Interview: Chris O'Brian, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad Drummer

ITHACA, N.Y. — Chris O’Brian, the drummer and a founding member of Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, sat for a 47-minute interview with the Pulse of Ithaca Podcast recorded on December 20, 2023, ahead of back to back shows at Deep Dive in Ithaca on Friday, December 29 and Iron Works in Buffalo the following night.

It was the show’s first interview with an outside guest, in what the hosts counted as roughly their seventh or eighth episode. Most of the conversation is band history, but the section that lands hardest is O’Brian’s arithmetic on what a working band actually gets out of a week on the road in 2023, and how a single Monday morning in a rehearsal room can beat it.

Episode 8 was published to the show’s YouTube channel on May 26, 2024, and is embedded in full below.

A trip to Ghana, and a decision waiting when he got back

Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad formed in Rochester in 2001, when O’Brian and his brother, guitarist Matt O’Brian, teamed up with childhood friend James Searl on bass and vocals. O’Brian describes the run-up as unremarkable.

“Basically your classic American band story,” he said. “We grew up together and we were jamming and we were playing a bunch of different types of tunes. We were playing some rock, we got into some fusion.”

The turn came from a trip. Searl, then an Ithaca College student, went to Ghana in 2001, and the decision was made in his absence.

“Pretty much when he was there we were like, okay, we’re going to be a reggae band when you come back,” O’Brian said.

He and his brother were living above a bar in downtown Rochester at the time, a place he says they had no business living, working through Lee “Scratch” Perry and Burning Spear records. O’Brian names guitarist Dylan Savage, still with the band, as coming aboard soon after the founding trio. The band took its name from the fictional Giant Panda Gypsy Blues Band in Tom Robbins’ novel “Another Roadside Attraction.”

O’Brian is direct about where the band actually started playing.

"It was really Ithaca based, honestly. Our first concert as Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad was definitely in Ithaca. We pretty much got our roots there."

Chris O'Brian

The drummers he was not expecting to name

Asked about influences, O’Brian went first to the ones that do not fit a North American reggae drummer, naming DJ Shadow, Zigaboo Modeliste of The Meters, and Fiona Apple’s drummer, whose name he said he did not know.

“Every once in a while, a couple times a year, I’ll be listening to some music that I’ve listened to forever and be like, oh wow, this person had a huge influence on my drumming, and I guess I’ve really never acknowledged it,” he said.

Among working players he named Joe Tomino, the Dub Trio drummer whose credits include Matisyahu, Wyclef Jean and a stretch with the Fugees, and called him a friend. He also named New York jazz drummer Dan Weiss, and Ted Poor, an Eastman School of Music graduate now based in Seattle who teaches at the University of Washington and has toured with Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham. O’Brian said he took lessons with Poor.

His answer for a current touring influence came from two consecutive nights. He watched boygenius perform on “Saturday Night Live” from home, then went to see Mike Doughty, formerly of Soul Coughing, at Flower City Station in Rochester, a room he puts at about 300 people.

The drummer, he realized mid-set, was the same person.

“I lean over to my friend and I’m like, yo dude, funny, I saw an incredible drummer, female drummer, on Saturday Night Live just last night,” he said. “And he goes, that’s the same girl.”

The drummer was Madden Klass, who has toured with boygenius and with Doughty. O’Brian went backstage afterward.

“She nailed the Soul Coughing drum tone, which is so specific,” he said. “Whereas like 12 hours previous she was nailing the boygenius performance.”

Red Rocks, an empty field and a run with Clinton Fearon

O’Brian named Reggae on the Rocks at Red Rocks as a career high, and remembers the sound check more than the set.

“I’m pretty sure me hitting my snare drum was like the first loud noise of the day when we set up,” he said.

He also described playing Rothbury, the Michigan festival that ran in 2008 and 2009 before it became Electric Forest, in an early slot with nobody in front of the stage.

“We started playing our set to an empty field, and like out of a zombie apocalypse movie, thousands of people popped through the woods and started walking toward us,” he said.

The collaboration he singles out is a run with Clinton Fearon, the Jamaican singer and bass player who was a member of The Gladiators from 1969 to 1987 and who now splits his time between Seattle and France.

"Jamming drum and bass, me on drums, Clinton Fearon on bass. That is a lifetime achievement level up for me."

Chris O'Brian

Fearon features on “Chants,” from the band’s 2023 Easy Star Records album “Love In Time.” O’Brian said Fearon cut his part in Paris and that another contributor filmed his portion of the video in Ghana, and that Searl kept the whole thing quiet until it was finished.

“I didn’t know that was a thing until I saw it,” he said.

The Monday morning argument

The most concrete stretch of the interview is O’Brian on what the band does with its time now that the members are, in his phrasing, all fully grown adults with more small Pandas than band member Pandas.

He does not frame it as a complaint. He frames it as a calculation.

"One little snippet of content on a Monday morning could do more than getting in the van with everybody, renting a bunch of hotels, eating a bunch of gas station food and being gone from your family for like a week."

Chris O'Brian

“I say to my guys every once in a while, we go play a tough weekend, and I’m like, guys, we could get together on a Monday and Tuesday and make some really cool stuff that honestly could end up making more waves than the festival in Missouri we just played,” he said.

He credits Searl with keeping that momentum going. “James, God bless him, is definitely the leader of the band in every way, who keeps that momentum going even when it feels dry,” he said.

What Ithaca did for a Rochester band

O’Brian was asked what the town has meant to the band, and answered without hedging.

“We are Rochester kids, but there is no other place besides Rochester that has shaped this band even closely,” he said. He was driving down to play Castaways while still in high school.

He describes a specific ambition from that period. Kevin Kinsella, the John Brown’s Body founder, ran I-Town Records out of Ithaca, the label that carried John Brown’s Body’s first four albums between 1996 and 2002.

“Literally a life goal of mine when I was 17 years old was to release something on I-Town Records,” O’Brian said.

Giant Panda served as Kinsella’s backing band at the Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival, and O’Brian says the pairing got better after the festival, on a short run that followed.

“It’s always bittersweet when you do like four shows with someone and at the end of the fourth set you’re like, damn, we should really take that on the road,” he said.

He also flagged, unprompted, that Ithaca songwriter Max Childs had played keys with the band over the summer and would be playing keys at the Deep Dive show. Childs sat for his own interview with the podcast three months later.

The huddle he does not take part in

Asked about pre-show rituals, O’Brian gave an answer that undercuts the question.

“We do like a funny hands in, and lately Eli has been leading a breathing exercise, and to me, and I’ve never even said this out loud, to me they’re kind of cheesy,” he said. “We’re like doing it to pretend we did it.”

His own routine is to leave.

“Chris O’Brian’s actual pre-show ritual is like silence, by myself,” he said. “I keep walking out the back door over and over again.” He describes going from exhausted to full energy on about two minutes’ notice, then a couple of jumping jacks.

He was careful to add that he was not criticizing the huddle. “It’s always nice to take a minute with your boys,” he said, and said Searl’s pep talks are meaningful.

A festival the band has never gotten around to

Asked for a favorite song to play, O’Brian said it is usually one the band is not currently playing.

“The funny reality when you’ve been in a band for 20 years is we have like a million songs, and my favorite ones are usually the ones we’re not playing,” he said, naming “Solution,” “Trouble Deep” and “All My Life” as ones he lobbies for.

Told that the answer to that problem is a multi-day Panda festival, he agreed and said the band has tested the idea before without following through.

“We are well overdue on our little party turning into a regional festival turning into a real thing,” he said. “If we had done it 10 years ago, we’d be having our 10th one this year.”

He contrasted it with the band he had just started with his brother. “We get up and play every single song that we have in our library and we’re like, okay, that’s over, and people are like, encore, encore,” he said. “You’re like, that’s all our songs.”

Flying Object, and a date he did not have right

That band is Flying Object, formed with Matt O’Brian on his brother’s material, rehearsing Monday mornings in a space O’Brian rented.

“I’m privileged to have my brother as like one of my favorite songwriters forever,” he said. “I wish I could do what he does, but hey, at least I’m his brother.”

He mentioned an Ithaca show coming up in February, opening for the reggae band Bumping Uglies, and put it at February 2 or 3 while saying he was not certain. The show landed on Thursday, February 8, 2024, at Deep Dive, and Matt O’Brian described the same night in the podcast’s Episode 11.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

The author co-hosts the Pulse of Ithaca Podcast and took part in this interview. Quotations are transcribed from the episode audio and lightly trimmed for filler. Speaker and band names have been corrected against published band listings where the automatic transcript garbled them. Two names spoken in the episode are omitted here because they could not be verified against a published source.

Pulse of Ithaca Podcast, Episode 8, “Interview with Chris O’Brian of Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad,” running 46 minutes and 46 seconds, recorded in Ithaca, New York on December 20, 2023 and published to the show’s YouTube channel on May 26, 2024. Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad played Deep Dive in Ithaca, New York on December 29, 2023, and Iron Works in Buffalo, New York on December 30, 2023.

Sources: Pulse of Ithaca Podcast, Episode 8, Pulse of Ithaca Podcast channel, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad, Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad on YouTube, Clinton Fearon, John Brown’s Body, Joe Tomino, Ted Poor, University of Washington School of Music, Madden Klass, Electric Forest Festival, bandsthatjam.com, Matt O’Brian interview.