, after a track from a Strawberry Alarm Clock record. They played covers: the Beatles, the Doors, Steppenwolf, the Stones, Creedence, the Zombies. Brian played bass and flute, and he was also the de facto bandleader, the one who could figure out the intricacies of any song in no time at all, score it in his mind, and then teach the song to the rest of the band. Over the summer break, he taught himself electric guitar, and by fall he’d taken that over, too. “In some ways, he was, I think, the most, more gifted of all of us,” said Bob Moorman, the organ player and lead singer, whose father was General Thomas Moorman, the superintendent of the Air Force Academy.
Brian’s band booked gigs all over the state: Glenwood Springs, Denver, South Trinidad. They played proms, an American Legion dance, the Catholic Youth Organization’s national meeting in Denver, and, though they were underage, a regular gig at a local bar called the VIP. In the spring of 1968, they were playing in Denver when they heard gunfire in the distance—a mini-riot following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Colorado Springs may have been a military town in the Vietnam era, but there was something innocent enough about the band that Paxton’s Backstreet Carnival had complete buy-in from the older generation. General Moorman took some extra steps to make life easy for the band, scouting out the interstate in bad weather to make sure it was safe for the boys to drive to gigs. After school, Brian and his bandmates all walked to the Moormans’ house, a big, private residence just around the corner from Air Academy High, where there was more room to rehearse. The band became such a fixture at the Academy that they played for visiting dignitaries. When Lucille Ball shot a two-part episode of her new show, Here’s Lucy, at the Air Force Academy, she listened politely to Paxton’s Backstreet Carnival and shook every band member’s hand afterward. It was anyone’s guess what Lucy made of them. And when Richard Nixon came to deliver a graduation address, five Secret Service agents in black suits interrupted the band’s rehearsal, unable to believe there was a rock band rehearsing in the Air Force Academy superintendent’s garage.
When Don and Mimi were away—taking the girls to Aspen or Santa Fe—Brian opened up the house for parties that seemed to draw the whole senior class, most of them smoking pot around Brian’s younger brothers. Brian started taking LSD, too. But to Don and Mimi, Brian never seemed to be a problem. He was so talented! And so beautiful to look at. That Brian might have been suffering, unnoticed, just as young Donald had, never crossed their minds.
After graduation, Brian followed John to the music program in Boulder. He stayed a year before deciding that college was not for him. There was nothing keeping him local anymore—Paxton’s Backstreet Carnival was no longer a going concern—so he made plans to go west with the hope of playing music and forming a new band. One of Brian’s last local gigs made history, albeit not because of him. On June 10, 1971, he opened for Jethro Tull at Red Rocks, the concert amphitheater built into a natural shelf of outcroppings outside Denver. The show sold out quickly, and when more than a thousand fans showed up without tickets, the overflow crowd was diverted to a space a distance away. Some of those people started climbing a wall between that space and the amphitheater. Others charged the gate. That was when the police flew out in a helicopter and bombed the crowd with tear gas.
For decades, that show would live in infamy as the Riot at Red Rocks, Colorado’s own miniature version of Altamont. Twenty-eight people, four of them police officers, were treated for injuries at the local hospital. Richard and Michael Galvin, then sixteen and eighteen, both remembered watching their rock star brother from a safe spot, away from the riot. Brian was up front, playing flute, as the police began cracking down—“just him and a guitar player,” Michael said—not so far away that he couldn’t smell the tear gas, but too focused on the music to register what was happening.
* * *
That same summer, 1971, Michael Galvin—the fifth son and the only one to proudly accept the label of hippie—was a newly minted high school graduate with no plan, and he could not have been more pleased about that. College was not on his agenda. Michael was not an ambitious person, but he somehow found a way to do what he wanted to do most of the time, and that was quite often enough for him. Altamont and the Manson Family and Kent State had all happened, but the bloom was not yet off the rose of the 1960s for Michael, nor was it for a lot of his friends. With the Vietnam War still raging, he wasn’t so much a conscientious objector as someone who never got around to registering for the draft at all. Michael’s plan, if you could call it that, was to ease his way in and out of any situation he found himself in, and see what happened next.
That summer was the start of Michael’s separation from his family, the first step in becoming himself. First, he hitchhiked to Aspen, where everyone he met was in the middle of reading The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda. Michael picked up both, and, in a way, never put either of them down again. It wasn’t even what either author had to say, specifically, that reached something in him. It was the presentation of worldviews that had nothing to do with the austere Catholic upbringing he’d been forced to endure. These new ideas went down easily with pot and hash and LSD, but that was just part of the appeal.
From Aspen, Michael hitchhiked to Indiana with a friend, and then kept going east alone, hoping to get to New York in time for the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden. He never made it. Instead, he stopped in Jerusalem, Pennsylvania, where he was arrested for taking a bath in a river. Michael spent eleven days in jail before a judge took pity on him and cut him loose. In Akron, Ohio, he was arrested again, this time for loitering. In front of the judge, he copped an attitude.
“Where are you from?” the judge asked.
“I’m from planet earth,” Michael said.
He spent another few days in jail before finally deciding to call home.
“What can you do for me?” Michael asked his father.
“I’ll send you a plane ticket,” Don said. Somehow, as Michael remembered it, his father vouching for him was enough to get him out.
* * *
—
SETBACKS LIKE THIS didn’t hit Michael that hard. “I think I was taking everything in stride,” he’d remember later. Getting tossed in jail, sleeping in a park, or taking a bath in a river were all part of the same broader eye-opening adventure for him—a growing understanding that reality was not necessarily what he’d once thought, that what he’d been brought up to believe may not be all there is.
The reality of being home, however, had never agreed with Michael. The 1960s, by his estimation, had somehow blown right past Hidden Valley Road. While other young people were off finding themselves, he and his brothers still had to dress alike, at least at church, wearing coats and ties on Sunday. Like the military, everyone was presumed to be the same, and everyone was expected to obey. If a Galvin son ever chose to question Mimi—which Michael made a regular habit of—she rarely settled for anything less than what she had first demanded.