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Music

Ben Greenberg of the Men Will Teach You Guitar

Catching up with an old guitar teacher over donuts, who happens to shred for one of Brooklyn's loudest punk bands.

Last month, Tomorrow’s Hits, the fifth and latest studio album from Brooklyn punk band the Men, was met with an outpouring of praise from much of the current rock critic intelligentsia (if such a thing exists). The record is loud and thrashy when it needs to be—crackling, overdriven guitars mixed with washed-out drum flurries and wailing vocals—and equally tempered and melodic when the moment calls for a bit of 1960s classic rock nostalgia. While the band’s chemistry is apparent on the album, I like to think that Ben Greenberg, the Men’s bassist-turned-guitarist, songwriter, and resident record producer, had more than a little to do with the group’s recent success.

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Because back before Ben Greenberg was Ben of the Men, he was my teacher at the National Guitar Workshop, a summer camp tucked away in the woods of Connecticut where pimple-faced music nerds such as myself spent the sunny months of July and August cooped up in classrooms sight-reading sheet music, learning the practical uses of the Locrian mode, and honing other important skills needed to make the proverbial panties drop. Even then, Ben was an immensely gifted multi-instrumentalist, a patient teacher, and an infamously stubborn music snob in the best sense of the word.

Following the release of Tomorrow’s Hits, I met up with Ben for the first time in almost ten years at the Peter Pan Donut and Pastry Shop in Greenpoint. He didn’t remember me (I like to think it’s because my skin has cleared up and I no longer wear cargo shorts and Sum 41 t-shirts), but we talked about music and guitars and stuff anyway.

Noisey: I’ve always felt that the guitar can be one of the most effective instruments in music or, on the other end of the spectrum, one of the lamest. What are some things guitarists should avoid at all costs?
Ben Greenberg: I don’t know. I used to be really snobby about stuff like that, because when you come from a place of having a lot of technique on the instrument—but you’re working in a world where that isn’t actually valued—you need to kind of be careful about what you play and what you put out there and what you don’t. And so I used to have a lot of rules for myself—I mean, ten years ago—where it was like, “Oh no! That’s corny and that’s corny and everything’s corny.” But as time has gone on I think I’ve realized it’s just how you use the stuff. Tapping doesn’t have to be stupid and, you know, all that stuff doesn’t have to come out so corny.

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Is it just that so many clichés exist on the guitar?
Obviously rock and roll isn’t a sub-genre, it’s a genre, so it has a much broader spread. If you look at whatever iterations of noise or ambient music that have happened over the past five to ten years… I mean, there’s all sorts of corny shit you can do with a microKORG that everybody does and there’s certain trends with that. I don’t know, I think the guitar is in a place of decline as far as its social standing.

Do you think it’s in danger of fading further from the mainstream?
I don’t think it’s in any danger, it’s definitely still a very widely appreciated thing. But it used to be the only thing. That was what you did. You played in a band, whether it was a rock band or a blues band or a country band or whatever, and that was just the band instrument… Guitar music used to be—or it seems at least like it used to be—the most popular music in the world. It isn’t anymore. But that’s how it should be, things should get old.

How do you get a guitarist to stop playing the same old boring shit?
I think it’s really easy for the guitar to seem restrictive when people are starting out because they don’t know what to play… There’s a moment that some people have and some people don’t where you take the things that you’ve learned and you turn them upside down and start playing that instead. That’s where you involve your mind in a way. I think that’s a big moment for a lot of people.

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Who are some of the most interesting guitarists in your opinion? Not the craziest technical virtuosos necessarily, but the most creative.
Mick Bar. He was in the band Orthrelm. I don’t know where he lives now, but he lived in New York for a while. He’s amazing. He thinks about the instrument in a totally different way and it doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard before. I think he’s fucking incredible. He has tons of records, tons of different projects.

Ben, terrifying parents at the National Guitar Workshop recitals.

When you write are you consciously trying to create something different?
You don’t want to repeat yourself, but I think the key is to not try at all. Just be in the moment and kind of let it happen… I think people who play the guitar do a lot of unnecessary worrying about what's right or wrong. There’s only 12 notes, you know what I mean? It’s not like you can be like, “Oh, no one’s ever played this…"

Thirteenth note?
Yeah, exactly. Like, “Nobody’s ever played this sharp thirteenth note. That’s gonna be the new sound, man.”

Are you cognizant of how an audience perceives what you’re playing?
That's the deal with [my solo project] Hubble, that it's a shared experience. I'm trying to gauge the room, and when I say the room, I mean literally the room itself. Just how it's actually sounding… I'm listening to not just the monitors, but the whole room and trying to perceive where the resonant frequencies are. I'm like, “Oh, if I hit this note it makes that window pane vibrate over there, if I hit these two notes together it shakes the floor.” Stuff like that. So you can work those elements into a performance.

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The way I feel about the guitar is pretty similar to how I think about music as a whole. A song can be so beautiful that it makes you want to cry, or so terrible it makes you want to puke. The disparity between good and bad just feels so great, more so than in other art forms.
I think it's similar with colors, but there's something about sound and the way that it affects us—it can be really primal. You've probably had this experience where you're listening to music or you're playing guitar or something and it's a little loud and someone somewhere is losing their fucking mind about it, banging on your door and just so pissed. I think that's kind of universal. Everyone has their threshold where they'll start acting like that in the presence of obtrusive noise no matter what. That's the really interesting thing and the really powerful thing about sound. Some people can have reactions like that to other mediums or other senses, but I think sound is the most consistently effective in that way.

[A generic pop/rock song is playing on the radio.]

What do you think of this song right now?
You listen to a song like this, and none of the sounds are real, yet they're all familiar.

Does that bother you?
I mean this bothers me a little bit, yeah. I think rock music should be simple and natural and loud and basic. That's the sound of the music, that's the point.

[The song switches to a slightly folkier pop song. We both assume it’s Mumford & Sons]

What about this one?
The way that this dude sings on this song is so unbelievably different from the way people sang in the 80s and the 90s. It's really specifically a past-15-years-of-pop singing style. It got really big in the late 90s, but it really is of this time, even if you listen to other genres of music right now. It’s Mumford & Sons, where everyone says, “Oh, they're a country band,” but they sing like that. And that's how you know they're full of shit. It's because they're doing that.

So it’s more about artists being disingenuous that bothers you?
It bothers me when people don't see it, you know? That bothers me. Yeah, that does bother me. It's not something I would listen to, but it’s also not something I would tell someone else not to listen to either. They're a bunch of guys, they're making a living doing what they do. They may love or hate what they do, you never know. I'm just a guy taking it at face value coming over the radio at a donut shop.

Jackson Connor is practicing his scales on Twitter - @JacksonMConnor