This is the conclusion of the third part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb) looking at the role of the general in commanding pre-gunpowder armies in battle. Last time we looked at how junior officers, when empowered to act independently, could give armies a degree of flexibility and reactiveness on the battlefield but didn’t necessarily increase the amount of actual control the general exerted over them.

This week we’re going to finish up this analysis by looking at the rank and file soldiers themselves and the issue of morale. Film and video games generally present a binary portrait of morale: soldiers are either 100% following orders and prosecuting the battle vigorously or else running away in disordered terror and never anywhere between. But in fact the morale and cohesion of armies are complex and unpredictable things, with many possible outcomes. Moreover, popular fiction across many genres tends to represent armies as far more willing to fight on through high casualties as they were historically.

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Gaming Morale

Most strategy/tactics games do not simulate morale at all, of course. In Starcraft or Age of Empires, all soldiers fight on until killed; they only retreat under orders (by the player) and never attempt to surrender. We’re going to set those sorts of games aside for the moment, however, and focus on games that do attempt some kind of morale simulation.

For games that do simulate morale, it generally exists in a binary state: units are either in good (enough) morale and will follow any and all orders the player gives them or they are ‘broken’ and will retreat uncontrollably to the rear. The binary itself is odd since, as we’ll see, morale and cohesion can exist in a lot of states. But it also has gameplay implications: because the shift from ‘fine’ to ‘broken’ is so immediate and severe (especially in games where it is unit-wide), the tendency in game design is to make the break-point very high.

The Total War series is probably the most popular strategy game series where morale plays a major role and provides a good example of the binary framework. As is the norm for such games, morale (or ‘leadership’ depending on the game) is a binary: units either execute your orders with full enthusiasm or run away uncontrollably with no binary space in the middle. There is a touch more complexity than this, but only a touch: units can either be ‘broken’ or ‘shattered;’ both flee uncontrollably, but ‘broken’ units can eventually reform if their morale improves. The way the game determines if a unit should flee is based on that ‘leadership’ or ‘morale’ stat: every unit has a different starting value (enhanced by gaining combat experience) which is then positively modified by things like a nearby general or friendly units and negatively modified by things like losses and danger; if they value drops below zero and stays there long enough the unit flees.

Now on the one hand, units in Total War consider a lot of things to determine their current morale: unit casualties, army casualties, the rate of unit losses,¹ routing friendly units, unit fatigue, the presence or absence of friendly units on the flanks and the presence of strong enemy units,² all matter to varying degrees. On the other hand, unit morale is generally set so high that most of these factors are at best indecisive unless they are stacked together with substantial damage to the unit. That is, it isn’t enough to flank a tired unit with a strong enemy and rout a unit next to them if the unit in question hasn’t taken substantial casualties they aren’t going anywhere.

To take some extreme examples, I set up some test battles in Total War: Warhammer II.³ First, I took the most bog standard infantry unit, the Empire Swordsmen – a solidly run-of-the-mill unit with neither particularly good nor particularly bad leadership (though the unit had 0 experience, so we are at the low end of ‘standard’) – and smashed them into a line of Har Ganeth Executioners, one of the strongest and most dangerous anti-infantry units available to see how long it would take for the line of swordsmen to run away.⁴ The answer, as shown below, was about 50% total army casualties – 1,168 models killed before the remaining 1,113 ran away. Then for the sake of setting a lower bound, I re-ran the experiment mashing an entire army of Bretonnian peasant mob – a unit noted on its unit card as having ‘low leadership’ – into an army of Swordsmen for a similarly lopsided fight; the peasant mob obediently charged the swordsmen and only retreated after having sustained roughly 1/3 losses.

This is, to put it mildly, not how actual armies behaved on the battlefield. But it is precisely how these units generally behave in Total War games. Indeed the community term for units like the peasant mob are ‘tarpits:’ cheap and weak units with lots of models and health which can hold down more powerful units simply by the time it takes to cut through them, especially if a nearby general or hero can provide the peasants with just a touch more morale. It’s a use-case for ‘chaff’ infantry with in fact depends on even extremely low leadership units sticking in the fight until they’ve taken significant casualties. And by and large they will do that; peasant mob’s 36 leadership is enough to keep them fighting even if they are charged from behind (-14) by a more powerful enemy unit (-4) with a bunch of their allies running away (-6) at the same moment their general dies (-10) if they haven’t yet taken any losses. And this is a peasant mob, the lowest leadership human⁵ unit available as far as I know. Any one of those things historically, as we’ll see, was sufficient to rout far more cohesive armies.

Now to be clear that doesn’t mean these morale modifiers don’t matter at all (at least on normal difficulty), they do. The key thing you are trying to do in a Total War battle is inflict losses to grind down enemy morale on all of their units and then use one or more of these ‘shocks’ to ‘spike’ that morale negative to rout the unit. But trying to rout even extremely low morale units without first grinding down their health is basically impossible. Indeed, it is so difficult that the game is set with a not-quite-hidden ‘backstop’ to the morale system: the ‘army losses penalty’ – a morale penalty which kicks up to absolutely massive values once the game decides that an army’s losses are too severe. Players on difficulties higher than normal will be very familiar with this because at any of the higher difficulties in the game, ‘army losses’ is just about the only way to actually rout high leadership units. But even on lower difficulties the ‘army losses’ penalty is necessary to avoid the odd spectacle of even very low leadership units that, while undamaged themselves, have just watched the entire rest of their army be crushed, inexplicably sticking in the fight.

Other games with similar ‘binary’ morale tend to be no less absurd in terms of how courageous they make even very basic units. Here’s a recent battle of mine from Mount and Blade: Bannerlord. The screenshot might be a bit hard to read if you are unfamiliar with the game, so let me decode.

Bannerlord handles large battles by having each army get a proportion of its forces on the field at start and then replacements ‘trickle’ in as casualties are taken. These two armies were on the same general order of magnitude, one army of 1000 and another of around 1400 (the former having much more cavalry).⁶ As you can see the defending army, out of its 1000, sustained 472 KIA (the red skull on the right) and 503 WIA (the broken shield on the right) before the surviving 37 troops retreated (the flag on the right). They inflicted only 119 casualties total; this was a preposterously, crushingly one-sided fight. Indeed, because of that trick effect only 436 of the 1,400 troops available to the attacker were even engaged. And yet the defender waited until they had sustained an astounding 96.3% casualty rate before attempting to run away.⁷ The wild thing is that the defending army featured a lot of cavalry (a typical Khuzait army, for those that play the game), which could have run away very effectively!

Not all games are quite so extreme, of course. Battles in Paradox titles – I’ll use Crusader Kings III as an example here because its the one I’ve played most recently – tend to feature casualty rates that are often a lot closer to historical norms. Looking through my own recent games, lopsided battles between armies of equivalent size tend to inflict around a quarter to a third losses (presumably both KIA and serious WIA since the ‘killed’ figure reflects all men not able to return to service), often with most of those casualties occurring during the ‘retreat’ phase of the battle – which is correct. The exception here are ‘stack wipes’ where an army is so wildly overmatched that it is defeated completely; I think we may take this to mean in most cases that the army collapsed and dispersed rather than that 100% of its troops were killed. Nevertheless a third to a quarter losses is closer to right, but actually probably still about triple the general average. It is not a good sign when the closest we seem to get is roughly three times the historical norm.

And if you are wondering ‘how do you **get** results that lopsided?’ In this case, the answer is having an army that is almost entirely men-at-arms and knights, resulting in extremely high quality ratings. This is relatively late in a reform-the-Roman-Empire run, so the poor French here are facing the cream of a **very** large Mediterranean crop.

I’ve focused on game morale systems here, but of course this blends over into film as well, where the ‘mooks’ often charge the heroes seemingly utterly heedless of their losses – frequently despite the fact that the last identical group of mooks to do so just got taken apart before their very eyes. And invariably they do this until they are so beaten that they switch to the other binary state, simply running away.

Actual armies have far more than two states of morale and behaved in far more dynamic, unpredictable and interesting ways!

Morale and Cohesion

The first problem with this ‘binary model’ of morale is that it assumes just a single factor (‘leadership’ or ‘morale’) but in practice we ought to be thinking about at least two different ingredients here: morale and cohesion.

Morale is the commitment the combatants have to their leadership and their cause. To simplify a bit, we might say that soldiers with good morale believe three things: that their cause is a worthy one, that they are on the road to success and that their leaders have a good (enough) plan to achieve final victory. Poor morale can result from a breakdown in any of those three elements: troops might for instance believe both in their goal and its eventual possibility but not in their leaders to produce it (this seems to have been the case, for instance, in the French Mutiny of 1917, discussed below). On the other hand, regardless of the charisma of leaders, few people come to a war intending to die in it; if the cause appears impossible, morale will sink regardless. And armies that do not believe in the cause at all are extremely difficult to motivate by other means.

On the other hand cohesion is the force that holds a specific unit together through the power of the bonds holding the individual combatants to each other and/or to their (generally junior or non-commissioned) officers. There are a lot of ways to build that cohesion: people are generally unwilling to abandon neighbors, close friends and relatives, for one. They are also reluctant to expose themselves to shame at home for having done so; shame is one of the few things people fear as much, if not more than, death. For armies that can’t rely on that sort of organic cohesion, it can be built by reconstructing the soldier’s unit as his primary social group. Drill can do this: it creates an experience of shared suffering and achievement which bonds the soldiers together creating strong ‘artificial’ cohesion.

These two ingredients have different roots, but they also function differently. The formulation that has always stuck with me is one from James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1998): morale (McPherson discusses it under the heading of ‘the Cause’) will get men into uniform, it will sustain them on large marches and cold nights and it will get them to the battle, but it will not get them through the battle. Instead, cohesion (the ‘comrades’ of the title) gets men through the terror of actual combat, when fear has driven ‘the cause’ far from mind. But of course cohesion isn’t enough on its own either, since it provides no reason to advance or attack or really to do anything at all except stick together.

Adding further complication to this, morale and cohesion are not, as they often exist in games, inherent properties of a unit, but rather emergent properties of the interactions of a whole bunch of individuals. In a strategy game, units exist primarily as extension of the player’s will; in film units typically exist as extensions of their commander’s or the main character’s will (note how common it is that right as the hero begins winning his duel with the villain, so too his army begins winning the battle). But of course actual armies are composed of lots of humans, each with their own individual will and agency.

Those humans are continually making calculations about risks, goals and survival. It’s not hard here to see why, by the by, morale won’t carry troops through high risk conditions: if your only goal is to survive to experience the end-state of the war, then it is always in your interest to let someone else do the dying; it doesn’t serve your end to stay in a high risk position. By contrast, if you are held there by the fear of shame if your close comrades see you run, that still applies. Thus these calculations get progressively more ‘primal’ as the sense of danger rises (fear makes a mess of those higher brain functions), but they do not stop.

Complex Outcomes

The result is a wide range of complex and unpredictable outcomes, rather than the neat binary state we tend to see in video games or film, where everyone is either 100% committed or 100% running away.

Consider, for instance, an army with high morale but with weak cohesion. This is actually so common an occurrence that it actually becomes tricky to point out specific examples; its most common expression are units at the beginning of a war that despite being highly motivated ‘for the cause’ nevertheless fall apart quickly when the fighting starts. A classic example is the First Battle of Bull Run (1861); both army’s morale was evidently high (they both thought they were about to win a brief and glorious war!) and that morale carried them into the battle just fine. But when it became evident that the US Army wasn’t winning the day, that morale was insufficient and the new and not yet sufficiently trained army lacked the cohesion to hold together, leading to a panic and collapse where the units themselves dissolved in a frenzied retreat.

What is striking in this example is that the army didn’t dissolve, because while cohesion had failed, morale had not. After the frenzy of the retreat war off, the army mostly reformed; only 1,216 US soldiers were reported missing after the battle (of 18,000 or so engaged), so most of the men found their way back to their units (one way or the other). Meanwhile the public and political leaders remained committed to the war, redoubling recruitment and enlistment; that commitment both reflected and influenced army morale: victory was still desirable and still possible. And so the army reformed to try again. The American Civil War is replete with examples like this where unit cohesion failed, but those same units after embarrassing retreats reformed and rejoined the army, often to put in solid service in later battles. Of course penalties for desertion and inducements for service also might play a part in this, but as I think McPherson (op. cit.) demonstrates, for both the United States and the Confederacy, ‘the cause’ was the driving factor. Morale brought the armies back together and sustained them through the campaigning – but it was not enough to hold together in battle until cohesion had been built within units.

What about an army experiencing a collapse of morale but with high cohesion? Here the particulars of the breakdown in morale matter a lot. A collapse of cohesion produces a fairly predictable result: the unit falls apart under the immediate stress and flees. But a collapse in morale, especially where cohesion is high means the unit stays together and generally continues to act in concert. The fact that they still act in concert means whatever they do will have all of the force of that cohesion, but the collapse of morale makes that action unpredictable.

Units may, for instance, hold together but refuse to attack or refuse to attack vigorously, especially in cases where the troops have lost faith in their leaders, but not in the cause. A classic example of this outcome is the 1917 French Mutiny. The French Army, having sustained very heavy losses in the previous years of the First World War responded to the failure of the Nivelle Offensive in April 1917 with a general mutiny that rapidly spread over much of the front. The immediate cause was the ‘crash’ in morale after the great optimism for the offensive (it was supposed to win the war) was dashed by its failure. What’s striking is that the mutinous soldiers in question didn’t simply desert en masse; they didn’t just go home, even after it was clear that the officers had lost control and more than half of the French army was refusing orders. Instead of retreating or rebelling, the mutinous divisions mostly just refused to advance; they had lost faith in the strategy and the generals, not the cause.⁸

Via Wikipedia, French infantrymen in Paris in July, 1917. Called poilus, “hairy ones” both for their often rustic origins but also their tendency to grow out facial hair (and the difficulty of shaving and grooming in the trenches), French soldiers were poorly paid and permitted little leave. One of the issues was the relative degree of social distance between French officers and their troops; both British and American commanders remarked on the resultant relatively poor provisions made for common French soldiers in their trenches, which contributed to the mutiny of 1917 (though British morale at that point was only marginally better).

In this case it also impacted the solution. While there was an immediate effort to crack down on the soldiers, what really seems to have alleviated the mutiny was a change in command: Nivelle was dismissed, replaced by the far more popular Petain⁹ and he promised a more careful strategy which wouldn’t waste the lives of his men (along with better pay and leave). The French Army had lost faith in its leaders, so a change in leader was able to restore the situation, at least to a degree.

Alternately, a highly cohesive army whose morale fails may turn on its leaders completely; this is particularly notable for armies that are at best weakly attached to the fortunes of the state or society they serve. Thus for instance after the end of the First Punic War, Carthage’s armies, composed mostly of mercenaries, turned on the state and instead formed the backbone of a widespread North African rebellion against Carthaginian rule (for more on this, check out Dexter Hoyos, Truceless War (2007); alas it is not cheap so try your library). A similar early modern example is the behavior of the Army of Flanders in 1576: having been left unpaid for an extended period due to the financial difficulties of the Kingdom of Spain, the army responded by electing new leaders and then brutally sacking its own regional capital, Antwerp. What’s striking here is that the army did this while functioning in perfect order (albeit against one of their own cities) – being able to execute a capable storming attack on a defended, fortified city – because cohesion was not the problem and the troops knew their business.

Via Wikipedia, “The Spanish Fury” (De Spaanse Furie), painter anonymous c. 1585 showing the sack of Antwerp. The painting is now in the Museum Aan de Stroom, Antwerp.

More broadly because morale is the force that holds the army together when it is out of danger, cohesive armies with low morale can suffer from contagious mass desertion where the army itself seemingly melts away admits a wave of mutinies, as with for instance the collapse of the Russian Army in 1917.

Alternately, morale failures can result from situations where the army itself is still a potentially effective fighting force, but victory itself is no longer possible. The most common way this happens in the pre-modern world is in wars of succession: even if the army is still functioning, if a faction’s proposed heir dies, victory is no longer possible. Thus for instance even though as a pure engagement the Battle of Cunaxa (401 BC) was indecisive, the fact that Cyrus the Younger (claimant to the Achaemenid throne) was killed meant that most of Cyrus’ army collapsed (though its Greek contingent, the famed 10,000 stuck together and fought their way out of the Achaemenid Empire, though one assumes had ‘vanishing away into the countryside’ been an option they’d have done that). Strategy games often have a big morale penalty for ‘general killed’ (which for some reason doesn’t remove your control over the army usually; Mount and Blade is an exception here – if your character is incapacitated, you do lose control of your army) which often seems to hearken to this kind of collapse, but it is worth noting that the army collapsed not because it lost any old general, but because that general was himself ‘the cause!’

A similar but more detailed interaction of morale and cohesion is visible with the Battle of Hastings (1066). William’s initial push up the hill failed and the rumor started in the army that he had been killed; since the war was a succession war that would mean the loss of any hope of victory. William had to ride along his line with his helmet off to show his face so that his men could see he was still alive and victory was still possible to reorganize them for another effort. On the other side, the death of Harold seems to have caused the collapse of the English line but in different ways. The troops of the fyrd seem to have collapsed and fled, melting into the countryside (failure of morale and cohesion), but the highly cohesive mass of the huscarls held position around Harold’s body, cohering in a single mass to the end.

Via Wikipedia, detail from the Bayeux Tapestry showing the death of Harold II. The following panel is labeled ‘et fuga verterunt Angli,’ “The English turned, fleeing’ but the label here may be a later addition. In any event, the English **did** flee.

Morale and cohesion can thus fail in different ways, sometimes leading to units that will respond to some orders but not others, or units which remain cohesive and act in concert but are no longer under the control of their officers. Perfect obedience and panicked rout are two of the possibilities, but only two states in a broad spectrum. And of course it is also possible for combatants to be too aggressive, attacking without orders, sometimes under the leadership of their officers, sometimes not. This sort of aggressiveness was itself a core part of the Roman ideal of virtus which in turn required disciplina to retain (at least until a Pelignian threw a flag at someone. Then all bets were off).

Now I do want to briefly note there are some games that do try to express some of these complexities, but they are mostly turn-based rather than real-time games with much smaller audiences. The old Sierra Civil War Generals¹⁰ titles, for instance, simulated both morale and organization; units with low morale would first refuse to charge (but still initiate rifle exchanges, though often half-heartedly), then refuse to attack, then refuse to advance at all (but could be ordered to dig in in their current position), then retreat in good order, then rout. More recently, some of Byzantine Games’ turn-based titles like Pike and Shot have units move through levels of cohesion (Steady/Disrupted/Fragmented/Broken), each of which lowers the combat ability of the unit; fragmented units can’t charge and may give ground while remaining minimally combat effective. But these more detailed considerations of morale are very rare in real-time titles.

When Does Morale and Cohesion Fail?

But this common binary system creates another related problem: because the player goes from having 100% control to 0% control in a single instant switch, the threshold for that switch is set very high. Armies often have to be attrited down to close to half their original numbers before units even begin considering retreat. The result are armies that are ahistorically accepting of combat casualties, with both skews the sense of how lethal warfare was but also how battles tended to flow.

For instance, as noted above even ‘peasant mob’ can be made both to charge and to receive a charge from basically any unit in a Total War game. Indeed, that’s the point: the way you are supposed to use ‘tarpit’ units like peasant mob is to have them absorb damage from more expensive units while your own expensive units deal blows to the enemy. Except that on actual pre-modern battlefields, units frequently broke before receiving a charge. For instance, here is how Thucydides describes the Battle of Mantinea (418, Thuc. 5.72.3-4):

As soon as they came to close quarters with the enemy, the Mantinean right broke the Sciritae and Brasideans, and bursting in with their allies and the thousand picked Argives into the unclosed breach in their line cut up and surrounded the Spartans, and drove them in full rout to the wagons, slaying some of the older men on guard there. But if the Spartans got the worst of it in this part of the field, it was not so with the rest of their army, and especially the center, where the three hundred hippeis, as they are called, fought round King Agis, and fell on the older men of the Argives and the five companies so named, and on the Cleonaeans, the Orneans, and the Athenians next them, and instantly routed them; the greater number not even waiting to strike a blow, but giving way the moment that they came on, some even being trodden under foot, in their fear of being overtaken by their assailants.

(Emphasis mine. Translation is R. Crawley from the The Landmark Thucydides, ed. R.B. Strassler, my only minor change was to leave hippeis untranslated; these fellows are the elite guard of the Spartan kings. Though called hippeis (‘horsemen’) they fought on food.)

In short on the left (to the Spartans) side of the field, the Spartan forces (for what each of these groups is, see my series on Sparta) collapsed almost instantly on contact, while on the right side, the opposing Argive (et al.) force collapsed before contact, at the very onset of the Spartans. That’s not uncommon for units or indeed even entire armies with weak cohesion or morale to collapse before contact or at the very moment of contact. After all, the onset of an enemy is very scary and even with your armor and all of the cohesive elements designed to hold you into the fight, everything in your monkey brain in that line is telling you to run away; indeed, as we’ve discussed, ‘shock’ cavalry relies on this feature of human behavior in order to be effective, since such cavalry is almost useless against infantry that remains dense, cohesive and in good order.

If anything, by the by, this tendency of units to break before contact becomes even more common in the gunpowder era. Part of the reason armies kept doing bayonet charges into the 1800s is that they could be very effective. While it was very hard to get a unit with the cohesion and courage to make a bayonet charge, for those that could, it was extremely rare for the defenders to wait to receive such a charge: without armor or shields, casualties were likely to be extremely severe. And there is something in our barely evolved monkey-brains that really understands someone running at us with a very sharp stick on a more fundamental, primal level than it understands artillery or gunfire. It was thus relatively rare for bayonet charges to result in an extended melee: instead the defender typically poured fire into the attacker who either broke and fled or else delivered the charge in which case the defender broke and fled with those who could not flee in time being killed or surrendering.¹¹

Of course not every unit ran away before striking a blow and casualties did happen. Figuring out the average casualties taken before an army collapsed is in most cases beyond the evidence, though. The problem is that most losses occur after an army breaks and runs, since combatants who are fleeing no longer are operating as a mutually protecting unit or actively defending themselves. But we don’t get casualty figures in our sources for the moment when an army breaks, we get figures for the end of the battle itself (and these are often of questionable reliability). Still, these ‘total losses’ if we keep in mind that ‘pursuit casualties’ are included, can give us some sense of the ‘range of the normal’ as it were.

Peter Krentz did a general survey of Greek hoplite battle casualties¹² and concluded that attested loss rates (only men killed; we have no WIA figures for Greek hoplite battles) at 5% for winners and 14% for losers; this leads to the generally quoted average of roughly 10% losses in a hoplite battle. Strikingly, the variation is pretty tight; there are few examples where any side suffered more than 20% losses. Now of course we need to be alert to the potential problems with the source material here though at the same time sources tend to exaggerate casualties, not minimize them. If we assume that loss rates might be close to even until the moment when an army breaks we might say that hoplite armies tended to collapse somewhere between perhaps 5-10% losses (and sometimes much earlier than that).

Nathan Rosenstein¹³ attempted a similar analysis (albeit his interest was more demographic) for the Romans stretching from 200 to 168 (the period where we have the best evidence) and notes that the averages of his figures for those years were 4.2% losses for winners and 16% for losers. Again one must stress the potential unreliabilities of the sources (which Rosenstein discusses) and also note that the period from 200 to 168 was a period where Rome did a lot of winning and not a lot of losing; the reported casualties for Rome’s enemies when they lost were often a fair bit higher but of course we must be careful there of exaggeration. Still this broadly tracks with the Greek figures and suggests perhaps a general rule, though it must be noted that there are outlier battles, particularly where the impossibility of retreat produced extreme casualties for the losers (something more common in Roman warfare where everyone was a lot better at pursuit than hoplite armies were).

So pre-modern armies generally seem to have fallen apart at or before 10% losses. That is somewhat sooner than modern military units (‘combat ineffectiveness’ rules of thumb vary, but they’re often between 10 and 20% losses), but as we’ve noted before shock combat exerts a very different morale and cohesion pressure than being under extended fire does.¹⁴ That’s still substantially lower than something like Crusader Kings III’s c. 30% or so average loss-rate for defeated armies and massively, wildly lower than the 50% or 90% losses-to-break rates implied by games in the Total War and Mount and Blade series (much less the 100% rates implied by many other real time strategy games).

Now it is not hard to understand why many video games set the thresholds for army collapse much higher. The design philosophy here is one that empowers the player and having an army collapse early in a battle from seemingly random or uncontrollable causes would be badly disempowering. Controlling low leadership armies under these circumstances would feel like trying to sword-fight with a pool noodle. But that’s precisely the point: controlling most pre-modern armies was like that. Likewise it’s not hard to imagine why film, with its preference for Big, Decisive Battles That Decide Everything tends to depict battles with very high casualties, the heroes and villains fighting on until one or both is utterly ruined. But once again, actual battles rarely turned out this way.

That has, as I see it, two implications, one small and one large. The small implication is that the standard practice in many of these games to ‘bog down’ an enemy’s expensive units in a mass of cheap forces so as to spare your own expensive ‘damage dealers’ from taking damage – a cornerstone of the ‘match-up’ model we discussed at the beginning of this series – doesn’t really function on an actual battlefield. Advancing low quality, low cohesion infantry without support will simply cause them to break for the rear without bogging down or potentially without even engaging their higher quality opponents. Peasant mobs know they’ll lose to dismounted knights, they will not, as a rule, stick around to put the matter to the test except under extreme circumstances.¹⁵ If you want infantry to hold against dangerous enemies, it generally has to be high quality, cohesive infantry. Attempting to do your ‘cost savings’ by cheaping out on your infantry ‘anvil’ was a good way to find yourself with nothing but your surrounded and soon to be defeated hammer.

The broader implication is for understanding the nature of pre-modern warfare in general, that casualties were, as a rule, relatively low compared to what we might expect. Even in our sources, which love to exaggerate the scale of victories, battles which result in the total and utter destruction of an army are rare and produced by special circumstances (typically the army is incapable of retreat for some reason). Consequently in these societies men in the ‘combatant class’ (whatever that was) were likely to participate in and survive more battles, including battles they lost.

Conclusion

At the beginning of the series, we introduced a ‘Total War‘ model of army command. That model was heavily focused on active command, with the general responding to changing battlefield conditions. The purpose that active control was put to was to create specific unit-to-unit match-ups (as well as using ranged units to specifically target and remove dangerous enemy units) rather than to maintain a contiguous front or coherent formation for the whole army. Those match-ups in turn play into a ‘rock-paper-scissors’ view of tactics where the key is matching enemy units with their specific counters in one’s own army.

And what I hope I’ve shown here is that almost none of that model of generalship was possible under the conditions that pervaded in warfare before the advent of gunpowder (and indeed, for some time after it). The general himself almost never had the information necessary to target specific units of the enemy maneuvering on the battlefield; the rare exceptions (like Leuktra (371) or Gaugamela (331)) were typically only possible because the general could guess in advance where those units would be because of a standard enemy disposition or where the general could respond to their position because he was personally leading the unit deployed against them (like the companion cavalry). Instead because dispositions had to be decided with extremely limited information, most armies deployed cautiously in ‘standard’ formations designed to minimize risk rather than maximize ‘match-ups.’

Which as well enough because even if a general somehow did get a ‘bird’s eye’ view of the battlefield, he generally lacked the capability to communicate those orders or have the army act upon them. Rather than having a nearly limitless set of opportunities to make changes to the army’s battleplan, the general was heavily constrained, having only a number of key ‘decision points’ where he could intervene and in those points in turn having only a limited ‘McDonald’s Menu’ of orders he could give – limited based on the training and capacity for synchronized discipline in the army. For most armies, this essentially limited the general to hitting “go” and hoping for the best, perhaps leading his own small unit more directly or making a show of himself in a way intended to inspire bravery in the rest of the army.

Actual responsiveness to evolving conditions didn’t come from the general at all, but was an emergent property of junior officers empowered to make independent decisions combined with armies that had sufficient training and discipline to act on those decisions in the moment. Such armies could be very effective, but they were also difficult to produce (as were the capable junior officers) and so a relative rarity. Even so, these armies didn’t always win: discipline and distributed command was an advantage, but only one factor of many. Tyche still rules the greatest part of the affairs of men.

And finally, even the plans of generals or their orders when they did get through were at best implemented imperfectly by armies that acted not as extensions of their commander’s will but as collections of humans with their on agency, courage and fears. Units ordered to charge sometimes refused; units ordered to hold sometimes broke before contact. Armies sometimes collapsed from sudden panics before much of the battle had been fought. Alternately, units sometimes put in reserve impetuously attacked anyway. An army itself is a rarely restrained mob and many generals, including quite good ones, sometimes lose control of those restraints.

The point here, I should stress, is not to reduce ancient or medieval armies to dumb mobs of humans mindlessly hacking away at each other. There was order to this chaos and there was method to this madness: these were, after all, thinking humans who tried to plan and tried to organize and generally succeeded about as well as humans do today. Instead, the point here is that the strictly controlled battlefield of film and video games is an illusion.

That has itself all sorts of implications but perhaps the biggest one is a blow to the ‘great general’ and his place in our mythology. The fact is the greatest captains often have at best limited influence on events. As we’ve noted, at Bibracte, Caesar seems to have played no role in the brilliant two-direction attack that won the battle; had his centurions been less creative and less adaptive, Caesar would have lost regardless of his considerable command skill. Indeed, when it comes to the Romans it is hard not to miss that they conquered the Mediterranean not with a succession of brilliant commanders but with a long line of modestly competent ones. Producing so many minimally competent generals was enough because brilliance was never the determining factor in any of Rome’s wars.

And that’s where we’re going to go next: what exactly it was that those modestly competent generals were doing outside of battles? Logistics mostly, it turns out. But while we’ve talked a fair bit about logistics in terms of what makes army movements plausible, we haven’t talked about the actual mechanics of feeding (and watering) an army on the march. So that is where we’ll turn to next; I had planned that originally as part of this series but I suspect I’ll break it out into its own series.

But first, next week has the Fourth of July, so we’ll have a bit of a detour for that.

COVID Metrics
	Now	Week Ago	Goal
Percent fully Vaccinated	66.9%	---	≥70.0%¹
Fully Vaccinated (millions)	222.1	---	≥232¹
New Cases per Day³🚩	109,930	98,217	≤5,000²
Hospitalized³🚩	26,648	25,110	≤3,000²
Deaths per Day³🚩	317	289	≤50²
¹ Minimum to achieve "herd immunity" (estimated between 70% and 85%). ²my goals to stop daily posts, ³7-day average for Cases, Currently Hospitalized, and Deaths 🚩 Increasing 7-day average week-over-week for Cases, Hospitalized, and Deaths ✅ Goal met.

COVID Metrics
	Now	Week Ago	Goal
Percent fully Vaccinated	66.9%	---	≥70.0%¹
Fully Vaccinated (millions)	222.1	---	≥232¹
New Cases per Day³🚩	108,505	99,702	≤5,000²
Hospitalized³🚩	26,232	25,023	≤3,000²
Deaths per Day³🚩	321	283	≤50²
¹ Minimum to achieve "herd immunity" (estimated between 70% and 85%). ²my goals to stop daily posts, ³7-day average for Cases, Currently Hospitalized, and Deaths 🚩 Increasing 7-day average week-over-week for Cases, Hospitalized, and Deaths ✅ Goal met.

BACKGROUND:

For many years, I avoided writing about rock ‘n’ roll.

I certainly listened to a lot of it—how could you miss it in those days? But my ties to jazz back then were almost matrimonial in intensity, allowing no infidelities, no quickies in the sack with other genres, not even sultry flirting by the water cooler.

But the deeper truth was that I had no clue how to write about rock music.

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One of my guiding tenets as a writer is that every subject dictates a different prose style. I had picked up that crazy notion back in my college days, when I saw how literary critic Hugh Kenner took on the persona of the different authors he wrote about—Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Eliot, etc. With each of his books, he radically transformed his own way of writing. Every subject, as he saw it, dictated its own terms of engagement.

I found that idea appealing—and later tried to apply it in my own work. When I started to write about non-jazz subjects, I worked hard to reinvent every aspect of my writing style—cadence, metaphor, tone, syntax, even down to the smallest details of the text.

A comparison will convey exactly what I’m describing.

Here’s the opening paragraph of my book Delta Blues, where I altered almost every aspect of my writing style to match the requirements of Mississippi in the 1920s and 1930s.

The Delta region of Mississippi is an expansive alluvial plain, shaped like the leaf of a pecan tree hanging lazily over the rest of the state. Stretching some two hundred and twenty miles from Vicksburg to Memphis, it is bounded on the west by the Mississippi River, and extends eastward for an average of sixty-five miles, terminating in hill country, with its poorer soil and different ways of life, and the Yazoo River, which eventually joins the Mississippi at Vicksburg. For blues fans, this is the Delta, although geologists will remind us that it is not the proper delta of the Mississippi River, which is found where the mighty currents flow into the Gulf of Mexico south of New Orleans.

Now compare that with the opening paragraph of my West Coast Jazz book, which required a very different writing style, one that effectively matched the neon-and-pavement vitality of SoCal in the 1950s and 1960s.

Los Angeles has no true neighborhoods—instead its distinctive cultures stretch out horizontally along specific streets. Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Strip, Mulholland Drive, Olvera Street, Rodeo Drive, La Cienega—these are to Southern California what Greenwich Village and Soho are to New York. They are Los Angeles’ linear neighborhoods, its criss-crossing geometry of local colors. Each of these Southern California streets boasts a unique sensibility, one that defies city limits and zoning laws—a Sepulveda, a La Cienega might cut through a half-dozen separate townships without losing its special aura, although a couple blocks on either side of these thoroughfares city life collapses back into the faceless anonymity of cookie-cutter car culture. Travelers from other parts of the globe, faced with this specifically West Coast phenomenon, can see only urban sprawl—looking for village geography, they miss the stories encrusted alongside the pavement, the flora and fauna of the LA city street.

Unlike the Mississippi Delta, where the landscape is so pervasive, nature in LA merely warrants a cynical comparison in that concluding phrase.

And, a final example—here’s the opening of my book Healing Songs, where I needed to capture both the emotional power of therapeutic music as well as the clinical scrupulousness of a medical subject.

Stop for a moment, and consider the rhythm within. Your heart pulsates at roughly the same tempo as Ravel’s Bolero, an insistent seventy-two beats per minute, some thirty-eight million times during the course of a year. Twenty thousand times each day, you inhale and exhale, mostly oblivious of the process. Each day, your body’s circadian rhythms run through a repeating cycle, with pulse rates and blood pressure rising upon wakening and temperature increasing during the day, declining at night. Even your hours of sleep are comprised of repetitive cycles of around ninety minutes duration. Your endocrine and immune systems run through their own diurnal cycles. Cholesterol, stomach acid, blood sugar, hormones—all ebb and flow at predictable points during the day. Your body, like a musical instrument in an orchestra, must synchronize its performance to the contrasting and complimentary rhythms surrounding it.

You can see what I’m saying. The writing style adapts to the subject matter. At least, that’s how I try to practice my craft.

These were all well and good, perhaps. But I still couldn’t figure out how to write about rock music.

And the more I thought about it, the harder it seemed. I wanted to write in a way that captured the grandiosity and titanic ambitions of the music, but also its shallowest moments of posturing and pretense. I dreamed of sentences big enough to fill a rock stadium, but also with the quiet authority of a backstage pass. I wanted to write with blunt honesty, but also do full justice to the magical mystery moments at the heart of the rock experience. I wanted to do all these things, and put it down in print.

Could I pull it off? Was it even possible?

I was determined to find out. So I started writing an entire book of essays on rock and pop. I even had a tentative title: Unpopular Essays on Popular Music. And I wrote, and wrote—day after day, for months.

And I failed.

I just couldn’t bring this book to completion. I wrote hundreds of pages, and decided not to publish any of it.

The final breaking point came with a long essay on Frank Zappa—which I struggled over interminably. I am typically immune to writer’s block, but I simply couldn’t finish the Zappa essay. I had met my match, and it was a scowling, frowning man with unkempt facial hair.

This gnarly Zappa essay was supposed to be the centerpiece of the book. It would showcase my new way of writing—custom-made for rock music in general and Frank Vincent Zappa in particular. Instead, this elongated essay came close to destroying me as a music critic.

So I put it aside, and returned to jazz and more comfortable topics. I found my groove again, and it’s no exaggeration to say I was a writer reborn and rejuvenated. I wrote a book called The Jazz Standards, which got positive reviews and sold well. I felt like a hit single spinning at a crisp 45 rotations per minute. Life was good, and Microsoft Word was my friend once more.

But the notion of the failed Zappa essay never stopped haunting me. It was a lasting reproach embedded in my hard drive—both the one in my computer and the one in my head. I felt I had come close to delivering something special, and that if I had kept at it, I might have overcome all the obstacles, or at least discovered my voice, my own personal way of addressing the genre that had defined my generation.

On rare occasions, I showed parts of the Zappa essay to others—only tiny sections, because there was no finished whole. They loved these little fragments, and expressed mystification that I hadn’t published the entire piece. They always wanted to see the rest. But there was no rest to this story. That merely added to my frustration and self-reproach.

Feelings of guilt forced me to return periodically to this failed experiment, and tinker with it—again and again, over a period of many years. And it slowly came together. When I finally put the finishing touches to that gnarly Zappa essay, I realized that nothing I had ever written in my entire life had taken so long to complete.

Instead of celebrating, I just breathed a sigh of exhaustion.

I share it here, but with some trepidation. I’m still hesitant to make any claims for it—so I’ll simply call it “An Experiment in Rock Criticism.” At least I broke out of my writer’s block, and found a way of dealing with this strident genre. For better or worse, I could move on.

It’s a longish piece, and I will share it in three installments. Below is part one.

Frank Zappa glossy publicity photo from 1970 (Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

The Gnarly Frank Zappa Essay (Part 1 of 3)

An Experiment in Rock Criticism

by Ted Gioia

The scowl should have told us immediately. The perpetual frown, matching the semi-circular arc of the bushy mustache, made it clear that this was no party, no summer of love orgy. And in case you might have missed the point, the wry face was under-pinned by another thick brush of whisker below, as if to emphasize the implied criticism, like your home room teacher underlining the grammar mistakes in your last term paper. No performer, since Miles Davis came of age as the anti-Satchmo, glared more often, more penetratingly than Frank Zappa. Read this face, and it proclaimed clear and certain disapproval. Your dad couldn’t match that dour look, even after seeing your latest report card, the dent in the fender of his Oldsmobile, or the newest Mothers of Invention record—Weasels Ripped My Flesh or Hot Rats, let’s say—desecrating his hi-fi turntable, the rotating altar intended for Sinatra, Dorsey, and the original Broadway cast of Oklahoma. If looks could kill, they would look like Frank Zappa.

Bang! Bang! Shoot! Shoot!

What was Zappa frowning at? Well, it hardly mattered. There was so much to disapprove of in the Johnson-Nixon-military-industrial-complex-repressive-computer-punchcard atmosphere. Take your pick: the Vietnam War, the Andy Griffith Show, go-go boots, genuine naugahyde, Reader’s Digest condensed books, leisure suits in pastel colors, Tupperware parties, lava lamps, Bobby Sherman’s picture on the cover of Sixteen magazine, you name it. Something had to burn, baby, burn—a draft card, a bra, the whole freaking dean’s office. Who could blame Zappa for frowning. We would have smiles enough after the revolution.

Zappa was the real deal—or so we ardently hoped. Dali had promised liberation. Robbe-Grillet had promised liberation. Schoenberg had promised liberation. But Zappa delivered. The avant garde, the progressive movements in art were supposed to break through the tired and emaciated paradigms of the past, and open up our sensory paths to brave, new feelings, recharge our central nervous system with a jolt of the latest juice. But too often they did nothing of the kind. The various –isms—surrealism, serialism, solecisms, spoonerisms, you name it, were just . . . well, boring us most of the time. They put us to sleep, when we wanted to be awake like never before.

Zappa never anesthetized his listeners, even when performing major surgery on their sensory organs. You could accuse him of many things—bizarre or outrageous things, even—but never of boring us. In an era in which the best rock music was always surprising us, offering the wonders of a White Album, a Pet Sounds, or Dylan going electric at Newport, no one pushed the “Aha!” further than Zappa. Every new Mothers of Invention album promised to blow out the subwoofers of your mind with something never heard before, not just pushing the envelope but tearing it to tatters with the draft card still inside.

The various ingredients were, of course, quite familiar: doo-wop, industrial noise, scatological humor, contemporary classical music, electric guitars, souped-up keyboards, energy jazz, the four food groups (as personified by Uncle Meat, Suzy Creamcheese, Duke of Prunes, and Electric Aunt Jemima, and others of their ilk), and the chords to “Louie Louie,” to name a few. But the way they were mixed together defied all conventional expectations. Hendrix promised liberation. Clapton promised liberation. But Zappa delivered, not just using his guitar as the ultimate slash-and-burn weapon but blasting gnarly monologues and illicit lyrics—the F-word on a 1960s Verve album, really?—that seemed ready-made for inclusion on the banned substances list.

You owned many albums, but you would still keep those Zappa platters at the back of the fruit box even if they weren’t sorted in A-Z order. Those were the ones Dad was least likely to confiscate, imprecate, mutilate, eradicate. Put up the Archies instead at the front, a sacrificial lamb for parental cross-the-Cambodian-border incursions.

Zappa street graffiti in Belgrade (Sadko Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons)

How did Frank Zappa prepare for this world-beating career? His formal education consisted mostly of moving from high school to high school—by the age of 15, Zappa had attended six different institutions of mid-level education. He later tried two different junior colleges, none of them adding much to his body of knowledge. “My formal education is a little skimpy,” he later admitted. “What I know is mostly from reading books I got out of the library.” His constant school-hopping did, however, leave one lasting mark. "I didn't have any friends,” Zappa once explained to the Washington Post. “I developed an affinity to creeps, and I've surrounded myself with them ever since."

In time these stragglers, creeps, and desperadoes morphed into something that vaguely resembled a rock and roll band. “These Mothers is crazy,” proclaimed the liner notes to Zappa’s debut album Freak Out. “You can tell by their clothes. One guy wears beads and they all smell bad.” You could tell even more by their music. The opening bars of the first track are vaguely reminiscent of the Stones “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which had shaken up the scene the previous year. But Zappa merely uses this to set the stage for the uncompromising weirdness of “Hungry Freaks, Daddy.” Where other mop-tops would follow with a huggy-kissy love song, the Mothers then launched into classic Zappa-frown-scowl mode with “I Ain’t Got No Heart,” which takes us to “Who Are the Brain Police?” perhaps the most eerie and unsettling rock piece one could find in July 1966, when Freak Out was presented for consumption to a Middle America still trying to come to grips with long haired boys brandishing electric guitars. By the time listeners got to “It Can’t Happen Here,” the word collage paean to paranoia on side two, they must have been reeling in Kansas.

Few got that far, however, or heard much of Freak Out. It took six months before the Mothers’ debut album staggered on to the estimable Billboard chart at #139. It peaked at #130. Then disappeared from view.

What was the respected Verve label—which had built its reputation on Ella Fitzgerald and swing-to-bop jazz—doing with these unkempt dropouts who couldn’t sell vinyl or write a sweet hit single? Parent company MGM had been played for fools. That was no surprise—these were the same industry tyros who thought popular music began and ended with Connie Francis, and when they finally decided to get involved with the British Invasion, made a sucker bet on Herman’s Hermits, while shrewder competitors backed Beatles and Rolling Stones.

But if MGM lacked vision, record producer Tom Wilson, who brought the Mothers on his date with the label, knew what he was doing. Wilson was a newcomer to MGM, but had already produced artists as diverse as Bob Dylan and John Coltrane, and around this same time signed the Velvet Underground. His advocacy led to a $2,500 advance for the Mothers of Invention, and a surprising commitment to release a double album for an unknown band, at a time when even established stars were limited to a single platter at the musical buffet. Wilson wanted to test the limits, and with Zappa and the Mothers he found the perfect vehicle for doing this.

That said, the Mothers were never quite as out-of-control as their image conveyed. Zappa always demanded top-notch musicianship, and the various units of his band invariably boasted some remarkable, if little known, accomplishments. Few fans would guess, for instance, that Don Preston had gigged with jazz legend Elvin Jones for a year, had toured with Nat King Cole, and not only played the synthesizer, but had actually built one in 1966. Or that Bunk Gardner once performed on bassoon with the Cleveland Philharmonic. Or that Ian Underwood whose father was President of U.S. Steel, had music degrees from Yale and Berkeley.

Zappa, of course, had none of these credentials. His last institutional affiliation had been with the San Bernardino county jail—where the young guitarist was locked up on an obscenity charge. The legal offense: Zappa had used his recording equipment to make a party tape of suggestive sounds, in response to a request from a supposed used car dealer who turned out to be an undercover cop. Jail time in San Berdoo may not look like much on the curriculum vitae, but at least Zappa got a song out of it.

She lives in Mojave in a winnebago
His name is Bobby, he looks like a potato.
She's in love with a boy from the rodeo
Who pulls the rope on the chute
When they let those suckers go.
He's a slobberin' drunk at the Palomino
They give him thirty days in San Ber'dino

Truth to tell, Zappa wasn’t much of an outlaw. He’d never kill a man in Reno, not even in self-defense. Instead Zappa’s formative experiences had revolved around everything drab and pedestrian in 1950s California. He grew up in Lancaster, a hot-baked flatland community in the Mojave Desert, almost two hours from downtown Los Angeles. This was not Hollywood and Vine or even Pico and Sepulveda—only non-descript houses, a small main street, a Denny’s coffee shop, Edwards Air Force Base, and some aerospace companies supported by the military-industrial complex. It’s all too fitting that even when Zappa was incarcerated it was in San Bernardino, a community that makes the middle-of-nowhere seem somewhere by comparison. If other artists spend their careers in a quest for authenticity, Zappa went in the opposite direction. He was our poet laureate of the phony, the plastic, the fake, and benighted—a prophet of those inauthentic souls who somehow, in a depressing SoCal variant on the beatitudes, had inherited the Earth, or at least the toasted badlands due north of LA.

Here one finds the roots of Zappa’s fascination with the banal and commonplace which figure so prominently in his music. El Monte Legion Stadium, Holiday Inn, Ralph’s supermarket, Chicken Delight, the shopping centers of the San Fernando Valley (where she just bought some bitchin’ clothes), and TV dinners by the pool: These were to Zappa, what hot surfing spots were to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. In point of fact, Zappa mentions just as many SoCal locales in his songs as Wilson does in “Surfin’ USA,” but instead of La Jolla and Redondo Beach, Zappa is singing about Pacoima, Encino, and other centers of landlocked mediocrity.

You can laugh—even the name Pacoima sounds funny or embarrassing, like some kind of dermatological problem. Doctor, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a raging case of Pacoima. [I lift up my shirt] Just take a look at this. But these were Zappa’s sources of inspiration, what a madeleine was to Proust or a skyscraper to King Kong. His attention was drawn inevitably to simulacrums, to whatever was most shallow in the most vainglorious corner of the world.

And even as rising fame gave Zappa access to the more overtly glamorous side of the entertainment industry, he brought his cynicism and outspokenness with him. Every institution from the Grammy Awards to that august deliberative body known as the US Senate was subject to his disdain. And finally when the powers-that-be wanted to give him honors and accolades, as increasingly was the case late in his life, Zappa refused to show any deference in return.

Consider the grand moment when Zappa was invited to give a keynote speech to the American Society of University Composers (ASUC). In the text of the talk, later published as “Bingo! There Goes Your Tenure,” Zappa sets the ground rules in his opening remarks:

“I do not belong to your organization. I know nothing about it. I'm not even interested in it—and yet, a request has been made for me to give what purports to be a keynote speech.
“Before I go on, let me warn you that I talk dirty, and that I will say things you will neither enjoy nor agree with.
“You shouldn't feel threatened, though, because I am a mere buffoon, and you are all Serious American Composers.
“For those of you who don't know, I am also a composer. I taught myself how to do it by going to the library and listening to records. I started when I was fourteen and I've been doing it for thirty years. I don't like schools. I don't like teachers. I don't like most of the things that you believe in—and if that weren't bad enough, I earn a living by playing the electric guitar….

This is Zappa at his most deferential.

He concludes his talk with the recommendation that the organization change its name from ASUC to “WE SUCK.” I am sorry to report that they did not take his advice.

But I’m running ahead of myself. Ready or not, we must return to the 1960s and take up the thread of our story.

Zappa’s follow-up project for MGM, Absolutely Free, embraced these themes of suburban despair as suitable subjects for rock rebellion, especially in the performances of “Plastic People” and “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.” But the strongest part of this acerbic album may have been the strangest: Zappa’s series of surreal compositions devoted to fruits and vegetables.

Despite its unpromising name, “The Duke of Prunes” boasts one of Zappa’s best melodies, as he himself must have realized, since he would later reuse its theme in other settings. It appears midway, for instance, in his piece “Music for Electric Violin and Low Budget Orchestra,” where it is played with surprising tenderness by Jean-Luc Ponty. It also shows up, in an ethereal orchestral version, in his mid-1970s project, eventually released under the name Läther. “Call Any Vegetable” also stands out. It is, to be honest, one of the best call-and-response rock pieces I have heard, and even the lyrics rise above their apparent inanity when you realize that the song isn’t really about lettuce and rutabagas. “People who do not live up to their responsibilities are vegetables, Zappa later explained. “I feel that these people, even if they are inactive, apathetic, or unconcerned at this point, can be motivated toward a more useful sort of existence. I believe that if you call any vegetable it will respond to you."

If Zappa could find this much symbolic resonance in detritus from the grocery produce section. . . . well, one wondered, what would he achieve when he tackled a meatier subject? Fans unfortunately had to wait two years before Zappa and the Mothers of Invention released Uncle Meat. In the meantime, they contented themselves with Lumpy Gravy, where Zappa didn’t play a note but conducted an orchestra, followed by the Mothers of Invention release We’re Only in It for the Money. The latter was Zappa’s ostensible response to Sgt. Pepper’s. Here the derisive man with too much facial hair was finally broaching the “big” themes of the counter-culture movement: peace and love, hippies, police brutality, conflict between generations.

But those expecting social advocacy from Zappa were bound to be disappointed. It may very well be impossible to say what, if anything, Zappa advocated here, but it was fairly obvious what he disliked—pretty much everything! Sure, cops and parents are pilloried. This was the ‘Sixties, after all. But Zappa now made clear that he despised hippies even more than the establishment.

“Who Needs the Peace Corp?” drips with sarcasm while depicting the life of a peace-lovin’ flower child. (“I’m really just a phony but forgive me ‘cause I’m stoned.”) A range of other targets, from politicians to American womanhood, get their share of abuse. Although the music is occasionally gripping, for example on the spirited anthem “Mother People,” the lyrics are mostly a downer—but that was the intended effect. While everyone else was applauding Sgt. Pepper’s and the groovy atmosphere of love, peace, and rock ‘n’ roll, Zappa saw them as just more targets for satire. The lightest, brightest part of the album is the inside cover parody of the famous Sgt. Pepper’s cut-and-paste celebrity line-up.

Fans were now getting a closer glimpse of this unusual rock star. That frown, they were starting to realize, was not a pose, but the sign of Zappa’s ingrained scorn for everything, anything, and in-between. Maybe he was even a nihilist, straight from the pages of Turgenev.

[At this point, I’m interrupted by a parent’s voice from the back row: That guitarist ain’t no hippie. He’s a Nietzschean Übermensch and recklessly laying the shameful foundation for the rise of Derrida. . . .]

That’s part one of “The Gnarly Frank Zappa Essay.” If I’m sufficiently brave, I’ll be back soon with the second installment.